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                         THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
                              OF RELIGION

                        _All rights reserved._

            [Illustration: _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

                            [Illustration]

                             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. Batta. 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.

                                                                       PAGE

    PART III.--CRITICAL

    CHAPTER IX.--PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS           3-61

    Introductory                                                        3-9

    I. Catherine’s Third Period, 1497-1510                             9-13

    II. Conclusions concerning Catherine’s Psycho-physical
    Condition during this Last Period                                 14-21

    III. Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition, its Likeness and
    Unlikeness to Hysteria                                            22-27

    IV. First Period of Catherine’s Life, 1447-1477, in its Three
    Stages                                                            28-32

    V. The Second, Great Middle Period of Catherine’s Life,
    1477-1499                                                         32-40

    VI. Three Rules which seem to govern the Relations between
    Psycho-physical Peculiarities and Sanctity in general             40-47

    VII. Perennial Freshness of the Great Mystics’ Main Spiritual
    Test, in Contradistinction to their Secondary, Psychological
    Contention. Two Special Difficulties                              47-61

    CHAPTER X.--THE MAIN LITERARY SOURCES OF CATHERINE’S
    CONCEPTIONS                                                      62-110

    Introductory                                                     62, 63

    I. The Pauline Writings: the Two Sources of their
    Pre-Conversion Assumptions; Catherine’s Preponderant
    Attitude towards each Position                                    63-79

    II. The Joannine Writings                                         79-90

    III. The Areopagite Writings                                     90-101

    IV. Jacopone da Todi’s “Lode”                                   102-110

    V. Points common to all Five Minds; and Catherine’s Main
    Difference from her Four Predecessors                               110

    CHAPTER XI.--CATHERINE’S LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES     111-181

    Introductory                                                   111, 112

    I. Interpretative Religion                                      112-121

    II. Dualistic Attitude towards the Body                         121-129

    III. Quietude and Passivity. Points in this Tendency to be
    considered here                                                 129-152

    IV. Pure Love, or Disinterested Religion: its Distinction
    from Quietism                                                   152-181

    CHAPTER XII.--THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES             182-258

    I. The Chief Present-day Problems, Perplexities, and
    Requirements with Regard to the After-Life in General           182-199

    II. Catherine’s General After-Life Conceptions                  199-218

    III. Catherine and Eternal Punishment                           218-230

    IV. Catherine and Purgatory                                     230-246

    V. Catherine and Heaven--Three Perplexities to be considered    246-258

    CHAPTER XIII.--THE FIRST THREE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS               259-308

    I. The Relations between Morality and Mysticism, Philosophy
    and Religion                                                    259-275

    II. Mysticism and the Limits of Human Knowledge and Experience  275-290

    III. Mysticism and the Question of Evil                         290-308

    CHAPTER XIV.--THE TWO FINAL PROBLEMS: MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM,
    THE IMMANENCE OF GOD, AND SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY, HUMAN AND
    DIVINE                                                          309-340

    Introductory                                                   309, 310

    I. Relations between the General and the Particular, God and
    Individual Things, according to Aristotle, the Neo-Platonists,
    and the Medieval Strict Realists                                310-319

    II. Relations between God and the Human Soul                    319-325

    III. Mysticism and Pantheism: their Differences and Points of
    Likeness                                                        325-335

    IV. The Divine Immanence; Spiritual Personality                 336-340

    CHAPTER XV.--SUMMING-UP OF THE WHOLE BOOK. BACK THROUGH
    ASCETICISM, SOCIAL RELIGION, AND THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT OF MIND,
    TO THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION                             341-396

    I. Asceticism and Mysticism                                     341-351

    II. Social Religion and Mysticism                               351-366

    III. The Scientific Habit and Mysticism                         367-386

    IV. Final Summary and Return to the Starting-point of the Whole
    Inquiry: the Necessity, and yet the Almost Inevitable Mutual
    Hostility, of the Three Great Forces of the Soul and of the
    Three Corresponding Elements of Religion                        387-396

    INDEX                                                               397




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.

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


III. THE AREOPAGITE WRITINGS.

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


1. _God’s general action._

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

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

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


2. _Symbols of God’s action._

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

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

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


3. _The soul’s reaction._

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

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

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


4. _Terminology of the soul’s reaction._

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

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

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

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

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


5. _Deification, especially through the Eucharist._

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


IV. JACOPONE DA TODI’S “LODE.”

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


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

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

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

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

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


2. _Lode LVIIIa, LVIIIb._

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

The great Loda LXXXVIII, “How the soul complains to God concerning
the excessive ardours of the love infused into it,” contains numerous
touches which have been interestingly responded to or ignored by
Catherine. “All my will is on fire with Love, is united, transformed
(into It); who can bear such Love? Nor fire nor sword can part the
loving soul and her Love; a thing so united cannot be divided; neither
suffering nor death can henceforth mount up to that height where the
soul abides in ecstasy,” vv. 5, 6: a combination of St. Paul and
Plotinus, quite after Catherine’s heart. But “the light of the sun
appears to me obscure, now that I see that resplendent Countenance,”
v. 7, has an anthropomorphic touch to which she does not respond;
and “I have given all my heart, that it may possess that Lover who
renews me so,--O Beauty ancient and ever new!” v. 10, has the personal
designation “Lover,” which, again, is alien to her vocabulary.

“Seeing such Beauty, I have been drawn out of myself … and the heart
now gets undone, melted as though it were wax, and finds itself again,
with the likeness of Christ upon it,” v. 11, must have stimulated, by
its first part, some of her own experiences, and will, by its second
part, taken literally, have helped on the fantastic expectations of
her attendants. “Love rises to such ardour, that the heart seems to
be transfixed as with a knife,” v. 14, no doubt both expressed an
experience of Jacopone and helped to constitute the form of a similar
experience on the part of Catherine. “As iron, which is all on fire,
as dawn, made resplendent by the sun, lose their own form (nature) and
exist in another, so is it with the pure mind, when clothed by Thee, O
Love,” v. 21, contains ideas, (all but the symbol of clothing,) very
dear to Catherine. But the astonishingly daring words: “Since my soul
has been transformed into Truth, into Thee, O Christ alone, into Thee
Who art tender Loving,--not to myself but to Thee can be imputed what I
do. Hence, if I please Thee not, Thou dost not please Thine Own Self,
O Love!” v. 22, remain unechoed by her, no doubt because her states
shift from one to another, and she wisely abstains from pushing the
articulation of any one of them to its own separate logical limit.

“Thou wast born into the world by love and not by flesh, O Love
become Man (_humanato Amore_),” v. 27, is like her in its interesting
persistence in the “Love” (not “Lover”) designation, but is unlike her
in its definite reference to the historic Incarnation. “Love, O Love,
Jesus, I have reached the haven,” v. 32, is closely like her, all but
the explicit mention of the historic name; and “Love, O Love, Thou art
the full-orbed circle,” “Thou art both warp and woof,” beginning and
end, material and transforming agency, v. 33, is Catherine’s central
idea, expressed in a form much calculated to impress it upon her.

The daring and profound Loda LXXXIX, “How the soul, by holy
self-annihilation and love, reaches an unknowable and indescribable
state,” contains again numerous touches which have been assimilated by
Catherine. So with: “Drawn forth, out of her natural state, into that
unmeasurable condition whither love goes to drown itself, the soul,
having plunged into the abyss of this ocean, henceforth cannot find,
on any side, any means of issuing forth from it,” vv. 12, 13. So also
with: “Since thou dost no longer love thyself, but alone that Goodness
… it has become necessary for thee again to love thyself, but with
His Love,--into so great an unity hast thou been drawn by Him,” vv.
52-54. So too with: “All Faith ceases for the soul to whom it has been
given to see; and all Hope, since it now actually holds what it used
to seek,” v. 70, although this is more absolute than are her similar
utterances.--But especially are the startling words interesting: “In
this transformation, thou drinkest Another, and that Other drinketh
thee (_tu bevi e sei bevuto, in transformazione_),” v. 98, which, in
their second part, are identical with R. Browning’s “My end, to slake
Thy thirst”:[111] for they will have helped to support or to encourage
Catherine’s corresponding inversion--the teaching of an eating, an
assimilation, not of God by man, but of man by God. Both sets of images
go back, of course, to the Eucharistic reception by the soul of the
God-man Christ, under the forms of Bread eaten and of Wine drunk.

The striking Loda LXXXX, “How the soul arrives at a treble state of
annihilation,” has doubtless suggested much to Catherine. “He who
has become the very Cause of all things” (_chi è cosa d’ogni cosa_)
“can never more desire anything,” v. 4, is, it is true, more daring,
because more quietly explicit, than any saying of hers. But v. 13 has
been echoed by her throughout: “The heavens have grown stagnant; their
silence constrains me to cry aloud: ‘O profound Ocean, the very depth
of Thine Abyss has constrained me to attempt and drown myself within
it,’”--where note the interestingly antique presupposition of the music
of the spheres, which has now stopped, and of the watery constitution
of the crystalline heaven, which allows of stagnation; and the rapidity
of the change in the impressions,--from immobility to silence, and from
air to water. Indeed that Ocean is one as much of air as of water, and
as little the one as the other; and its attractive force is still that
innate affinity between the river-soul and its living Source and Home,
the Ocean God, which we have so constantly found in Plotinus, Proclus,
and Dionysius. “The land of promise is, for such a soul, no longer one
of promise only: for the perfect soul already reigns within that land.
Men can thus transform themselves, in any and every place,” v. 18, has,
in its touching and lofty Stoic-Christian teaching, found the noblest
response and re-utterance in and by Catherine’s words and life.

Loda LXXXXVIII, “Of the Incarnation of the Divine Word,” full though
it is of beautiful Franciscanism, has left her uninfluenced. But the
fine Loda LXXXXIX, “How true Love is not idle,” contains touches which
have sunk deep into her mind. “Splendour that givest to all the world
its light, O Love Jesus … heaven and earth are by Thee; Thine action
resplends in all things and all things turn to Thee. Only the sinner
despises Thy Love and severs himself from Thee, his Creator,” v. 6,
is, in its substance, taken over by her. “O ye cold sinners!” v. 12,
is her favourite epithet. And vv. 13, 14, with their rapid ringing of
the changes on the different sense-perceptions, will, by their shifting
vividness, have helped on a similar iridescence in her own imagery: “O
Odour, that transcendest every sweetness! O living river of Delight …
that causest the very dead to return to their vigour! In heaven Thy
lovers possess Thine immense Sweetness, tasting there those savoury
morsels.”

And finally Loda LXXXVII, “Of true and false discretion,” which, in vv.
12-20, consists of a dialogue between “the Flesh” and “the Reason,”
will have helped to suggest the slight beginnings of this form of
apprehension to Catherine which we have found amongst her authentic
sayings and experiences, and which were, later on, developed on so
large a scale, by Battista Vernazza, throughout her long _Dialogo della
Beata Caterina_.

5. Jacopone it is, then, who furnished Catherine with much help towards
that rare combination of deep feeling with severely abstract thinking
which, if at times it somewhat strains and wearies us moderns who would
ever end with the concrete, gives a nobly virile, bracing note to even
the most effective of her sayings.


V. POINTS COMMON TO ALL FIVE MINDS; AND CATHERINE’S MAIN DIFFERENCE
FROM HER FOUR PREDECESSORS.

If we now consider for a moment the general points common to the four
writers just considered and to Catherine, we readily note that all
five are profoundly reflective and interpretative in their attitude
towards the given contingencies of traditional religion; that they
all tend to find the Then and There of History still at work, in
various degrees, Here and Now, throughout Time and Space, and in the
last resort, above and behind both these categories, in a spaceless,
timeless Present. And if only three, Paul, Jacopone, and Catherine,
bear marks, throughout all they think and feel and do and are, of the
cataclysmic conversion-crisis through which they had passed,--the
temporally intermediate two, John and Dionysius, have also got, but in
a more indirect form, much of a similar Dualism. All five are, in these
and other respects, indefinitely closer to each other than any one of
them is to the still richer, more complete, and more entirely balanced
though less articulated, Synoptic teaching, which enfolds all that
is abiding in those other five, whilst they, even if united, do not
approximately exhaust the substance of that teaching.

And if we would briefly define the main point on which Catherine holds
views additional to, or other than, those other four, we must point to
her Purgatorial teaching, which has received but little or no direct
suggestion from any one of them, and which, whatever may have been its
literary precursors and occasions, gives, perhaps more than anything
else, a peculiarly human and personal, original and yet still modern,
touch to what would otherwise be, to our feeling, too abstract and
antique a spiritual physiognomy.




CHAPTER XI

CATHERINE’S LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES


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

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

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


I. INTERPRETATIVE RELIGION.


1. _Difficulties of the Subjective element of Religion._

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

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

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

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

What, then, shall we think of all this?


2. _Answers to the above difficulties._

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

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

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

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

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

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


3. _Partial developments of the full Gospel Ideal._

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

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

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

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

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

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


4. _The exclusive emotionalism of Dionysius and Jacopone._

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


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

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

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


II. DUALISTIC ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE BODY.

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


1. _New Testament valuations of the body._

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


(5) Now if such “Passivity,” or Action, is in reality the condition
in which the soul attains to its fullest energizing, we can argue
back, from this universal principle, to the nature of the various
stages and kinds of the Prayer and States of Quiet. In each case, that
is, we shall combat the still very common conception that,--though
orthodoxy, it is admitted, requires _some_ human action to remain
throughout,--such Prayer and States consist (not only as to the
immediate feeling of their subjects, but in reality and in their
ultimate analysis) in an ever-increasing preponderance of divine action
within the soul, and an ever-decreasing remnant of acts of the soul
itself. For such a view assumes that God supplants man, and that, so
to speak, His Hand appears unclothed alongside of the tissue woven by
man’s own mind; whereas God everywhere but stimulates and supports man
whom He has made, and His Hand moves ever underneath and behind the
tissue,--a tissue which, at best, can become as it were a glove, and
suggest the latent hand. The Divine Action will thus stimulate and
inform the human action somewhat like the force that drives the blood
within the stag’s young antlers, or like the energy that pushes the
tender sap-full fern-buds up through the hard, heavy ground.

Thus a special intensity of divine help and presence, and an unusual
degree of holiness and of union, have nothing to do with the fewness
of the soul’s own acts at such times, but with their quality,--with
the preponderance amongst them of divinely informed acts as against
merely natural, or wrongly self-seeking, or downrightly sinful acts.
And since it is certain that living simplicity is but the harmony and
unification, the synthesis, of an organism, and hence is great in
precise proportion to the greater perfection of that synthesis, it
follows that the living, utterly one-seeming Action or State will,
at such times, contain a maximum number of interpenetrating acts and
energies, all worked up into this harmonious whole.


2. _Four causes of inadequate analysis._

It is plain, I think, that one thoroughly normal, one accidental, and
two mischievous, causes have all conspired to arrest or to deflect the
analysis of most of the Mystics themselves concerning Simplicity.

For one thing, the soul, as has just been shown, at such moments of
harmonious concentration and of willing and thinking in union with
God’s Light and Will, necessarily ceases, more or less, to be conscious
of its own operations, and, in looking back, braced and rested as it
now is, it cannot but think that it either did not act at all, or that
its action was reduced to a minimum. For how otherwise could it now
feel so rested, when, after its ordinary activity, it feels so tired
and dissatisfied? and how otherwise could it be so unable to give
any clear account of what happened in those minutes of union? Yet it
is, on the contrary, the very fulness of the action which has rested,
by expanding, the soul; and which has made the soul, returned to its
ordinary distractedness, incapable of clearly explaining that, now
past, concentration.

The accidental cause has been the fairly frequent, though not
necessary, connection of the more pronounced instances of such habits
of mind with more or less of the psycho-physical phenomena of ecstasy,
in the technical sense of the word. For, in such trances, the breathing
and circulation are retarded, and the operation of the senses is in
part suspended. And it was easy to reason, from such visible, literal
simplification of the physical life, to a similar modification of
the soul’s action at such times; and, from the assumed desirableness
of that psycho-physical condition, to the advantage of the supposed
corresponding state of the soul itself. Any tendency to an extreme
dualism, as to the relations between body and soul, would thus
directly help on an inclination to downright Quietism.--Here it is,
on the contrary, certain that only in so far as those psycho-physical
simplifications are the results of, or conditions for, a deepening
multiplicity in unity, a fuller synthetic action of the soul, or,
at least, of a fuller penetration by the soul of even one limited
experience or idea--an operation which entails not less, but more,
energizing of the soul,--are such psycho-physical simplifications of
any spiritual advantage or significance. And in such cases they could
not be indications of the cessation or diminution of the deepest and
most docile energizing of the soul.

And the mischievous causes were a mistake in Psychology and a mistake
in Theology. For, as to Psychology, not only was simplicity assumed,
(through a mistaken acceptance of the soul’s own feeling, as furnishing
the ultimate analysis of its state), to consist, at any one moment,
of an act materially and literally one, instead of a great organism
of various simultaneous energizings; but this one act was often
held to require no kind of repetition. Since the act was one as
against any simultaneous multiplicity, so was it one as against any
successive multiplicity, even if this latter were taken as a repetition
differentiated by number alone. And yet here again energizing _is_
energizing; and though the soul’s acts overlap and interpenetrate
each other, and though when, by their number and harmony, they
completely fill and pacify the soul, many of them are simultaneously
or successively present to the soul in their effects alone: it is
nevertheless the renewal, however peaceful and unperceived, of these
acts, which keeps the state of soul in existence. For these acts are
not simply unowned acts that happen to be present within the soul; they
are the soul’s own acts, whether, in addition, the soul is directly
conscious of them or not.

And, theologically, the idea was often at work that it was more
worthy of God to operate alone and, as it were, _in vacuo_; and more
creaturely of man to make, or try to make, such a void for Him. Yet
this is in direct conflict with the fundamental Christian doctrine,
of the Condescension, the Incarnation of God to and in human nature,
and of the persistence, and elevation of this humanity, even in the
case of Christ Himself. God’s action does not keep outside of, nor
does it replace, man’s action; but it is,--Our Lord Himself has told
us,--that of yeast working in meal, which manifests its hidden power in
proportion to the mass of meal which it penetrates and transforms.


3. _Four Quietistic aberrations._

Now it is certain that the error of Quietism has, in no doubt many
cases, not remained confined to such mistakes in psychological analysis
and theological doctrine, but that these have joined hands with, and
have furnished a defence to, sloth and love of dreamy ease, or to some
impatience of the necessary details of life, or to fanatical attachment
to some one mood and form of experience; and that they have, thus
reinforced, ravaged not a few wills and souls.

Four chief Quietistic aberrations can be studied in history.

(1) The neglect or even contempt of vocal prayer, and of the historical
and institutional elements of religion, at least in the case of
more advanced souls, is one of these abuses.--Now it is true, and
Catherine has been a striking instance, that the proportion of all
these different elements towards one another vary, and should vary,
considerably between soul and soul, according to the _attrait_ and
degree of advance of each; that the soul’s most solid advance is in the
direction of an ever-deepened spiritual devotedness, and not in that of
a multiplication of particular devotions; that the use of even the more
central of those elements and means may, for souls called to the prayer
of Quiet, become remarkably elastic and largely unmethodized; and that,
for such souls (and, in various degrees and ways, sooner or latter, for
perhaps most other souls), a prayer of peacefully humble expectation
and of all but inarticulate, practically indescribable, brooding of
love, and of dim, expansive trust and conformity is possible, sometimes
alone possible, and is proved right and useful, if it leaves them
strengthened to act and to suffer, to help and to devote themselves to
their fellows, to Christ, and to God.

But it remains equally true, even for these as for all other souls,
that the historical and institutional elements must ever remain
represented, and sufficiently represented; indeed the persistence in
these elements of religion will be one of the chief means for avoiding
delusion. We have St. Teresa’s experience and teaching here, as a truly
classical instance. And if the prayer of Quiet will give a special
colour, depth, and unity to those more contingent-seeming practices,
these practices will, in return, give a particular definiteness,
content, and creaturely quality to that prayer. And thus too the
universally and profoundly important union and interchange with souls
of other, equally legitimate, kinds and degrees of spirituality will
be kept up. Only the sum-total of all these souls, only the complete
invisible Church, is the full Bride of Christ; and though the souls
composing her may and should each contribute a varying predominance of
different elements, no soul should be entirely without a certain amount
of each of these constituents.

(2) Another abuse is the neglect, contempt, or misapplied fear
of not directly religious occupations and labours which, however
otherwise appropriate or even necessary to this soul’s growth and
destination, tend to disturb its quiet and to absorb a part of its
time and attention. Here it is doubtless true that the other elements
of religion are also all more or less apprehensive and jealous with
regard to actual, or even only possible, non-religious rival interests.
And it is certain that they are all right in so far as that a certain
interior leisureliness and recollection, a certain ultimate preference
for the spiritualizing religious force of the soul as against the
materials, non-religious and other, which that force is to penetrate,
are necessary to the soul that would advance.

But the fear that characterizes the Historical and Institutional
elements is rather a fear, respectively, of error and of disobedience
and singularity, whereas on the part of the Mystical element it is a
fear of distraction and absorption away from the _Unum Necessarium_ of
the soul. Perhaps even among the Canonized Mystics there is none that
has more impressively warned us, both by word and example, against
this insidious danger, than the distinguished Platonist scholar and
deep spiritual writer, Père Jean Nicolas Grou, who, right through the
long mystical period of his life, alternated his prayer of Quiet with
extensive and vigorous critical work on the Graeco-Latin classics,
and whose practice only wants further expansion and application,
(according to the largely increased or changed conditions of such not
directly religious work), in order to bear much fruit, not only for
criticism and science, but, (by the return-effect of such occupations
upon the soul’s general temper and particular devotional habits), for
spirituality itself. But we must return to this point more fully in our
last chapter.

(3) The third abuse is the neglect or contempt of morality, especially
on its social, visible, and physical sides. Particular Mystics, and
even whole Mystical schools and movements, have undoubtedly in some
instances, and have, possibly, in many more cases, been maligned on
this point, since even such a spotless life as Fénelon’s, and that of
such a profoundly well-intentioned woman as Madame Guyon, did not,
for a time, escape the most unjust suspicions. It is also true that,
as a man advances in spirituality, he lays increasing stress upon the
intention and general attitude of the agent, and increasingly requires
to be judged by the same interior standard, if he is to be rightly
understood at all. God may and does, to humble and purify him, allow
painful temptations and trials from within to combine, apparently,
against him, with persecutions and much isolation from without. And
the difference, rather than the similarity, between Religion and
Morality,--the sense of pure grace, of free pardon, of the strange
profound “givenness” of even our fullest willings and of our most
emphatically personal achievements,--can and should grow in him more
and more.

And yet it is clear that there must have been some fire to account
for all that smoke of accusation; that the material and the effect
outwards, the _body_ of an action, do matter, as well as does that
action’s _spirit_; that this body does not only act thus outwards,
but also inwards, back upon the spirit of the act and of the agent;
and that temptations and trials are purifying, not by their simple
presence but in proportion as they are resisted, or, if they have been
yielded to, in proportion as such defeats are sincerely deplored and
renounced. Thus everywhere the full development of any one part of
life, and the true unity of the whole, have to be achieved through the
gradual assimilation of at first largely recalcitrant other elements,
and within an ever-abiding multiplicity--a maximum number of parts and
functions interacting within one great organism. And hence not the
outrage, neglect, or supersession of morality, but, on the contrary,
its deeper development, by more precise differentiation from, and more
organic integration into, religion proper, must, here again and here
above all, be the final aim. Once more again it is the Incarnational
type which is the only fully true, the only genuinely Christian one.

(4) And, finally, there are certain hardly classifiable fanaticisms,
which are nevertheless a strictly logical consequence from a wrongly
understood Quiet and Passivity,--from Quietism in its unfavourable,
condemned sense. I am thinking of such a case as that of Margarethe
Peters, a young Quietist, who caused herself to be crucified by her
girl-companions, at Wildenspuch, near Schaffhausen, in 1823,--in order
to carry out, in full literalness and separateness, the utmost and
most painful passivity and dependence and resistless self-donation, in
direct imitation of the culminating act of Christ’s life on earth and
of His truest followers.[124] Here, in the deliberate suicide of this
undoubtedly noble Lutheran girl, we get an act which but brings out
the strength and weakness of Quietism wherever found. For the greatest
constituents of the Christian spirit are undoubtedly there: free
self-sacrifice, impelled by love of God, of Christ, and of all men,
and by hatred of self.--Yet, because they here suppress other, equally
necessary, constituents, and are out of their proper context and bereft
of their proper checks, they but render possible and actual a deed of
piteous self-delusion. How terrible is false simplification, the short
cut taken by pure logic, operating without a sufficient induction from
facts, and within an ardent, self-immolating temperament!


4. _Rome’s condemnation of Quietism._

All this is abundantly sufficient to explain and justify Rome’s
condemnation of Quietism. The term “Quietists” appears, I think, for
the first time,--at least in an invidious sense,--in the Letter which
Cardinal Caraccioli, Archbishop of Naples, addressed to Pope Innocent
XI (Odescalchi) on June 30, 1682, and in which he graphically describes
the abuses which, (under pretext or through the misapplication of
spiritual Quiet and Passivity), had now appeared in his Diocese: souls
apparently incapable of using their beads or making the sign of the
Cross; or which will neither say a vocal prayer nor go to Confession;
or which, when in this prayer of Quiet, even when at Holy Communion,
will strive to drive away any image, even of Our Lord Himself, that may
present itself to their imagination; or which tear down a Crucifix, as
a hindrance to union with God; or which look upon all the thoughts that
come to them in the quietude of prayer, as so many rays and effluences
from God Himself, exempting them henceforth from every law.[125]

Yet it is important to bear well in mind, the special circumstances,
the admitted limits, and the probable signification of Rome’s
condemnations.

(1) As to the circumstances of the time, it appears certain that it was
the ready circulation of the doctrines of the Spanish priest, Miguel de
Molinos in the _Guida Spirituale_, 1675, and the abuses of the kind we
have just now detailed, and that sprang from this circulation, which
formed the primary reason and motive for the otherwise excessively
severe treatment of a man and a book, which had both received the very
highest and the most deliberate ecclesiastical approbations. That these
two circumstances were the determining causes of at least the severity
of his condemnation is well brought out by the circumstance that,
during his two years’ trial (1685-1687), not only the short _Guida_ but
his whole obtainable correspondence (some twenty thousand letters) were
examined, and that it is at least as much on such occasional manuscript
material, and on Molinos’s own oral admissions,--in prison and
doubtless, in part at least, under torture,--that the condemnation was
based, containing, as it does, certain revoltingly immoral propositions
and confessions, admittedly absent from his published writings.

But if at least some shadow of doubt rests upon the moral character
of Molinos, not a shadow of such suspicion or of doubt concerning his
perfectly Catholic intentions can, in justice, be allowed to rest
upon his chief follower and the most distinguished apologist for his
doctrine, the saintly Oratorian and Bishop, the much-tried Cardinal
Petrucci; any more than Fénelon’s moral and spiritual character, or
deeply Catholic spirit and intentions, can, (in spite of the painfully
fierce and unjust attack upon both by Bossuet in his formally classic
invective, _Relation sur le Quiétisme_), for one moment be called
in question.[126] Other admittedly deeply spiritual and entirely
well-intentioned Catholics, whose writings were also condemned during
this time when devotional expressions having an at all quietistic tinge
or drift were very severely judged, are Mère Marie de l’Incarnation
(Marie Guyard), a French Ursuline Religious, who died in Canada in
1672, and the process of whose Beatification has been introduced; the
saintly French layman, Jean de Bernières-Louvigny, much admired by
Fénelon, who died in 1659; the very interior, though at times somewhat
fantastic, Secular Priest, Henri Marie Boudon, who died in 1702; and
the very austere but highly experienced ascetical writer, the Jesuit
Père Joseph Surin, whom Bossuet had formally approved, and who died in
1668.[127] But Madame Guyon herself, that much-tried and vehemently
opposed woman, was held, by many an undoubtedly Catholic-minded,
experienced and close observer, to be (in spite of the largely
misleading and indeed incorrect character of many of her analyses and
expressions) a truly saintly, entirely filial Catholic.[128]

(2) As to the limits of these condemnations, we must remember that only
two of them,--those of Molinos and of Fénelon,--claim to be directly
doctrinal at all; and that Fénelon was never really compromised in
the question of Quietism proper, but was condemned on questions of
Pure Love alone. Bossuet himself was far less sound as against the
central Quietist doctrine of the One Act, which, unless formally
revoked, lasts on throughout life, and hence need never be repeated;
Fénelon’s early criticism of the Molinos propositions remains one of
the clearest extant refutations of that error. Again in the matter of
the Passivity of advanced souls, Bossuet was distinctly less normal and
sober than Fénelon: for whilst Fénelon taught that in no state does
the soul lose all capacity, although the facility may greatly vary,
to produce distinct acts of the virtues or vocal prayers and other
partially external exercises, Bossuet taught that, in some cases, all
capacity of this kind is abolished.[129] “I take,” says Fénelon, “the
terms ‘Passive’ and ‘Passivity’ as they actually appear everywhere
in the language of the (sound) Mystics, as something opposed to the
terms ‘active’ and ‘activity’: ‘Passivity,’ taken in the sense of an
entire inaction of the will, would be a heresy.” And he then opposes
“Passivity,” not to “Action,” but to that “Activity,” which is a merely
natural, restless, and hurried excitation.[130]

(3) And as to the abiding significance of the whole anti-quietist
decisions and measures, we shall do well to consider the following
large facts. From St. Paul and St. John to Clement of Alexandria and
Origen; from these to Dionysius the Areopagite; from the Areopagite to
St. Bernard of Clairvaux and then the Franciscan and Dominican Mystics;
from these, again, on to the great Renaissance and Counter-Reformation
saints and writers of this type,--the German Cardinal Nicolas of Coes
and the Italian St. Catherine of Genoa, the Spaniards St. Teresa and
St. John of the Cross, and the French Saint Francis de Sales and
Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, we get a particular type of religious
experience and doctrine, which but unfolds and concentrates, with an
unusual articulation, breadth, and depth, what is to be found, on
some sides of their spiritual character and teaching, among Saints
and religious souls of the more mixed type, such as St. Augustine,
St. Anselm, St. Thomas of Aquin, and St. Ignatius Loyola. And this
mixed type, bearing within it a considerable amount of that mystical
quiet and emotional-speculative element, is again but a deepening, a
purification and a realization of one of the profoundest affinities and
constituents of every human heart and will.

Hence, even in the thickest of the quietist controversy, when that
mystical element must have seemed, to many, to be discredited once for
all, those best acquainted with the rich history of the Church, and
with the manifold requirements of the abiding religious consciousness,
could not and did not doubt that all that was good, deep, and true
in that element would continue to be upheld by, and represented in,
the Church.--And it is not difficult to point to the more or less
Mystical souls furnished by the Monks, the Friars; the Clerks-Regular,
specially the Jesuits; the Secular Clergy; and the Laity, down to
the present day. Such writers and Saints as Père de Caussade (_d._
about 1770) on the one hand, and Père Jean N. Grou (_d._ 1803) and
the Curé d’Ars (_d._ 1859) on the other hand, carry on the two
streams of the predominantly mystical and of the mixed type,--streams
so clearly observable before 1687 and 1699. Quietism, the doctrine
of the One Act; Passivity in a literal sense, as the absence or
imperfection of the power and use of initiative on the soul’s part in
any and every state: these doctrines were finally condemned, and most
rightly and necessarily condemned; the Prayer of Quiet, and various
states and degrees of an ever-increasing predominance of Action over
Activity,--an Action which is all the more the soul’s very own,
because the more occasioned, directed, and informed by God’s action
and stimulation,--these, and the other chief lines of the ancient
experience and practice, remain as true, correct, and necessary as ever.


5. _Rome’s alleged change of front._

And yet it is undeniable that the Roman events between 1675 and 1688 do
seem, at first sight, to justify the strongly Protestant Dr. Heppe’s
contention that those twelve years,--not to speak of the later troubles
of Madame Guyon and of Fénelon--witnessed a complete _volte face_, a
formal self-stultification, of the Roman teaching and authority, on
these difficult but immediately important matters.

(1) Let us put aside the many passages in Molinos’s _Guida_ which
were but (more or less) literal reproductions of the teachings
of such solemnly approved authorities as Saints Teresa, Peter of
Alcantara, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de
Chantal,--passages which, of course, remained uncondemned even in
Molinos’s pages, but which it would often be difficult to distinguish
from the parts of his book that were censured. Yet there still remain
such facts as the following.

Juan Falconi’s _Alfabeto_ and _Lettera_ were at their Fifth Italian
edition, 1680, and all five editions had been approved by the Master
of the Apostolic Palace; but only in 1688 were these writings
forbidden. Yet the _Lettera_ contains, with unsurpassed directness and
clearness, the central doctrine of Quietism: an exhortation to the
production of one single lively Act of Faith, which will then continue
uninterruptedly through the whole earthly life into eternity, and
which, consequently, is not to be repeated.[131]

Molinos’s _Guida_ and _Breve Trattato_ appeared in Rome, respectively
in 1675 and 1681, with the approbations of five theologians, four of
whom were Consultors of the Holy Office,--the Archbishop of Reggio;
the Minister-General of the Franciscans; the late General of the
Carmelites; Father Martin Esparza, the same Jesuit Theologian-Professor
of the Roman College who, some years before, had been one of those who
had examined and approved St. Catherine’s _Vita ed Opere_; and the
actual General of the Carmelites.[132]

Even after these two writings of Molinos had been criticised by the
Jesuits Bell Huomo and Segneri and the Clerk Regular Regio, (Segneri
enjoying a deservedly immense reputation, and showing in this affair
much moderation and a strong sense of the legitimate claims of
Mysticism), the Inquisition examined these criticisms, and forbade, not
the incriminated writings of Molinos and Petrucci, but the critique of
Bell Huomo _donec corrigatur_, and those of Regio and of Segneri (in
his _Lettera_ of 1681) absolutely. Segneri’s subsequent _Concordia_
almost cost him his life, so strong was the popular veneration of
Molinos.

Molinos indeed was the guest of Pope Innocent XI himself, and the
friend and confidant, amongst countless other spiritually-minded souls,
of various Cardinals, especially of the deeply devout Petrucci, Bishop
of Jesi, who was raised to the Cardinalate eighteen months after the
beginning of Molinos’s trial. The imprisonment of Molinos began in May
1685, but the trial did not end till August 1687, when (after nineteen
“Principal Errors of the New Contemplation” had been censured by the
Holy Office in February 1687) sixty-eight propositions, out of the
two hundred and sixty-three which had been urged against him, were
solemnly condemned: of these the clearly and directly immoral ones
being admittedly not derived from any printed book, or indeed any ever
published letter of his Molinos.[133]

(2) To estimate Rome’s attitude (as far as it concerns the ultimate
truth and completeness of these doctrines, taken in their most
characteristic and explicit forms) fairly, we shall have to put aside
all questions as to the motives that impelled, and the methods that
were employed, by either side against the other. Molinos may have been
even worse than the condemned propositions represent, and yet Petrucci
would remain a saintly soul; and we certainly are driven to ask with
Leibniz: “Si Molinos a caché du venin sous ce miel, est-il juste que
Petrucci et autres personnes de mérite en soient responsables?”[134]
But neither the wickedness of the one nor the sanctity of the other
would make the doctrines propounded by them, objectively, any less
solid or more spiritual than they are in themselves. The acutely
anti-Roman Anglican Bishop Burnet may not have invented or exaggerated
when he wrote from Rome, during those critical years, that one of the
chief motives which actuated the opponents of the Quietists was the
fact that, though the latter “were observed to become more strict in
their lives, more retired and serious in their mental devotions, yet …
they were not so assiduous at Mass, nor so earnest to procure Masses to
be said for their friends: nor … so frequently either at Confession or
in processions”: and so “the trade of those that live by these things
was sensibly sunk.”[135] And the cruel injustice of many details and
processes of the movement against the Quietists,--a movement which soon
had much of the character of a popular scare and panic, in reaction
against a previous, in part, heedless enthusiasm,--are beyond dispute
or justification. Yet mercenary and ruthless as part of the motives and
much of the action of the anti-quietists doubtlessly were, the question
as to the worth and wisdom of Quietism, (taken objectively, and not as
an excusable counter-excess but as a true synthesis of the spiritual
life), remains precisely where it was before.

(3) Now I think that two peculiarities, most difficult to notice at
the time, seriously differentiate the Molinist movement from the great
current of fully Catholic Mysticism, even in those points and elements
where the two are materially alike or even identical; and yet that
these peculiarities are but the caricature (through further emphasis
and systematization) of certain elements present, in a more latent
and sporadic manner, in the formulae and philosophic assumptions
or explanations of the older Mysticism,--elements which had been
borrowed too largely from a, at bottom, profoundly anti-incarnational
philosophy, not to be of far less value and of much greater danger than
the profoundly true experiences, nobly spiritual maxims, and exquisite
psychological descriptions which that predominantly Neo-Platonist
framework handed on.

The first peculiarity is that the older Mystics, especially those of
the type of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. John of the Cross, but
even also those of the more “mixed” type of Mysticism, such as St.
Teresa, had indeed quite freely used terms which are vividly true
as descriptions of the prima facie aspect and emotional impression
of certain states and experiences of the soul: “empty,” “fixed,”
“motionless,” “the reason and the will have ceased to act,” “doing
nothing,” “incapable of doing anything,” “moved by irresistible grace,”
“but one act,” “one single desire”: these and equivalent expressions
occur again and again. But these sayings do not here lead up to such a
deliberate and exclusive rule as is that given by Falconi, and repeated
by Molinos in his _Guida_, Nos. 103-106.[136]

This doctrine of the One Act, in this its negative form,--for it
is not to be repeated,--and in its application to the whole waking
and sleeping life, is first an exclusive concentration upon, and
then a wholesale extension of, one out of the several trends of the
older teaching, a doctrine which, compared with that teaching in its
completeness, is thin and doctrinaire, and as untrue to the full
psychological explanation and working requirements of the soul as it
is readily abusable in practice and contrary to the Incarnational type
of religion. It is impossible not to feel that the manifold great
ocean-waters of life, that the diversely blowing winds of God’s Spirit
are here, somehow, expected to flow and breathe in a little shortcut,
single channel, through a tiny pipe; one more infallible recipe or
prescription is here offered to us, hardly more adequate than the many
similar “sure” roads to salvation, declared by this or that body of
devout religionists to attach to the practice or possession of this or
that particular prayer or particular religious object.

And the second difference is that the older Catholic Mystics leave
less the impression that the external side of religion, its _body_,
is of little or no importance, and indeed very readily an obstacle to
its interior side, its _soul_. And this, again, for the simple reason
that their teaching is, in general, less systematic and pointed, more
incidental, and careless of much self-consistency.

(4) Yet these two differences have largely sprung from the simple
pressing and further extension of precisely the least satisfactory, the
explanatory and systematic side,--the form as against the content,--of
the older Mystics. For once the more specifically Neo-Platonist
constituent, in those Mystics’ explanation and systematization, was
isolated from the elements of other provenance which there had kept it
in check, and now became, as it were, hypostasized and self-sufficient,
this constituent could not but reveal, more clearly than before, its
inadequacy as a form for the intensely organic and “incarnational”
spiritual realities and processes which it attempted to show forth.
That Neo-Platonist constituent, always present in those ancient
Mystics, had ever tended to conceive the soul’s unity, at any one
moment, as a something outside of all multiplicity whatsoever. Hence
this character of the simultaneous unity had only to be extended to
the successive unity,--and the literally One Act, as in the present so
throughout the future, became a necessary postulate.

And that same constituent had, even in those great teachers of
profound maxims, exquisite religious psychology, and noblest living,
tended, (however efficaciously checked by all this their Christian
experience and by certain specifically Platonist and Aristotelian
elements of their philosophy), towards depreciating the necessity,
importance, indeed even the preponderant utility, of the External,
Contingent, Historical and Institutional, and of the interchange, the
inter-stimulation between these sides and expressions of religion and
its internal centre and spirit.

Perhaps, amongst all the great ecclesiastically authorized Mystics of
that past, the then most recent of them all, St. John of the Cross,
comes, by his (theoretically continuous though in his practice by no
means exclusive) insistence upon the abstractive and universal, the
obscure and invisible, the self-despoiling and simplifying element and
movement, nearest to an exclusion of the other element and movement.
Indeed the Quietists’ generally strong insistence upon the necessity
of a Director and upon Frequent Communion gives their teaching, when
taken in its completeness, a prima facie greater Institutionalism than
is offered by the spiritual theory of the great Spaniard. Yet if, even
in him, one misses, in his theoretical system, a sufficiently organic
necessity for the outgoing movement, a movement begun by God Himself,
and which cannot but be of fundamental importance and influence for
believers in the Incarnation, there is as complete an absence of the
doctrinaire One-Act recipe for perfection as in the most Historical and
Institutional of Christian teachers. But more about this hereafter.


6. _Four needs recognised by Quietism._

Quietism, then, has undoubtedly isolated and further exaggerated
certain explanatory elements of the older Mysticism which, even there,
were largely a weakness and not a strength; has thus underrated and
starved the Particular, Visible, Historical, Institutional constituents
of Religion; and has, indeed, misunderstood the nature of true Unity
everywhere. Yet the very eagerness with which it was welcomed at
the time,--in France and Italy especially,--and this, not only as a
fashion by the _Quidnuncs_, but as so much spiritual food and life by
many a deeply religious soul; and the difficulty, and not infrequent
ruthlessness of its suppression, indicate plainly enough that, with
all its faults and dangers, it was divining and attempting to supply
certain profound and abiding needs of the soul. I take these needs to
be the following four.

(1) Man has an ineradicable, and, when rightly assuaged, profoundly
fruitful thirst for Unity,--for Unification, Synthesis, Harmonization;
for a living System, an Organization both within and without himself,
in which each constituent gains its full expansion and significance
through being, and more and more becoming, just _that_ part and
function of a great, dynamic whole; a sense of the essential and
ultimate organic connection of all things, in so far as, in any degree
or form, they are fair and true and good. And this sense and inevitable
requirement alone explain the surprise and pain caused, at first, to
us all, by the actual condition of mutual aloofness and hostility,
characteristic of most of the constituents of the world within us, as
of the world around us, towards their fellow-constituents. A truly
atomistic world,--even an atomistic conception of the world,--of life,
as a collection of things one alongside of another, on and on, is
utterly repulsive to any deeply religious spirit whose self-knowledge
is at all equal to its aspirations.--No wonder, then, if the Quietists,
haunted by the false alternative of one such impenetrable atom-act or
of an indefinite number of them, chose the One Act, and not a multitude
of them.

(2) Man has a deep-seated necessity to purify himself by detachment,
not only from things that are illicit but even from those that are
essential and towards which he is bound to practise a deep and warm
attachment. There is no shadow of theoretical or ultimate contradiction
here: to love one’s country deeply, yet not to be a _Chauvinist_; to
love one’s wife tenderly, yet not to be uxorious; to care profoundly
for one’s children, yet to train, rebuke, and ever brace them, when
necessary, up to suffering and even death itself: these things so
little exclude each the other, that each attachment can only rightly
grow in and through the corresponding detachment. The imperfection
in all these cases, and in all the analogous, specifically religious
ones, lies not in the objects to be loved, nor in these objects being
many and of various degrees and kinds of lovableness, nor in the right
(both effective and affective, appropriately varied) love of them:
but simply in our actual manner of loving them.--No wonder then that
Quietism, face to face with the false alternative of either Attachment
or Detachment, chose Detachment, (the salt and the leaven of life) and
not attachment (life’s meat and meal).

(3) Man has a profound, though ever largely latent, capacity and need
for admiration, trust, faith; and does not by any means improve solely
by direct efforts at self-improvement, and by explicit examinations
of his efforts and failures; but, (a little from the first, and very
soon as much, and later on far more), he progresses by means of a
happy absorption in anything clean and fruitful that can and does
lift him out of and above his smaller self altogether.--And such an
absorption will necessarily be unaccompanied, at the time, by any
direct consciousness on the part of the mind as to this its absorption.
And, religiously, such quiet concentrations will, in so far as they are
at all analyzable after the event, consist in a quite inarticulate,
and yet profound and spiritually renovating, sense of God; and they
will have to be tested, not by their describable content, but by their
ethical and religious effects. “Psychology and religion,” says that
great psychological authority, Prof. William James, “both admit that
there are forces, seemingly outside of the conscious individual, that
bring redemption to his life.” “A man’s conscious wit and will, so far
as they strain after the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and
inaccurately imagined, whilst the deeper forces of organic ripening
within him tend towards a rearrangement that is pretty surely definite,
and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and
determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with by efforts
of too direct and energetic a kind on our part.”[137]--No wonder
then that Quietism, finding this element of quiet incubation much
ignored and starved in the lives of most religious souls, flew to the
other extreme, of making this inarticulateness and wise indirectness
of striving into the one test and measure of the perfection of all
the constituents of the religious life, instead of insisting upon
various degrees and combination of full and direct consciousness and
articulation, and of much dimness and indirect alertness, as each
requiring the other, and as both required by the complete and normal
life of the soul.

(4) And Man has a deep-seated sense of shame, in precise proportion
as he becomes spiritually awake, about appropriating to himself his
virtues and spiritual insight, even in so much as he perceives and
admits his possession of them. Not all his consciousness and conviction
of the reality of his own efforts and initiative, can or does prevent
a growing sense that this very giving of his is (in a true sense)
God’s gift,--that his very seeking of God ever implies that he had, in
some degree, already found God,--that God had already sought him out,
in order that he might seek and find God.--No wonder then that, once
more shrinking from a Unity constituted in a Multiplicity, Quietism
should, (with the apparently sole choice before it, of God Himself
operating literally all, or of man subtracting something from that
exclusive action and honour of God), have chosen God alone and entire,
rather than, as it were, a fragmentary, limited, baffled influence
and efficiency of the Almighty within His Own creature. Yet here
again the greater does not supplant, but informs, the lesser; and the
Incarnational action of God is, in this supreme question also, the
central truth and secret of Christianity.


7. _Multiplicity and unity, in different proportions, needful for all
spiritual life._

We find, then, that it is essential for even the most advanced souls,
that they should keep and increase the sense and the practice of a
right multiplicity, as ever a constituent and essential condition
of every concrete, living unity; of a right attachment, as ever the
necessary material and content for a fruitful and enriching detachment;
of a right consciousness and articulation of images, thoughts,
feelings, volitions, and external acts, as ever stimulations, restful
alternations, and food for a wise and strengthening prayer or states
of Quiet and inarticulation; and of a right personal initiative
and responsibility, as the most precious means and element for the
operations of God.

We find, too, that it is equally important, for even the most imperfect
souls, to be helped towards some, (though but ever semi-conscious and
intermittent), sense of the unity which alone can give much worth
or meaning to their multiplicity; of the detachment which alone can
purify and spiritualize their attachments; of the self-oblivion, in
rapt and peaceful admiration, which alone can save even their right
self-watchings and self-improvements from still further centring them
in themselves; and of the true self-abandonment to pure grace and the
breathing of God’s Spirit, which alone can give a touch of winning
freedom and of joyful spaciousness to all the prudence and right fear
and conscious responsibility which, left alone, will hip, darken and
weigh down the religious soul.

And thus we shall find that there is no degree of perfection for any
one set of souls which is not, in some form and amount, prefigured and
required by all other souls of good-will; and again, that there is
no one constituent, to which any one soul is specially drawn, which
does not require the supplementation and corrective of some other
constituents, more fully represented in other souls of possibly lower
sanctity.

Thus each soul and grade requires all the others; and thus the measure
of a soul’s greatness is not its possessing things which cannot, in
any degree or way, be found in, or expected of, all human souls, in
proportion as they are fully and characteristically human, but, on the
contrary, its being full of a spirit and a force which, in different
degrees and forms, are the very salt and yeast, the very light and
life, of all men in every place and time.

The following weighty declaration, long ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas,
fully covers, I think, the doctrine and ideal aimed at throughout this
section: “Already in this life we ought continuously to enjoy God, as
a thing most fully our own, in all our works.… Great is the blindness
and exceeding the folly of many souls that are ever seeking God,
continuously sighing after God, and frequently desiring God: whilst,
all the time, they are themselves the tabernacles of the living God …
since their soul is the seat of God, in which He continuously reposes.
Now who but a fool deliberately seeks a tool which he possesses under
lock and key? or who can use and profit by an instrument which he is
seeking? or who can draw comfort from food for which he hungers, but
which he does not relish at leisure? Like unto all this is the life
of many a just soul, which ever seeks God and never tarries to enjoy
Him; and all the works of such an one are, on this account, less
perfect.”[138]


IV. PURE LOVE, OR DISINTERESTED RELIGION: ITS DISTINCTION FROM QUIETISM.

The problem of Pure Love, of Disinterested Religion, can hardly, in
practice, be distinguished from that of Quiet and Passivity, if only
because Quietists, (those who have considered perfection to diminish
more and more the number of the soul’s acts, or at least to eliminate
more and more the need of distinctness or difference between them),
have, quite inevitably, ever given a special prominence to the question
as to what should be the character of those few acts, of that one
unbroken act. For once allow this their main question we should all
have to answer in the Quietist’s way,--viz. that this single act must,
for a perfect soul, to be the most perfect of the acts possible to
man, and hence must be an act of Pure Love.--Yet it is well to realize
clearly that, if Quietism necessitates an even excessive and unreal
doctrine of Pure Love, a moderate and solid Pure-Love teaching has
no kind of necessary connection with Quietism. For even though my
interior life be necessarily one continuous stream and tissue of acts,
countless in their number, variety, and degrees of inter-penetration,
it in nowise follows that acts of Pure Love are not the best, or are
impossible; nor that, in proportion as Pure Love informs the soul’s
multiform acts, such acts must lose in depth and delicacy of variety
and articulation. Indeed here, with regard to the very culmination
of the interior life, we shall again find and must again test the two
conceptions: the finally abstractive and materially simplifying one,
which must ever have any one real thing outside of another; and the
incarnational and synthetic one, which finds spiritual realities and
forces working the one inside and through the other. And the latter
view will appear the true one.


1. _New Testament teaching as to Pure Love._

Now we must first try and get some clear ideas as to how this difficult
matter stands in the New Testament,--in the Synoptic tradition and in
the Pauline-Joannine teaching respectively. Here again it is the former
which, (though on its surface it appears as the more ordinary and the
more locally coloured teaching), is the richer, in its grandly elastic
and manifold simplicity; and it is the latter which has most profoundly
penetrated and articulated the ultimate meaning and genius of a part
of Our Lord’s doctrine, yet at the cost of a certain narrowing of the
variety and breadth of that outlook. In both cases I shall move, from
the easier and more popular teaching, to the deepest and most original
enunciations and explanations.[139]

(1) The Synoptic teaching starts throughout from the ordinary
post-exilic Jewish feeling and teaching, which indeed recognizes the
ceremonial obligations and the more tangible amongst the ethical
demands as standing under the categorical imperative of the Legal
“Thou Shalt,” but places the large territory of the finer moral
precepts outside of the Law. So with the “Zedakah,” the “Justice” of
almsdeeds, and with the “Gemiluth Chasadim,” the “works of mercy,”
such as visiting the sick, burying the dead, and rejoicing with the
joyful and sorrowing with the sorrowful. Thus Rabbi Simon the Just
tells us: “The world rests on three things: on the Law (_Thorah_),
on Worship (_Abodah_), and on Works of Mercy (_Gemiluth Chasadim_)”;
and Rabbi Eleazar declared the “Gemiluth Chasadim” to be above the
“Zedakah.”[140] And it is especially in view of these works of
supererogation that rewards, and indeed a strict scale of rewards,
are conceived. Thus already in the Book of Tobit, (written somewhere
between 175 and 25 B.C.), we have Tobit instructing his son Tobias that
“Prayer is good with Fasting and Alms, more than to buy up treasures
of gold. For Alms delivereth from death … they that practise Mercy and
Justice shall live long.”[141] And one of the sayings of the Jewish
Fathers declares: “So much trouble, so much reward.”[142]

Now this whole scheme and its spirit seems, at first to be taken over
quite unchanged by Our Lord. The very Beatitudes end with: “Rejoice
… because your reward is great in heaven.” And, in the following
Sermon, his hearers are bidden to beware of doing their “Zedakah,”--the
“Justice” of Prayer, Fasting, Almsdeeds in order to be seen by men;
since, in that case, “ye shall not have reward from your Father Who is
in heaven.” And this is driven home in detail: these three kinds of
Justice are to be done “in secret,” and “thy Father will repay thee.”
Even Prayer itself thus appears as a meritorious good work, one of the
means to “treasure up treasures in heaven.” Similarly, the rich man
is bid “Go sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor; and thou
shalt have a treasure in heaven.” Even “he that shall give you a cup of
cold water in My name, shall not lose his reward.” Indeed we have the
general principle, “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”[143]

And yet we can follow the delicate indications of the presence, and the
transitions to the expression, of the deeper apprehension and truth.
For, on the part of God, the reward appears, in the first instance, as
in intrinsic relation to the deed. The reward is the deed’s congenital
equivalent: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”;
“if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Father … will likewise
forgive you your trespasses”; and “everyone who shall confess Me before
men, him will I also confess before My Father Who is in heaven.”[144]
Or the reward appears as a just inversion of the ordinary results of
the action thus rewarded: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
the land”; take the highest seat at a banquet, and you will be forced
down to the lowest, take the lowest, and you will be moved up to the
highest; and, generally, “he who findeth his soul, shall lose it;
and that loseth his soul, for My sake, shall find it.”[145] Or the
reward appears as an effect organically connected with the deed, as its
cause or condition: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see
God.”[146] And then the reward comes to vary, although the deed remains
quantitatively identical, solely because of that deed’s qualitative
difference,--_i.e._ according to the variation in its motive: “He that
receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive the reward
of a prophet; and he who receiveth a just man in the name of a just
man, shall receive the reward of a just man.”[147] And then the reward
moves up and up and becomes a grace, through being so far in excess
of the work done: “Every one who hath forsaken house … or father or
children or fields for My name, shall receive manifold,” indeed “an
hundredfold”--“a full … and overflowing measure shall they pour into
your lap”; and “whosoever shall humble himself, shall be exalted,”--not
simply back to his original level, but into the Kingdom of Heaven. So,
too, “Thou wast faithful over a few things, I shall place thee over
many things”; indeed this faithful servant’s master “shall place him
over all his possessions;” or rather, “blessed are those servants whom
the Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching. Amen, I say unto you,
that he shall approach … and shall minister unto them.”[148]

This immense disproportion between the work and its reward, and the
consequent grace-character of the latter, is driven home with a
purposely paradoxical, provocative pointedness, in the two Parables of
the Wedding Garment and of the Equal Payment of the Unequal Labourers,
both of which are in St. Matthew alone. The former concerns the soul’s
call to the kingdom, and that soul’s response. The King here, after
having formally invited a certain select number of previously warned
relatives and nobles, who all, as such, had a _claim_ upon him, Matt,
xxii, 3, sends out invitations with absolute indiscrimination,--to men
with no claims or with less than none; to “bad” as well as “good.” And
it is the King, again, who gratuitously supplies them each with the
appropriate white wedding-feast garment. He has thus a double right to
expect all his guests to be thus clothed, and to punish instantly,
not the mere negligence, but the active rejection implied on the part
of the man clothed in his ordinary clothing (vv. 11, 12). Both call
and investiture have been here throughout pure graces, which rendered
possible, and which invited but did not force, an acceptance.[149]

The second Parable describes the “Householder” who hired labourers
for his vineyard at the first, third, sixth, ninth, and even eleventh
hour,--each and all of them for a penny a day; who actually pays out
to them, at the end of the day, this one identical pay; and who,
to the labourer of the first shift who complains, “These last have
wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us who have
borne the burden and heat of the day,” declares, “Friend, I do thee
no wrong: didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take thine own
and go thy way: I will give to this last even as unto thee. Is it not
lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil (art
thou envious) because I am good” (because I choose to be bountiful)?
Matt. xx, 1-15. Here again the overflowing generosity of God’s grace
is brought home to us, as operating according to other standards
than those of ordinary daily life: nor is this operation unjust, for
the Householder paid their due to the first set of workers, whilst
rewarding, far above their worth, those poor labourers of the last
hour. But, as Jülicher well points out, “we should not pedantically
insist upon finding here a doctrine of the strict equality of souls in
the Beyond--a doctrine contradicted by other declarations of Jesus.
Only the _claim_ of single groups of souls to preferential treatment is
combated here …: a certain fundamental religious disposition is to be
awakened.” And, as Bugge rightly notes, “the great supreme conception
which lies at the bottom of the parable has, parablewise, remained here
unnamed: Paul has found the expressive term for it,--‘Grace.’”[150]

And we get corresponding, increasingly spiritual interpretations with
regard to man’s action and man’s merit. First, all ostentation in the
doing of the deed cancels all reward in the Beyond; so, in the case
of each of the three branches of “Justice.”[151] And then the worker
is to be satisfied, day by day, with that day’s pay and sustenance:
“Give us this day our daily bread,” every soul is to pray; the divine
Householder will say, “Didst thou not agree with me for a penny a day?
Take thine own and go thy way.” And even “when ye have done all that
has been commanded you, say ‘we are unprofitable servants, we have but
done what we were bound to do.’” They are invited to look away from
self, to “seek first the Kingdom and His Justice,” and then “all these
things,” their very necessaries for earthly life, “shall be added unto
you.” Indeed it is the boundlessly generous self-communicativeness of
God Himself which is to be His disciples’ deliberate ideal, “be ye
perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; and the production of
this likeness within themselves is to be the ultimate end and crown
of their most heroic, most costly acts: “love your enemies, and pray
for those that persecute you: that you may become the sons of your
Father who is in Heaven, who maketh His sun to rise upon the evil and
the good, and who raineth upon the just and the unjust.” And the more
there is of such self-oblivious love, the more will even the gravest
sins be entirely blotted out, and the more rapid will be the full
sanctification of the soul, as Our Lord solemnly declares concerning
the sinful woman in St. Luke, “her many sins are forgiven her, because
she hath loved much.”[152]

In all this matter it is St. Luke’s Gospel which is specially
interesting as showing, so to speak, side by side, an increased
Rabbinical-like preciseness of balance between work and reward, and
yet the adoption, doubtlessly under Pauline influence, of St. Paul’s
central term in lieu of the old Jewish terminology. For, in one of its
curious so-called “Ebjonite” passages, this Gospel works up the Parable
of the Talents, with its only approximate relation between the deeds
and their rewards (Matt. xxv, 14-30), into the Parable of the Pounds
(Luke xix, 12-27), with its mathematically symmetrical interdependence
between the quantities of the merit and those of this merit’s reward:
the man who makes ten pounds is placed over ten cities, and he who
makes five, over five. And, on the other hand, in a Lukan equivalent
for part of the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew’s “reward” is replaced
by “grace”: “If ye love them that love you, what grace (χάρις) have
you? and if ye do good to those that do you good, what grace have
you?”[153]

(2) St. Paul indeed it is who, in the specially characteristic portions
of his teaching, unfolds, by means of a partly original terminology,
the deepest motives and implications of Our Lord’s own divinely
deep sayings and doings, and never wearies of insisting upon the
Grace-character of the soul’s call and salvation,--the Free Mercy, the
Pure Love which God shows to us, and the sheer dependence and complete
self-donation, the pure love which we owe to Him, and which, at the
soul’s best, it can and does give Him.

It is true that in the contrasting, the traditional layer of his
teaching, we find the old Jewish terminology still intact: “God will
render unto every man according to his works”; “it behoves us to
appear before the Judgment-seat of Christ, that everyone … may receive
according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad.”[154]
Indeed it is precisely in St. Paul’s pages that we find the two most
difficult and, at first sight, least spiritual sayings concerning this
matter to be discovered in the whole New Testament: “If in this life
only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most miserable.”
And: “If the dead do not rise … let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die.”[155] But these two passages must doubtless be taken partly
as arguments adapted to the dispositions of his hearers,--the “Let us
eat and drink” conclusion is given in the words of a current Heathen
Greek proverb,--and, still more, as expressions not so much of a
formal doctrine as of a mood, of one out of the many intense, mutually
supplementary and corrective moods of that rich nature.

According to his own deepest, most deliberate, and most systematic
teaching, it is the life of Christ, the living Christ, energizing even
now within the faithful soul, that constitutes both the primary source
and the ultimate motive of Christian sanctity. “I am crucified with
Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” And
through this divine-human life within us “we faint not; but though our
outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” Indeed
the Lord Himself said to him: “My grace is sufficient for thee; for
power is made perfect in infirmity”; and hence he, Paul, could declare:
“Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of
Christ may dwell in me.” And thus, with Christ living within him, he
can exclaim: “If God be for us, who shall be against us?… Who shall
separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or peril, or
the sword?… In all these things we are more than conquerors, through
him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life,
nor things present nor things to come … shall be able to separate us
from the love of God.” “Whether we live, or whether we die, we are
the Lord’s.”[156] We thus get here a reinsistence upon, and a further
deepening of, perhaps the profoundest utterance of the whole Old
Testament: “What have I in Heaven besides Thee? and besides Thee I seek
nothing upon earth. Even though my flesh and my heart faint, Thou art
my rock and my portion for ever.”[157]

And then that deathless hymn to Pure Love, the thirteenth chapter of
the First Epistle to the Corinthians, not only culminates with the
proclamation that, of all man can hope and wish and will and do, of
all his doings and his graces, “there remain these three, Faith, Hope,
Love, (Charity): but the greatest of these is Love (Charity).” But
the Love that has this primacy is Pure Love, for “it seeketh not its
own.” And though of this Love alone it is said that “it never passeth
away,” ever persists in the Beyond: yet even here already it can and
does get exercised,--and this, not only without any suppression of
parallel acts of the other virtues, but with these other virtues and
their specific motives now taken over and deepened, each in its special
characteristic, by the supreme virtue and motive of Pure Love: “Love
believeth all things, hopeth all things, beareth all things.”[158] Thus
Faith, Hope, Patience, and all the other virtues, they all remain,
but it is Love that is now the ultimate motive of all their specific
motives. These, his culminating teachings, indicate clearly enough that
virtue’s rewards are regarded by him, ultimately and substantially, as
“the wages of going on and not to die”; or rather that they are, in
their essence, manifestations of that Eternal Life which is already
energizing, within souls that earnestly seek God, even here and now.
This Life, then, however great may be its further expansion and the
soul’s consciousness of possessing it, already holds within itself
sufficient, indeed abundant motives, (in the fulfilment of its own
deepest nature and of its now awakened requirements of harmony,
strength, and peace through self-donation), for giving itself ever more
and more to God.

(3) And with regard to the Joannine teaching, it will be enough for
us to refer back to the texts discussed in the preceding chapter, and
to note how large and specially characteristic is here the current
which insists upon the reward being already, at least inchoatively,
enclosed in the deed itself, and upon this deed being the result and
expression of Eternal Life operating within the faithful soul, even
already, Here and Now. Only the declaration that “perfect love casteth
out fear,” that it does not tolerate fear alongside of itself, 1 John
iv, 18, appears to be contrary to the Pauline doctrine that Perfect
Love, “Love” itself “beareth all things, believeth, hopeth, endureth
all things,” 1 Cor. xiii, 7. Love then can animate other virtues: why
not then a holy fear? But this Joannine saying seems in fact modelled
upon St. Paul’s quotation and use of a passage from the Septuagint:
“Cast out the bondwoman (the slave-servant) and her son, for the son
of the bondwoman shall not be heir together with the son of the free,”
Gal. iv, 30; and hence this saying will not exclude “children of the
free-woman,”--a holy fear as well as faith, hope, patience,--but
only “children of the slave-woman,” superstition, presumption,
weakmindedness, and slavish fear.


2. _The “Pure Love” controversy._

In turning now to the controversy as to, Pure Love (1694-1699) and its
assured results, we shall have again to distinguish carefully between
the lives and intentions of the writers who were censured, and the
doctrines, analytic or systematic, taught or implied by them, which
were condemned. This distinction is easier in this case than in that of
Quietism, for the chief writer concerned here is Fénelon, as to whose
pure and spiritual character and deeply Catholic intentions there never
has been any serious doubt.

But in this instance we have to make a further distinction--viz.
between the objective drift of at least part of his _Explication des
Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure_, published in 1697, and
especially the twenty-three propositions extracted from it which
were condemned by Pope Innocent XII in 1699; and the teaching which
he increasingly clarified and improved in his numerous apologetic
writings against Bossuet and other opponents in this memorable
controversy--especially in his Latin writings, intended for
transmission to the Pope, and written as late as 1710 and 1712.[159]
It is certain that Bishops and theologians who opposed his _Maximes_
were found warmly endorsing such pieces as his wonderfully clear and
sober _Première Réponse aux Difficultés de M. l’Evêque de Chartres_.
It is these pieces, comprising also his remarkably rich _Instruction
Pastorale_, his admirably penetrating _Lettre sur l’Oraison Passive_
and _Lettre sur la Charité_, and his extraordinarily compact and
balanced Second Epistle to Pope Clement XI, 1712 (where all the
censured ambiguities and expressions are carefully avoided), and which
alone among Fénelon’s writings shall be accepted in what follows.[160]
Indeed even the earlier of these writings fail in but one thing--in
justifying the actual text of the condemned book, as distinguished
from the intentions of its writer. Bishop Hedley sums up the real
position with the treble authority of a spiritually trained Monk,
of a practised theological writer, and of a Catholic Bishop of long
experience: “The doctrine intended by Fénelon, in his _Maximes des
Saints_, and as explained by him during his controversy with Bossuet,
has never been censured, although the opposite party laboured hard for
its condemnation. Fifteen years after the condemnation of his book, we
find him re-stating to Pope Clement XI (who, as Cardinal, had drawn up
the Brief of his condemnations), in careful scholastic language the
doctrine intended by himself, but which he himself had misstated in his
popular treatise. As there were errors, the other side, whatever the
crudity or novelty of some of its contentions, whatever its motives or
methods--and some of them were far from creditable--was sure in the end
to succeed. And it is well that it should have succeeded as far as it
did succeed.”[161]

In any case, we shall have to beware of considering Bossuet’s
contentions as to the specific character of Charity, Love, and as to
the possibility, for man here below, of single acts of pure love, to
be representative of the ordinary Catholic teaching either before or
since the condemnation. On both these fundamental points Fénelon’s
positions are demonstrably, and indeed have been generally admitted to
be, a mere restatement of that teaching, as is shown, for instance, in
the Jesuit Father Deharbe’s solid and sober, thoroughly traditional and
highly authorized essay: _Die vollkommene Liebe Gottes … dargestellt
nach der Lehre des h. Thomas von Aquin_, Regensburg, 1856. It is
this most useful treatise and the admirable _Analyse Raisonnée de la
Controverse du Quiétisme_ of the Abbé Gosselin,[162] (which has already
much helped me in the preceding section), that have been my chief aids
in my careful study, back through Bossuet and Fénelon, to St. Thomas
and his chief commentators, Sylvius, who died in 1649, and Cardinal
Cajetan, who died in 1534, and to the other chief authorities beyond
them.--I group the main points, which alone need concern us here, under
three heads: the specific Nature of Pure Love; single Acts of Pure
Love; a State of Pure Love.

(1) Now as to the specific Nature of Charity, or Pure, Perfect Love,
St. Thomas tells us: “One Kind of Love is perfect, the other kind is
imperfect. Perfect Love is that wherewith a man is loved for his own
sake: as, for instance, when some one wishes well to another person,
for that other person’s sake, in the manner in which a man loves his
friend. Imperfect love is the love wherewith a man loves something,
not for its own sake, but in order that this good thing may accrue to
himself,--in the manner in which a man loves a thing that he covets.
Now the former kind of love pertains to Charity, which clings to God
for His own sake, whereas it is Hope that pertains to the second
kind of love, since he who hopes aims at obtaining something for
himself.”[163] And Cardinal Cajetan explains that this wishing well to
God, “this good that we can will God to have, is double. The good that
is in Him, that (strictly speaking) is God Himself,--we can, by Love,
will Him to have it, when we find our delight in God being what He is.
And the good that is but referred to God,--His honour and Kingdom and
the Obedience we owe him,--this we can will, not only by finding our
pleasure in it, but by labouring at its maintenance and increase with
all our might.”[164]

And, says St. Thomas, such Perfect Love alone is Love in its strict
sense and “the most excellent of all the virtues”: for “ever that which
exists for its own sake is greater than that which exists in view of
something else. Now Faith and Hope attain indeed to God, yet as the
source from which there accrue to us the knowledge of the Truth and
the acquisition of the Good; whilst Love attains to God Himself, with
a view to abide in Him, and not that some advantage may accrue to us
from Him.” And perhaps still more clearly: “ When a man loves something
so as to covet it, he apprehends it as something pertaining to his
own well-being. The lover here stands towards the object beloved, as
towards something which is his property.”[165] And note how, although
he teaches that whereas “the beatitude of man, as regards its cause
and its object, is something increate,” _i.e._ God Himself, “the
essence of the beatitude itself is something created,” for “men are
rendered blessed by participation, and this participation in beatitude
is something created”: yet he is careful to explain some of his more
incidental passages, in which he speaks of this essence of beatitude
as itself man’s end, by the _ex professo_ declaration: “God” alone “is
man’s ultimate end, and beatitude is only as it were an end before the
very end, an end in immediate proximity to the ultimate end.”[166]

(2) And next, as to the possibility, actual occurrence and
desirableness of single Acts of such Pure Love, even here below:
all this is assumed as a matter of course throughout St. Thomas’s
_ex professo_ teaching on the matter. For throughout the passages
concerning the Nature of Pure Love he is not exclusively, indeed not
even primarily, busy with man’s acts in the future life, but with the
respective characteristics of man’s various acts as executed and as
analyzable, more or less perfectly, already here below. And nowhere
does he warn us against concluding, from his reiterated insistence upon
the essential characteristics of Pure Love, that such love cannot, as
a matter of fact, be practised, at least in single acts, here below at
all. Hence it is clear that, according to him, the soul as it advances
in perfection will--alongside of acts of supernatural Faith, Hope,
Fear, etc. (and the production of such acts will never cease), produce
more and more acts of Pure Love: not necessarily more, as compared
with the other kinds of contemporary acts, but certainly more as
compared with its former acts of the same character.

But there is a further, profoundly and delicately experienced
doctrine. Not only can Pure Love be exercised in single and simple
acts, alongside of single and simple acts of other kinds of virtues,
supernatural or otherwise: but Pure Love can itself come to command
or to inform acts which in themselves bear, and will now bear in
increased degree, the characteristics of the other kinds of acts. St.
Thomas tells us, with admirable clearness: “An act can be derived from
Charity in one of two ways. In the first way, the act is elicited
by Charity itself, and such a virtuous act requires no other virtue
beside Charity,--as in the case of loving the Good, rejoicing in it,
and mourning over its opposite. In the second way, an act proceeds
from Charity in the sense of being commanded by it: and in this
manner,--since Charity” has the full range of and “commands all the
virtues, as ordering them (each and all) to their (ultimate) end,--an
act can proceed from Charity whilst nevertheless belonging to any other
special virtue.” And he assures us that: “The merit of eternal life,”
“the fountain-head of meriting,” “pertains primarily to, consists in
Charity, and pertains to and consists in other kinds of supernatural
acts in only a secondary manner,--that is, only in so far as these acts
are commanded or informed by Charity” or Pure Love.[167]

Let us take some instances of such two-fold manifestations of identical
motives and virtues, according as these motives and virtues operate
in simple co-ordination, or within a compound and organic system. In
the scholar’s life, Greek and Latin and Hebrew may be acquired, each
simply for its own sake and each alongside of the other; or they can be
acquired, from the immediate motive indeed of knowing each in its own
specific nature as thoroughly as possible, yet with the ultimate, ever
more and more conscious and all-penetrating, motive of thus acquiring
means and materials for the science of language, or for the study of
philosophy, or for research into early phases of the Jewish-Christian
religion. In the family life, a man, woman, or child can live for
himself or herself, and then for his or her other immediate relatives,
each taken as separate alongside of the other, or he or she may get
more and more dominated by the conception and claims of the family as
an organic whole, and may end by working largely, even with respect
to himself, as but for so many constituents of that larger organism
in which alone each part can attain its fullest significance. And
especially a young mother can live for her own health and joys, and
then, alongside of these, for those of her child, or she can get to the
point of sustaining her own physical health and her mental hopes and
will to live as so many means and conditions for feeding and fostering
the claimful body and soul of her child.

So again, in the creatively artistic life, we can have a Dante writing
prose and poetry and painting a picture, and a Rafael painting
pictures and writing sonnets; or we can have Wagner bringing all his
activities of scholar, poet, painter, musician, stage-manager,--each
retaining, and indeed indefinitely increasing, its specific character
and capabilities,--to contribute, by endless mutual stimulation and
interaction, to something other and greater than any one of them
individually or even than the simple addition of them all,--to a great
Music-Drama and multiform yet intensely unified image of life itself.
And an organist can draw out, as he plays, the _Vox Humana_ stop, and
then another and another limitedly efficacious organ-stop, whilst each
new-comer takes the place of its predecessor or a place beside it; or
he can draw out the _Grand Jeu_ stop, which sets all the other stops
to work in endless interaction, with itself permeating and organizing
the whole. We thus, in these and countless other cases, and in every
variety of degree within each case, get two kinds of variety, what we
may call the simple and the compound diversification. And everywhere
we can find that the richest variety not only can co-exist with, but
that it requires and is required by, indeed that it is a necessary
constituent and occasion of, the deepest and most delicate unity.[168]

(3) And finally, as to a State of Pure Love. Only here do we reach the
class of questions to which the condemnations of Fénelon really apply.

We shall do well to begin by bearing in mind the very ancient,
practically unbroken, very orthodox Christian discrimination of
faithful souls,--sometimes into the two classes of Mercenaries (or
Slaves) and Friends or Children, the latter of whom the great Clement
of Alexandria, who died about A.D. 215, called “Gnostics,” “Gnosis”
being his term for perfection (this scheme is the one to which
Catherine’s life and teaching conform); or into the three classes
of Servants (Slaves); Mercenaries; and Friends (or Children), as is
already worked out with full explicitness by Saints Basil, Gregory
of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa, who died in the years 379, 389,
and 395 (?) respectively. Now Clement places the Mercenary on the
left of the Sanctuary, but the “Gnostic” on the right; and, whilst
declaring that the former “are those who, by means of renouncing things
perishable, hope to receive the goods of incorruption in exchange,”
he demands of the “Gnostic” that “he approach the saving word neither
from the fear of punishment, nor from the motive of reward, but simply
because He is good.”[169] And St. Basil, echoed in this by his two
contemporaries, teaches that, “We obey God and avoid vices, from the
fear of punishment, and in that case we take on the resemblance of
Slaves. Or we keep the precepts, because of the utility that we derive
from the recompense, thus resembling Mercenaries. Or finally, from
love of Him who has given us the law, we obey with joy at having been
judged worthy of serving so great and good a God, and thus we imitate
the affection of Children towards their parents.”[170] And, in the case
of all these Fathers, it is clear that, not only single acts, but whole
states of soul and life are meant.

But the increased fineness in the analysis of interior experiences
and dispositions has since then required, and the Church formulations
have most wisely demanded, that these three classes be not so sharply
distinguished as to make any one soul seem exclusively and unchangeably
to pertain to any one of them; and, still more, that these three
divisions be taken to represent, even where and whilst they are most
completely realized, only the predominant character of the majority of
the acts constituting the respective state of soul. For it is clear
that not only is there, and can there be, no such thing, on earth at
least, as a state composed of one unrepeated act; but there is no such
thing as a condition of soul made up solely of acts of “simple” Pure
Love, or even of supernatural acts of all sorts commanded throughout
by Charity, or indeed solely of supernatural acts, both simple and
commanded. The “One-act” state is a chimera; the state of “simple”
acts of Pure Love alone would, if possible, involve the neglect of
numberless other virtues and duties; and the last two states indeed
highly desirable, but it would be fanaticism to think we could
completely attain to them here below.

Yet there is nothing in any Church-censure to prevent, and there is
much in the teaching and life of countless saints to invite, our
holding the possibility, hence the working ideal and standard, for even
here below, of a state in which two kinds of acts, which are still
good in their degree, would be in a considerable minority: acts of
merely natural, unspiritualized hope, fear, desire, etc.; and acts of
supernatural hope, fear, desire, etc., in so far as not commanded by
Charity. For even in this state not fully deliberate venial sins would
occasionally be committed, far more would a certain number of acts
of an unspiritualized, unsupernatural kind occur. And the necessary
variety among the supernatural acts would in nowise be impaired,--it
would indeed be greatly stimulated, by Pure Love being now, for the
most part, the ultimate motive of their exercise.

Sylvius, in his highly authoritative commentary on St. Thomas, puts the
matter admirably: “We may not love God in view of reward in suchwise
as to make eternal life the true and ultimate end of our love, or to
love God because of it, so that without the reward we would not love
Him … We must love God with reference to the eternal reward in suchwise
that we put forth indeed both love and good works in view of such
beatitude,--in so far as the latter is the end proposed to these works
by God Himself; yet that we subordinate this our beatitude to the love
of God as the true and ultimate end,” so that “if we had no beatitude
to expect at all, we should nevertheless still love Him and execute
good works for His own sake alone. In this manner we shall first love
God above all things and for His own sake; and we shall next keep the
eternal reward before us, for the sake of God and of His honour.”[171]
A man in these dispositions would still hope, and desire, and fear,
and regret, and strive for, and aspire to conditions, things, persons
both of earth and of the beyond, both for himself and for others,
both for time and for eternity: but all this, for the most part, from
the ultimate motive, penetrating, deepening, unifying all the other
motives,--of the love of Love, Christ, Spirit, God.

Any hesitation to accept the reality or possibility of such a state
cannot, then, be based upon such acceptance involving any kind of
Quietism, but simply on the admittedly great elevation of such a
condition. Yet this latter objection seems to be sufficiently met if
we continuously insist that even such a state neither exempts souls
from the commission of (more or less deliberate) venial sin; nor is
ever entirely equable; nor is incapable of being completely lost; nor,
as we have just contended, is ever without more or less numerous acts
of an unsupernaturalized kind, and still less without acts of the
supernatural virtues other than Love and unprompted by Love.

And all fear of fanaticism will be finally removed by a further most
necessary and grandly enlarging insistence upon the Mercenaries and
even the Servants having passing moments, and producing varyingly
numerous single acts of, Pure Love and of the other supernatural
virtues prompted by Pure Love. All souls in a state of Grace throughout
God’s wide wide world,--every constituent, however slight and recent,
of the great soul of the Church throughout every sex, age, race, clime,
and external organization, would thus have some touches, some at least
incidental beginnings of Pure Love, and of the other supernatural
virtues prompted by Pure Love. All souls would thus, in proportion to
their degree of grace and of fidelity, have some of those touches; and
the progress of all would consist in the degree to which that variety
of acts would become informed and commanded by the supreme motive of
all motives, Pure and Perfect Love.[172]

And with such an Ideal, required by fundamental Catholic positions,
ever increasingly actuating the soul and binding it to all souls
beneath, around, above it, what there is of truth in the savage
attacks of Spinoza and of Kant and of such recent writers as A.
E. Taylor,[173] upon the supposed hypocritical self-seeking in the
practice and temper of average Christians, would lose all its force.


3. _Cognate Problems._

Three much-discussed cognate matters require some elucidation here.
They answer to the questions: Does reference to the self, as for
instance in acts of gratitude and thanksgiving, prevent an act from
being one of Pure Love? Is the pleasurableness, normally ever attached
and subsequent to all virtuous acts, to be regarded as part of the
reward from which Pure Love abstracts? And finally are, I will not say
any technically ecstatic or other in part psycho-physical peculiarities
and manifestations, but even active Contemplation or the simple Prayer
of Quiet, necessary conditions or expressions of a state of Pure
Love,--understood in the sense explained above?

(1) As to reference to the self, it is highly important to distinguish
between acts of Pure Love, and attempts, by means of the maximum
possible degree of abstraction, to apprehend the absolute character
and being of God. For these two things have no necessary connection,
and yet they have been frequently confounded. St. Teresa’s noble
confession of past error, and consequent doubly valuable, amended
teaching is perhaps the most classical pronouncement extant upon this
profoundly important point.[174] The contingent, spacial and temporal,
manifestations and communications of God, above all as we have them in
the life of Our Lord and in those who have come nearest to Him, but
also, in their several degrees and forms, in the lives of each one of
us: all these, in their sacred, awakening and healing, particularity
and closeness of contact, can and should be occasions and materials for
the most perfect, for the purest Love.

Indeed it is well never to forget that nothing, and least of all God,
the deepest of all the realities, is known to us at all, except in and
by means of its relation to our own self or to our fellow-creatures.
Hence if Love were Pure only in proportion as it could be based upon
our apprehension of God as independent of all relation to ourselves,
Pure Love would be simply impossible for us.--But, in truth, such a
conception would, in addition, be false in itself: it would imply that
the whole great Incarnation-fact and -doctrine,--the whole of that
great root of all religion, the certainty that it is because God has
first loved us that we can love Him, that He is a self-revealing God,
and One whom we can know and reach because “in Him we live and move
and have our being”--was taking us, not towards, but away from, our
true goal. There are, surely, few sadder and, at bottom, more deeply
uncreaturely, unchristian attitudes, than that which would seek or
measure perfection in and by the greatest possible abstraction from all
those touching contingencies which God Himself has vouchsafed to our
nature,--a nature formed by Himself to require such plentiful contact
with the historical and visible.--And if God’s pure love for us can
and does manifest itself in such contingent acts, then our love can
and should become and manifest itself purer and purer by means, not
only of the prayer of formless abstraction and expectation, but also
by the contemplation of these contingencies and by the production of
analogously contingent acts. And if so, then certainly gratitude, in so
far as it truly deserves the name, can and does belong to Pure Love,
for the very characteristic of such gratitude consists in a desire to
give and not to receive.[175]

Not, then, the degree of disoccupation with the Contingent, even
of the contingent of our own life, but the degree of freedom from
self-seeking, and of the harmonization and subordination of all these
contingencies in and under the supreme motive of the Pure Love and
service of God in man and of man in God, is the standard and test of
Christian perfection.

(2) As to the pleasurableness which, in normal psychic conditions, more
or less immediately accompanies or follows the virtuous acts of the
soul, the realizations of its own deeper and deepest ideals, we should
note that, in its earthly degree and form, it is not included in what
theologians mean by the “rewards” of virtuous action. And in this they
are thoroughly self-consistent, for they adhere, I think with practical
unanimity, to Catherine’s doctrine that these immediate consequences
of virtuous acts are not to be considered a matter of positive and,
as it were, separate divine institution,--as something which, given
the fundamental character of man’s spiritual nature, might have been
otherwise; but as what,--given the immutable nature of God and of the
image at nature in His creature, man,--follows from an intrinsic,
quite spontaneous necessity.--Hence, at this point especially, would
it be foolish and fanatical, because contrary to the immanental nature
of things, and to the right interplay of the elemental forces of all
life, to attempt the suppression even of the several actual irruptions
of such pleasure, and still more of the source and recurrence of this
delectation. Fortunately success is here as impossible as it would be
undesirable,--as much so as, on a lower plane, would be the suppression
of the pleasure concomitant with the necessary kinds and degrees of
eating. Indeed, it is clear, upon reflection that unless a man (at
least implicitly) accepts and (indirectly) wills that spiritual or
physical pleasure, he cannot profitably eat his food or love his God.

But from this in nowise follows what Bossuet tried so hard to
prove,--that what is thus necessarily present in man, as a psychical or
physical prompting and satisfaction, must also of necessity be willed
by him, directly and as his determining reason and justification. In
turning to eat, man cannot help feeling a psychic pleasure of an all
but purely physical kind; and, if he is wise, he will make no attempt
to meddle with this feeling. But he can either deliberately will, as
his action’s object, that pleasure which is thus inevitably incident
to the act, and the more he does so, the more simply greedy and
sensual he will become; or he can directly will, as his determining
end, that sustenance of life and strength for his work and spiritual
growth, which is the justification and ultimate reason of eating (the
_rationale_ of that very pleasure so wisely attached by nature, as a
stimulus, to a process so necessary to the very highest objects), and
the more he does so, the more manly and spiritual he will grow.

And so with every one of man’s wondrously manifold and different
physical, psychical, spiritual requirements and actions, within
the wide range of his right nature and ideals. There is not one of
them,--not the most purely physical-seeming of these acts,--which he
cannot ennoble and spiritualize by, as it were, meeting it,--by willing
it, more and more, because of its rational end and justification.
And there is not one of them,--not an act which, judged simply by
its direct subject-matter and by the soul’s faculties immediately
engaged, would be the most purely mental and religious of acts,--which
man cannot degrade and de-spiritualize, by, as it were, following
it, by willing it more and more because of its psychical attraction
and pleasurable concomitance alone. For, in the former case, the
act, however gross may seem its material, is made the occasion and
instrument of spiritual character-building and of the constitution
of liberty; in the latter case, the act, however ethereal its body,
is but the occasion and means of the soul’s dispersion in the mere
phenomenal flux of the surface of existence, and of its subjection to
the determinism which obtains here.[176]

Catherine’s whole convert life is one long series of the most striking
examples of an heroic delicacy in self-knowledge and self-fighting in
this matter: a delicacy which, as to the degree of its possibility and
desirableness in any particular soul, is, however, peculiarly dependent
upon that soul’s special circumstances, temperament, _attrait_, and
degree of perfection reached and to be reached.

(3) And, finally, as to the relations between the Contemplative forms
of Prayer, and Acts and variously complete States of Pure Love; and,
again, of such Prayer and Love, and Abnormal or Miraculous conditions:
it is clear that, if there is no true Contemplation without much Pure
Love, there can be much Pure Love without Contemplation.

Abbé Gosselin well sums up the ordinary Catholic teaching. “Meditation
consists of discursive acts which are easily distinguished from each
other, both because of the kind of strain and shock with which they
are produced, and because of the diversity of their objects. It is
the ordinary foundation of the interior life and the ordinary prayer
of beginners, whose imperfect love requires to be thus excited and
sustained by distinct and reflective acts. Contemplation consists,
strictly speaking, in direct ‘non-reflex’ acts,--acts so simple and
peaceful as to have nothing salient by which the soul could distinguish
one from the other. It is called by the Mystical Saints ‘a simple and
loving look,’ as discriminating it from meditation and the latter’s
many methodic and discursive acts, and as limiting it to a simple and
loving consideration and view of God and of divine things, certified
and rendered present to the soul by faith. It is the ordinary prayer
of perfect souls, or at least of those that have already made much
progress in the divine love. For the more purely a soul loves
God, the less it requires to be sustained by distinct, reflective
acts; reasoning becomes a fatigue and an embarrassment to it in its
prayer--it longs but to love and to contemplate the object of its love.”

Or as Fénelon puts it: “‘Passivity,’ ‘Action,’ is not precisely itself
Pure Love, but is the mode in which Pure Love operates.… ‘Passivity,’
‘Action,’ is not precisely the purity of Love, but is the effect of
that purity.”[177] Yet, as M. Gosselin adds, “It must be admitted that
without Contemplation the soul can arrive at a very high perfection;
and that the most discursive meditation, and hence still more all
prayer as it becomes effective, often includes certain direct acts
which form an admixture and beginning of contemplation.”[178]

And as to any supposed necessary relations between the very highest
contemplation and the most complete state of Pure Love on the one hand,
and anything abnormal or miraculous on the other hand, Fénelon, in
this point remarkably more sober than Bossuet, well sums up the most
authoritative and classical Church-teaching on the matter: “‘Passive’
Contemplation is but Pure Contemplation: ‘Active’ Contemplation
being one which is still mixed with hurried and discursive acts.
When Contemplation has ceased to have any remnant of this hurry, of
this ‘activity,’ it is entirely ‘Passive,’ that is, peaceful, in
its acts.” “This free and loving look of the soul means acts of the
understanding,--for it is a look; and acts of the will, for the look
is a loving one; and acts produced by free-will, without any strict
necessity, for the look is a free look.” “We should not compare
Passive Contemplation,” as did Bossuet, “to prophecy, or to the gift
of tongues or of miracles; nor may we say that this mystical state
consists principally in something wrought by God within us without
our co-operation, and where, consequently, there neither is nor can
be any merit. We must, on the contrary, to speak correctly, say that
the substance of such Passive Prayer, taken in its specific acts,
is free, meritorious, and operated within us by a grace that acts
together with us.” “It is the attraction to the acts which the soul
now produces which, as by a secondary and counter-effect, occasions
a quasi-incapacity for those acts which it does not produce. Now
this attraction is not of a kind to deprive the soul of the use of
its free-will: we see this from the nature of the acts which this
attraction causes the soul to produce. Whence I conclude that this
same attraction does not, again, deprive it of its liberty with regard
to the acts which it prevents. The attraction but prevents the latter
in the way it produces the other,--by an efficacious influence that
involves no sheer necessity.” “‘Passivity,’ if it comes from God, ever
leaves the soul fully free for the exercise of the distinct virtues
demanded by God in the Gospel; the _attrait_ is truly divine only
in so far as it draws the soul on to the perfect fulfilment of the
evangelical counsels and promises concerning all the virtues.” “The
inspiration of the Passive state is but an habitual inspiration for
the interior acts of evangelical piety. It renders the Passive soul
neither infallible nor impeccable, nor independent of the Church even
for its interior direction, nor exempt from the obligation of meriting
and growing in virtue.… The inspiration of the passive soul differs
from that of actively just souls only in being purer; that is, more
exempt from all natural self-seeking, more full, more simple, more
continuous, and more developed at each moment. We have, throughout,
ever one and the same inspiration, which but grows in perfection and
purity in proportion as the soul renounces itself more, and becomes
more sensitive to the divine impressions.”[179]

Thus we get an impressive, simple and yet varied, conception of
spirituality, in which a real continuity, and a power and obligation of
mutual understanding and aid underlies all the changes of degree and
form, from first to last. For from first to last there are different
degrees, but of the same supernatural grace acting in and upon the same
human nature responsive in different degrees and ways. From first to
last there is, necessarily and at every step, the Supernatural: at no
point is there any necessary presence of, or essential connection with,
the Miraculous or the Abnormal.


4. _Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant._

Theology and Philosophy have not ceased to occupy themselves, at least
indirectly, with the substance of these great questions, since they
furnished the subject-matter to Bossuet and Fénelon in their memorable
controversy; somewhat over-subtle although some of it was in its
earlier phases, owing to Fénelon’s chivalrous anxiety to defend, as far
as possible, the very expressions, often so nebulous and shifting, of
his cousin, Madame Guyon.

(1) Indeed about twenty years before that controversy, Spinoza had,
in his _Theologico-Political Treatise_, and then, more impressively
still, in his _Ethics_, made a brilliant assault upon all, especially
all religious, self-seeking. Also on this point these writings showed
that strange, pathetic combination of grandly religious intuitions
and instincts with a Naturalistic system which, logically, leaves no
room for those deepest requirements of that great soul; and here they
revealed, in addition, considerable injustice towards the, doubtless
very mixed and imperfect, motives of average humanity.

True intuition speaks in his _Treatise_ (published in 1670) in the
words: “Since the love of God is man’s supreme beatitude and the final
end and scope of all human actions: it follows that only that man
conforms to the divine law, who strives to love God, not from fear of
punishment, nor from the love of some other thing, such as delights,
fame, and so forth, but from this motive alone, that he knows God, or
that he knows the knowledge and love of God, to be his supreme end.”
But a little further back we learn that “the more we know the things
of Nature, the greater and the more perfect knowledge of God do we
acquire”; a frank application of the pure Pantheism of his reasoned
system.

In his _Ethics_, again, a noble intuition finds voice where he says:
“Even if we did not know our Mind,” our individual soul, “to be
eternal, we should still put Piety and Religion and, in a word, all
those virtues that are to be referred to magnanimity and generosity,
first in our esteem.” But he is doubtless excessive in his picturing of
the downright, systematic immorality of attitude of ordinary men--the
“slaves” and “mercenaries.” “Unless this hope of laying aside the
burdens of Piety and Religion after death and of receiving the price
of their service, and this fear of being punished by dire punishments
after death were in men, and if they, contrariwise, believed that
their minds would perish with their bodies: they would let themselves
go to their natural inclination and would decide to rule all their
actions according to their lust.” And he is doubtlessly, though nobly,
excessive in his contrary ideal: “He who loves God cannot strive that
God shall love him in return,”--an ideal which is, however, certainly
in part determined by his philosophy, which knows no ultimate abiding
personality or consciousness either in God or man.

Yet, once again, we have him at his inspiring best when,
Catherine-like, he tells us: “The supreme Good of those who pursue
virtue is common to them all, and all are equally able to rejoice in
it”; and “this love towards God is incapable of being stained by the
passions of envy and bitterness, but is increased in proportion as we
figure to ourselves a larger number of men joined to God by the same
bonds of love”; when he declares: “we do not enjoy beatitude because we
master our passions; rather, contrariwise, do we master our passions
because we enjoy beatitude”; and when he insists, with no doubt too
indiscriminating, too Jacopone-like, a simplification, upon what,
in its substance, is a profound truth: “the intellectual,” the pure
“love of the soul for God is the very love of God, wherewith God loves
Himself.”[180]

(2) It was, however, the astonishingly circumspect and many-sided
Leibniz who, indefinitely smaller soul though he was, succeeded,
perhaps better than any other modern philosopher, in successfully
combining the divers constitutive elements of the act and state of
Pure Love, when he wrote in 1714: “Since true Pure Love consists in a
state of soul which makes me find pleasure in the perfections and the
felicity of the object loved by me, this love cannot but give us the
greatest pleasure of which we are capable, when God is that object.
And, though this love be disinterested, it already constitutes, even
thus simply by itself, our greatest-good and deepest interest.”

Or, as he wrote in 1698: “Our love of others cannot be separated
from our true good, nor our love of God from our felicity. But it is
equally certain that the consideration of our own particular good, as
distinguished from the pleasure which we taste in seeing the felicity
of another, does not enter into Pure Love.” And earlier still he
had defined the act of loving as “the finding one’s pleasure in the
felicity of another”; and had concluded thence that Love is for man
essentially an enjoyment, although the specific motive of love is not
the pleasure or the particular good of him who loves, but the good or
the felicity of the beloved object.[181]

(3) Yet it is especially Kant who, with his predominant hostility to
all Eudaemonism in Morality and Religion, has, more than all others,
renewed the controversy as to the relations between virtue and piety
on the one hand, and self-seeking motives on the other, and who is
popularly credited with an entirely self-consistent antagonism to even
such a wise and necessary attitude as are the amended positions of
Fénelon and those of Leibniz. And yet I sincerely doubt whether (if
we put aside the question as to the strictly logical consequences of
his Critical Idealism, such as that Idealism appears in its greatest
purity in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, 1781; and if we neglect the
numerous, often grossly unjust, Spinoza-like sallies against the
supposed undiluted mercenariness of ordinary piety, which abound in his
_Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason_, 1793), we could readily
find any explicit pronouncement hopelessly antagonistic to the Catholic
Pure-Love doctrine.

Certainly the position taken up towards this point in that very
pregnant and curious, largely-overlooked little treatise, _The Canon
of Pure Reason_, which (evidently an earlier and complete sketch), has
been inserted by him into his later, larger, but materially altered
scheme of the _Critique_ of 1781, (where it now forms the _Zweite
Hauptstück_ of the _Transcendentale Methodenlehre_, ed. Kehrbach,
Reclam, pp. 603-628), appears to be substantially acceptable.[182]
“Happiness consists in the satisfaction of all our inclinations,
according to their various character, intensity, and duration. The
law of practical action, in so far as it is derived from the motive
of happiness, I call Pragmatic, a Rule of Good Sense; the same law,
in so far as it has for its motive only the becoming worthy of such
happiness, I call Moral, the Moral Law. Now Morality already by itself
constitutes a system, but Happiness does not do so, except in so far as
Happiness is distributed in exact accordance with Morality. But such a
distribution is only possible in the intelligible world,”--the world
beyond phenomena which can be reached by our reason alone--“and under
a wise Originator and Ruler. Such an One, together with life in such a
world--a world which we are obliged to consider as a future one--reason
finds itself forced to assume, or else to look upon the moral laws as
empty phantoms, since the necessary result of these laws,--a result
which that same reason connects with their very idea,--would have to
fall away, if that assumption were to go. Hence every one looks upon
the moral laws as _commandments_, a thing which they could not be,
if they did not conjoin with their rule consequences of _a priori_
appropriateness, and hence if they did not carry with them _promises_
and _threats_. But this too they can do only if they lie within the
compass of a Single Necessary Being, Itself the Supreme Good, Which
alone can render possible such a unity embracing both means and
end.--Happiness alone is, for our reason, far from being the Complete
Good, for reason does not approve of Happiness unless it be united with
the being worthy of Happiness, _i.e._ Moral Rectitude. But Morality
alone, and with it the simple being worthy of happiness, is also far
from the Complete Good. Even if reason, free from any consideration of
any interest of its own, were to put itself in the position of a being
that had to distribute all happiness to others alone, it could not
judge otherwise: for, in the complete idea of practical action, both
points are in essential conjunction, yet in suchwise that it is the
moral disposition which, as condition, first renders possible a sharing
in happiness, and not the prospect of happiness which first gives
an opening to the moral disposition. For, in this latter case, the
disposition would not be moral, and, consequently, would not deserve
that complete happiness to which reason can assign no other limitation
than such as springs from our own immoral attitude of will.”[183]

In his _Foundation of the Metaphysic of Morals_, 1785, the noble
apostrophe to the Good Will no doubt appears formally to proclaim
as possible and desirable a complete human disposition, in which no
considerations of Happiness play any part: “The good will is good,
not through what it effects or produces, not through its utility for
the attainment of any intention or end, but it is good through the
quality of the volition alone; that is, it is good in itself.…” “If,
with its greatest efforts, nothing were to be effected by it, and only
the good will itself were to remain, this bare will would yet shine in
lonely splendour as a jewel,--as something which has its full value in
itself.” But further on he shows us how, after all, “this good will
cannot, then, be the only and the whole good, but still it is the
highest good and the condition for all the rest, even for our desire of
happiness.”[184] Certain exaggerations, which are next developed by
him here, shall be considered in a later chapter.


5. _Four important points._

Here I will but put together, in conclusion, four positions which I
have rejoiced to find in two such utterly, indeed at times recklessly,
independent writers as Professor Georg Simmel of Berlin and Professor
A. E. Taylor.

(1) Dr. Simmel declares, with admirable cogency: “The concept of
religion completely loses in Kant, owing to his rationalistic manner
of discovering in it a mere compound of the moral interest and the
striving after happiness, its most specific and deepest character.
No doubt these two apprehensions are also essential to religion, but
precisely the direction in which Kant conjoins them,--that duty issues
in happiness, is the least characteristic of religion, and is only
determined by his Moralism, which refuses to recognize the striving
after happiness as a valuable motive. The opposite direction appears to
me as far more decisively a part of religion and of its incomparable
force: for we thus find in religion precisely that ideal power, which
makes it the duty of man to win his own salvation. According to the
Kantian Moralism, it is every man’s private affair how he shall meet
his requirement of happiness; and to turn such a private aspiration
into an objective, ideal claim, would be for Kant a contradiction and
abomination. In reality, however, religion itself _requires_ that man
should have a care for his own welfare and beatitude, and in this
consists its incomparable force of attraction.”[185] Let the reader
note how entirely this agrees with, whilst properly safeguarding, the
doctrine of Pure Love: it is the precise position of the best critics
of the unamended Fénelon.

(2) Professor Taylor insists that “it is possible to desire directly
and immediately pleasant experiences which are not my own.… Because
it is _I_ who in every case have the pleasure of the anticipation, it
is assumed that it must be I who am to experience the realization of
the anticipation.” Yet “it is really no more paradoxical that I should
anticipate with pleasure some event which is not to form part of my own
direct sensible experience, than it is that I should find pleasure in
the anticipation at twenty of myself at eighty.” “The austerest saints
will and can mortify themselves as a thing well-pleasing to God.”[186]
In this way the joy of each constituent of the Kingdom of God in the
joys of all the rest, and in the all-pervading joy of God, is seen to
be as possible as it is undoubtedly actual: the problem of the relation
between pleasure and egoism is solved.

(3) And Professor Taylor again insists upon how pleasant experiences,
which do not owe their pleasantness to their relation to a previous
anticipation, are not, properly speaking, good or worthy. It is by
“satisfactions” and not by mere “pleasures” that “even the most
confirmed Hedonist must compute the goodness of a life.… Only when
the pleasant experience includes in itself the realization of an idea
is it truly good.”[187] But, if so, then the experience will be good,
not in proportion as it is unpleasant, as Kant was so prone to imply;
nor directly in proportion as it is pleasant, although pleasantness
will accompany or succeed it, of a finer quality if not of a greater
intensity, according as the idea which it embodies is good: but
directly in proportion to the goodness of that idea. Thus all things
licit, from sense to spirit, will find their place and function in such
acts, and in a life composed of such acts, spirit expressing itself
in terms of sense. And the purification, continuously necessary for
the ever more adequate expression of the one in and by the other, will
be something different from any attempt at suppressing this means of
expression. Thus here again the great Christian Incarnation-Doctrine
appears as the deepest truth, and as the solution of the problem as to
the relations of pleasure and duty.[188]

(4) And finally, as to the ever-present need and importance of a theory
concerning these matters, Professor Taylor points out, not only that
some such theory is necessary to the full human life, but that it must
place an infinite ideal before us: paradox though it may sound, nothing
less is truly practical, for “any end that is to be permanently felt
as worth striving for, must be infinite,” and therefore “in a sense
infinitely remote”; and hence “if indifference to the demand for a
practicable ideal be the mark of a dreamer or a fanatic, contentment
with a finite and practicable ideal is no less undeniably the mark of
an _esprit borné_.”[189]

Here Fénelon has adequately interpreted the permanent and complete
requirements of the religious life and spirit. “You tell me,” he
says to his adversaries, “that ‘Christianity is not a school of
Metaphysicians.’ All Christians cannot, it is true, be Metaphysicians;
but the principal Theologians have great need to be such. It was by a
sublime Metaphysic that St. Augustine soared above the majority of the
other Fathers, who were, for the rest, as fully versed in Scripture
and Tradition. It was by his lofty Metaphysic that St. Gregory of
Nazianzum has merited the distinguishing title of _Theologian_.
It is by Metaphysic that St. Anselm and St. Thomas have been such
great luminaries of the Church. True, the Church is not ‘a school of
Metaphysicians,’ who dispute without docility, as did the ancient sects
of philosophers. Yet she is a school in which St. Paul teaches that
Charity is more perfect than Hope, and in which the holiest Doctors
declare, in accordance with the principles of the Fathers, that Love
is more perfect, precisely because it ‘abides in God, not in view of
any benefit that may accrue to us from so doing.’” “I know well,” he
writes to a friend, “that men misuse the doctrines of Pure Love and
Resignation; I know that there are hypocrites who, under cover of
such noble terms, overthrow the Gospel. Yet it is the worst of all
procedures to attempt the destruction of perfect things, from a fear
that men will make a wrong use of them.” Notwithstanding all misuse of
the doctrine--“the very perfection of Christianity is Pure Love.”[190]




CHAPTER XII

THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES


Moving on now to the questions concerning the After-Life, it
will be convenient to consider them under five heads: the chief
present-day positions and perplexities with regard to belief in
the After-Life in General; the main implications and convictions
inherent to an Eschatology such as Catherine’s; and then the principal
characteristics, difficulties, and helps of her tendencies and
teachings concerning Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And throughout the
Chapter we shall busy ourselves directly only with the After-Life in
the sense of a heightened, or at least an equal, consciousness after
death, as compared to that which existed before death: the belief in
a shrunken state of survival, in non-annihilation, appearing to be as
certainly the universal minimum of belief as such a minimum is not
Immortality.


I. THE CHIEF PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS, PERPLEXITIES, AND REQUIREMENTS WITH
REGARD TO THE AFTER-LIFE IN GENERAL.

Now I take our chief present-day problems, perplexities, and resultant
requirements with regard to the After-Life in general, to fall into
three groups, according as those problems are predominantly Historical,
or Philosophical, or directly Practical and Ethical.


1. _Three Historical Difficulties._

The Historical group now brings very clearly and certainly before
us the striking non-universality, the startling lateness, and
the generally strange fitfulness and apparent unreasonableness
characterizing the earliest stage of belief in the soul’s heightened,
or at least equivalent, consciousness after death.

(1) Now with respect to the Non-Universality of the doctrine, it
is true that, in China, Confucianism is full of care for the dead.
“Throughout the Empire, the authorities are obliged to hold three
annual sacrifices for the refreshment and rest of the souls of the dead
in general.” “It is hardly doubtful that the cultus of Ancestors formed
the chief institution in classical Confucianism, and constituted the
very centre of religion for the people. Even now ancestor-worship is
the only form of religion for which rules, applicable to the various
classes among the Emperor’s subjects, are laid down in the Dynastic
Statutes.” And Professor De Groot, from whom I am quoting, gives an
interesting conspectus of the numberless ways in which the religious
service of the dead penetrates Chinese life.[191]--Yet we hear of
Kong-Tse (Confucius) himself (551-478 B.C.), that, though he insisted
upon the most scrupulous execution of the three hundred rules of the
then extant temple-ceremonial, which were no doubt largely busy with
the dead, and though he said that one should sacrifice to the spirits
as if they were present, he designated, in several of his sayings,
occupation with theological problems as useless: “as long as we do not
know men, how shall we know spirits? As long as we do not understand
life, how should we fathom death?” And to questions relative to the
spirits and the dead, he would give evasive answers.[192] Thus the
founder of the most characteristic of the Chinese religions was without
any clear and consistent conviction on the point in question.

In India we find, for Brahmanic religion, certain unmistakable
Immortality-Doctrines (in the sense of the survival of the soul’s
self-consciousness), expressed in the hymns of the _Rig-Veda_.--But
already, in the philosophizings of the _Upanishads_, we get a
world-soul, and this soul’s exclusive permanence: “to attain to true
unity, the very duality of subject and object is to disappear. The
terms Atman and Brahman here express the true Being which vivifies all
beings and appearances, and with which cognizing man reunites himself
whilst losing his individual existence.”[193]

And if we move on to Buddhism, with its hundreds of millions of
adherents in Burmah, Tibet, China, and Japan, we can learn, from the
classical work of Oldenberg, how interestingly deep down lies the
reason for the long conflict between scholars as to whether Nirvana
is or is not to be taken for the complete extinction of the individual
soul. “Everything, in the Buddhist dogmatic system, is part and parcel
of a circle of Becoming and of Dissolution: all things are but a
Dhamma, a Sankhara; and all Dhamma, all Sankhara are but temporary.…
The Mutable, Conditioned is here thinkable only as conditioned by
another Mutable and Conditioned. If we follow the dialectic consequence
alone, there is no seeing how, according to this system, there can
remain over, when a succession and mutual destruction of things
conditioning and of things conditioned has run its course, anything
but a pure vacuum.” And we have also such a saying of the Buddha as
the following. “Now if, O disciples, the Ego (_atta_) and anything
appertaining to the Ego (_attaniya_) cannot be comprehended with
accuracy and certainty, is not then the faith which declares: ‘This is
the world, and this is the Ego; this shall I become at death,--firm,
constant, eternal, unchangeable,--thus shall I be there, throughout
eternity,’--is not this sheer empty folly?” “How should it not, O
Lord, be sheer empty folly?” answer the disciples. “One who spoke
thus,” is Oldenberg’s weighty comment, “cannot have been far from the
conviction that Nirvana is annihilation. Yet it is understandable how
the very thinkers, who were capable of bearing this consequence, should
have hesitated to raise it to the rank of an official dogma of the
community.… Hence the official doctrine of the Buddhist Church attained
the form, that, on the question of the real existence of the Ego, of
whether or not the perfected saint lives on after death, the exalted
Buddha has taught nothing. Indeed the legally obligatory doctrine of
the old community required of its votaries an explicit renunciation of
all knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of completely
redeemed souls.”

“Buddhism,” so Oldenberg sums up the matter, with, I think, the
substantial adhesion of all present-day competent authorities, “teaches
that there is a way out of the world of created things, out into the
dark Infinite. Does this way lead to new being? or does it lead to
nothingness? Buddhist belief maintains itself on the knife’s edge
of these alternatives. The desire of the heart, as it longs for the
Eternal, is not left without something, and yet the thinking mind is
not given a something that it could grasp and retain. The thought
of the Infinite, the Eternal, could not be present at all, and yet
vanish further away than here, where, a mere breath and on the
point of sinking into sheer nothingness, it threatens to disappear
altogether.”[194] This vast Buddhist community, numbering, perhaps, a
third of the human race, should not, then, be forgotten, when we urge
the contrary instances of the religions of Assyria and Babylonia; of
Egypt; of Greece and Rome; and, above all, of the Jews and Christianity.

Yet it is well to remember that such non-universality of belief is at
least as real, to this very hour, for such a fundamental religious
truth and practice as Monotheism and Monolatry; such purely Ethical
convictions as Monogamy and the Illicitness of Slavery; such a plain
dictate of the universal humanitarian ideal as the illegitimacy
of the application of physical compulsion in matters of religious
conviction; and such directly demonstrable psychical and natural facts
as subconsciousness in the human soul, the sexual character of plants,
and the earth’s rotundity and rotation around the sun. In none of these
cases can we claim more than that the higher, truer doctrine,--that is,
the one which explains and transcends the element of truth contained in
its predecessor and opposite,--is explicitly reached by a part only of
humanity, and is but implied and required by other men, at their best.
Yet this is clearly enough for leaving us free to decide,--reasonably
conclusive evidence for their truth being forthcoming,--in favour of
the views of the minority: since the assumption of an equality of
spiritual and moral insight and advance throughout mankind is as little
based upon fact, as would be the supposition of men’s equal physical
strength or height, or of any other quality or circumstance of their
nature and environment.

(2) The lateness of the doctrine’s appearance, precisely in the cases
where there can be no doubt of its standing for a conviction of an
endless persistence of a heightened consciousness after death,--that
is, amongst the Greeks (and Romans) and the Jews (and Christians),--has
now been well established by critical historical research.

With regard to the Greeks,[195] the matter is particularly plain,
since we can still trace even in Plato, (427 to 347 B.C.), who, next
to Our Lord Himself and to St. Paul, is doubtless the greatest and
most influential teacher of full individual Immortality that the world
has seen, two periods of thought in this matter, and can show that
the first was without any such certain conviction. In his _Apology of
Socrates_, written soon after the execution in 399 B.C., he makes his
great master, close to his end, declare that death would bring to man
either a complete unconsciousness, like to a dreamless sleep, or a
transition into another life,--a life here pictured like to the Homeric
Hades. Both possibilities Socrates made to accept resignedly, in full
reliance on the justice of the Gods, and to look no further; how should
he know what is known to no man?--And this is Plato’s own earlier
teaching. For in the very _Republic_ which, in its chronologically
later constituents, (especially in Book V, 471_c_, to the end of
Book VIII, Book IX, 560_d_ to 588_a_, and Book X up to 608_b_), so
insists upon and develops the truth and importance of Immortality in
the strictest, indeed the sublimest sense: we get, in its earlier
portions, (especially in Book II, 10_c_, to Book V, 460_c_), no trace
of any such conviction. For, in these earlier passages, the Guardians
in the Ideal State are not to consider what may come after death: the
central theme is the manner in which Justice carries with it its own
recompense; and the rewards, that are popularly wont to be placed
before the soul, are referred to ironically,--Socrates is determined to
do without such hopes. In those later portions, on the contrary, there
is the greatest insistence upon the importance of caring, not for this
short life alone, but for the soul’s “whole time” and for what awaits
it after death. And in the still later parts, (as in Books VI and VII),
the sublimest form of Immortality is presupposed as true and actual
throughout. Thus in Greece it is not till about 390-380 B.C., and in
Plato himself not till his middle life, that we get a quite definite
and final doctrine of the Immortality of all souls, and of a blessed
after-existence for every just and holy life here below.

For the survival after the body’s death, indubitably attributed to
the Psyche in the Homeric Poems, is conceived there, throughout,
as a miserably shrunken consciousness, and one which is dependent
for its continuance upon the good offices bestowed by the survivors
upon the corpse and grave. And the translation of the still living
Menelaus to Elysium (Od. IV, 560-568) is probably a later insertion;
belongs to a small class of exceptional cases; implies the writer’s
inability to conceive a heightened consciousness for the soul, after
the soul’s separation from the body; and is based, not upon any virtue
or reward, but upon Menelaus’s family-relationship to Zeus. Ganymede
gets similarly translated because of his physical beauty (II. XX, 232
_seq._).

Hesiod, though later than Homer as a writer, gives us, in his account
of the Five Ages of the World (_Works and Days_, ll. 109-201), some
traces of an Animistic conception of a heightened life of the bodiless
soul beyond the grave,--a conception which had been neglected or
suppressed by Homer, but which had evidently been preserved alive in
the popular religion of, at least, Central Greece. Yet Hesiod knows of
such a life only for the Golden and for the Silver Ages, and for some
miraculous, exceptional cases of the fourth, the Heroic Age: already
in the third, the Bronze Age, and still more emphatically in his own
fifth, the Iron Age, there are no such consolations: nothing but the
shrunken consciousness of the Homeric after-death Psyche is, quite
evidently, felt by him to be the lot of all souls in the hard, iron
present.

The Cultus of the Heroes is already registered in Draco’s Athenian
Laws, in about 620 B.C., as a traditional custom. And these Heroes have
certainly lived at one time as men upon earth, and have become heroes
only after death; their souls, though severed from the body, live a
heightened imperishable life, indeed one that can mightily help men
here below and now,--so at Delphi and at Salamis against the Persians.
Yet here again each case of such an elevation was felt to be a miracle,
an exception incapable of becoming a universal law: not even the germ
of a belief in the Immortality of the soul as such seems to be here.

The Cultus of the Nether-World Deities, of the Departed generally, and,
as the culmination of all this movement, the Eleusinian Mysteries,
must not be conceived as involving or as leading to, any belief in the
ecstatic elevation of the soul, or consciousness of its God-likeness;
and such unending bliss as is secured, is gained by men, not because
they are virtuous and devout, but through their initiation into the
Mysteries. Rhode assures us, rightly I think, that “it remains unproved
that, during the classical period of Greek culture, the belief in
Judges and a Judgment to be held in Hades over the deeds done by men on
earth, had struck root among the people”; Professor Percy Gardner adds
his great authority to the same conclusion.[196] Here again it is Plato
who is the first to take up a clearly and consistently spiritual and
universalistic position.

Indeed it is only in the predominantly neuropathic, indeed largely
immoral and repulsive, forms of the Dionysiac sect and movement, (at
work, perhaps, already in the eighth century B.C. and which leads
on to the formation of the more aristocratic and priestly Orphic
communities) that a demonstrable and direct belief arose in the soul’s
intrinsic God-likeness, or even divinity, and in its immortality,
or even eternity; and that stimulations, materials, and conceptions
were furnished to Greek thought, which are traceable wheresoever it
henceforth inclines to belief in the soul’s intrinsic Immortality.

Yet the leaven spread but slowly into philosophy. For the Ionian
philosophers, and among them Heraclitus, the impressive teacher of
the flux of all things, flourish from about 600 to 430 B.C.; but,
_naïve_ Materialists and Pantheists as they are, they frankly exclude
all survival of individual consciousness after death. The Eleatic
philosophers live between 550 and 450 B.C., and are all busy with _a
priori_ logical constructions of the physical world, conceived as sole
and self-explanatory; and amongst them is Parmenides, the powerful
propounder of the complete identity and immutability of all reality.
Those transcendent spiritual beliefs appear first as part, indeed as
the very foundation, although still rather of a mode of life than of
a formal philosophy, in the teaching and community of Pythagoras, who
seems to have lived about 580 to 490 B.C., and who certainly emigrated
from Asia Minor to Croton in Southern Italy. The soul appears here
as intrinsically immortal, indeed without beginning and without end.
And then Immortality forms one (the mystical) of the two thoroughly
heterogeneous elements of the, otherwise predominantly Ionic and
Materialistic, philosophy of Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily, about
490 to 435 B.C. In both these cases the Dionysiac-Orphic provenance of
the “Immortality”-doctrines is clearly apparent.

And then, among the poets who bridge over the period up to Plato, we
find Pindar, who, alongside of reproductions of the ordinary, popular
conceptions, gives us at times lofty, Orphic-like teachings as to
the eternity, the migration, and the eventual persistent rest and
happiness of the just Soul, and as to the suffering of the unjust one;
Aeschylus, who primarily dwells upon the Gods’ judgment in this life,
and who makes occasional allusions to the after-life which are partly
still of the Homeric type; Sophocles, who indeed refers to the special
privileges which, in the after-life, attend upon the souls that have
here been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, and who causes
Oedipus to be translated, whilst still alive, to Other-World happiness,
but who knows nothing of an unceasing heightened consciousness
for all men after death; and Euripides, who, showing plainly the
influence of the Sophists, gives expression, alongside of Pantheistic
identifications of the soul and of the aether, to every kind of
misgiving and doubt as to any survival after death.

And as to the appearance of the doctrine among the Jews, we again find
a surprising lateness. I follow here, with but minor contributions
and modifications from other writers and myself, the main conclusions
of Dr. Charles’s standard _Critical History of the Doctrine of a
Future Life_, London, 1899, whose close knowledge of the subject is
unsurpassed, and who finds as many and as early attestations as are
well-nigh findable by serious workers.[197]

“The primitive beliefs of the individual Israelite regarding the future
life, being derived from Ancestor-worship, were implicitly antagonistic
to Yahwism, from its first proclamation by Moses.… This antagonism
becomes explicit and results in the final triumph of Yahwism.” And
to the early Israelite, even under Yahwism, “the religious unit was”
not the individual but “the family or tribe.” Thus, even fully six
centuries after Moses, “the message of the prophets of the eighth
century,” Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, “is still directed to the
nation, and the judgments they proclaim are collective punishment for
collective guilt. It is not till late in the seventh century B.C. that
the problem of individual retribution really emerged, and received
its first solution in the teaching of Jeremiah.” And “the further
development of these ideas,” by the teaching of Ezekiel and of some
of the Psalms and Proverbs, as regards individual responsibility
and retribution in this life, and by the deep misgivings and keen
questionings of Job and Ecclesiastes, as to the adequacy of this
teaching, “led inevitably to the conception of a blessed life beyond
the grave.”

Yet throughout the Hebrew Old Testament the Eschatology of the Nation
greatly predominates over that of the Individual. Indeed in pre-Exilic
times “the day of Yahwe,” with its national judgments, constitutes
the all but exclusive subject of the prophetic teaching as to the
future. Only from the Exile, (597 to 538 B.C.), onwards, does the
eschatological development begin to grow in complexity, for now the
individualism first preached by Jeremiah begins to maintain its claim
also. But not till the close of the fourth century, or the beginning of
the third century B.C., do the separate eschatologies of the individual
and of the nation issue finally in their synthesis: the righteous
individual will participate in the Messianic Kingdom, the righteous
dead of Israel will arise to share therein,--thus in Isaiah xxvi, 1-19,
a passage which it is difficult to place earlier than about 334 B.C.
The resurrection is here limited to the just. In Daniel xii, 2, which
is probably not earlier than 165 B.C., the resurrection is extended,
not indeed to all members of Israel, but, with respective good and evil
effects, to its martyrs and apostates.

And the slowness and incompleteness of the development throughout the
Hebrew Old Testament is strikingly illustrated by the great paucity
of texts which yield, without the application of undue pressure, any
clear conviction or hope of a heightened, or even a sheer, maintenance
of the soul’s this-life consciousness and force after death. Besides
the passages just indicated, Dr. Charles can only find Psalms xlix and
lxxiii, and Job xix, 25-27, all three, according to him, later than
Ezekiel, who died in 571 B.C.[198] The textually uncertain and obscure
Job-passage (xix, 25, 26) must be discounted, since it evidently
demands interpretation according to the plain presupposition and point
of the great poem as a whole.--And the same result is reached by the
numerous, entirely unambiguous, passages which maintain the negative
persuasion. In the hymn put into the mouth of the sick king Hezekiah,
for about 713 B.C., (a composition which seems to be very late,
perhaps only of the second century B.C.), we hear: “The grave cannot
praise Thee … they that go down into the pit cannot hope for truth.
The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day.” And
the Psalter contains numerous similar declarations. Thus vi, 5: “In
death there is no remembrance of Thee: in the grave who shall give Thee
thanks?” and cxv, 17: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that
go down into silence; but _we_ praise the Lord.” See also Psalms xxx,
19; lxxxviii, 11.

Indeed the name for the Departed is Rephaim, “the limp, the powerless
ones.” Stade well says: “According to the ancient Israelitish
conception the entire human being, body and soul, outlasts death,
whilst losing all that makes life worth living. That which persists
in Sheol for all eternity is the form of man, emptied of all content.
Antique thought ignores as yet that there exists no such thing as a
form without substance. The conception has as little in common with
the conviction of the Immortality of the Soul, which found its chief
support in Greek ideas, as with the expectation of the Resurrection,
which grew out of the Jewish Messianic hope, or with the Christian
anticipation of Eternal Life, which is also based upon religious
motives.”[199]

Yet, with respect to this objection from the lateness of the doctrine,
we must not forget that fully consistent Monotheism and Monogamy are
also late, but not, on that account, less true or less precious; and
indeed that, as a universal rule, the human mind has acquired at all
adequate convictions as to most certain and precious truths but slowly
and haltingly. This process is manifest even in Astronomy, Geology,
Botany, Human Anatomy. It could not fail to be, not less but more
the case in a matter like this which, if it concerns us most deeply,
is yet both too close to us to be readily appreciated in its true
proportions, and too little a matter of mathematical demonstration
or of direct experience not to take much time to develop, and not to
demand an ever-renewed acquisition and purification, being, as it is,
the postulate and completion of man’s ethical and spiritual faiths, at
their deepest and fullest.

(3) And with regard to the unsatisfactory character of some of the
earliest manifestations of the belief, this point is brought home to
us, with startling vividness, in the beginnings of the doctrine in
ancient Greece. For Rhode’s very careful and competent examination of
precisely this side of the whole question shows conclusively (even
though I think, with Crusius, that he has overlooked certain rudiments
of analogous but healthy experiences and beliefs in pre-Dionysiac
Greece) how new and permanently effective a contribution to the full
doctrine was made, for the Hellenic world and hence indirectly for
all Western humanity, by the self-knowledge gained in that wildly
orgiastic upheaval, those dervish-like dances and ecstatic fits during
the Dionysian night-celebrations on the Thracian mountain-sides.
Indeed Rhode traces how from these experiences, partly from the
continuation of them, partly from the reaction against them, on the
part of the intensely dualistic and ascetic teaching and training of
the Orphic sect, there arose, and filtered through to Pythagoras, to
Plato, and to the whole Neo-Platonist school, the clear conception
and precise terminology concerning ecstatic, enthusiastic states,
the divinity and eternity of the human soul, its punitive lapse
into and imprisonment within the body, and its need of purification
throughout the earthly life and of liberation through death from this
its incurably accidental and impeding companion.--Thus we get here,
concerning one of the chief sources of at least the formulation of our
belief in Immortality, what looks a very nest of suspicious, repulsive
circumstances:--psycho-physical phenomena, which, quite explicable to,
and indeed explained by, us now as in nowise supernatural, could not
fail to appear portentous to those men who first experienced them;
unmoral or immoral attitudes and activities of mind and will; and
demonstrable excesses of feeling and conception as regards both the
static goodness, the downright divinity, eternity, and increateness
of the soul, and the unmixed evil of the body with its entirely
disconnected alongsideness to the soul. Does not all this spell a mass
of wild hallucination, impurity, fanaticism, and superstition?

Yet here again it behoves us, if not to accept, yet also not to reject,
in wholesale fashion and in haste. For the profoundly experienced
Professor Pierre Janet shows[200] us, what is now assumed as an axiom,
and as the ultimate justification of the present widespread interest
in the study of Hysteria, that “we must admit for the moral world the
great principle universally admitted for the physical world since
Claude Bernard,--viz. that the laws of illness are, at bottom, the
same as those of health, and that, in the former, there is but the
exaggeration or the diminution of phenomena which existed already in
the latter.”

And if thus our recent studies of morbid mentalities have been able
to throw a flood of light upon the mechanism and character of the
healthy mind, a mind more difficult to analyze precisely because
of the harmonious interaction of its forces, there is nothing very
surprising if man, in the past, learnt to know his own fundamental
nature better in and through periods of abnormal excitation than in
those of normal balance. And the resultant doctrines in the case in
question only required, and demand again and again, a careful pruning
and harmonizing to show forth an extraordinary volume of abiding
truth. The insuppressible difference between mind and matter, and the
distinction between the fully recollected soul (intuitive reason), and
explicit reasoning; the immeasurable superiority of mind over matter,
and the superiority of that full reason over this “thin” reasoning;
the certainty, involved in all our inevitable mental categories and
assumptions and in all our motives for action, of this mind and
intuition being more like the cause of all things than are those
other inferior realities and activities; the indestructibleness of
the postulates and standards of objective and infinite Beauty, Truth,
Goodness, of our consciousness of being intrinsically bound to them,
and of our inmost humanity and its relative greatness being measurable
by just this our consciousness of this our obligation, and hence
by the keenness of our sense of failure, and by our striving after
purification and the realization of our immanental possibilities: all
this remains deeply fruitful and true.

And those crude early experiences and analyses certainly point to
what, even now, are our most solid reasons for belief in Immortality:
for if man’s mind and soul can thus keenly suffer from the sense
of the contingency and mutability of all things directly observed
by it without and within, it must itself be, at least in part or
potentially, outside of this flux which it so vividly apprehends
as _not_ Permanence, _not_ Rest, _not_ true Life. Let us overlook,
then, and forgive the first tumultuous, childishly rude and clumsy,
mentally and emotionally hyper-aesthetic forms of apprehension of
these great spiritual facts and laws, forms which are not, after all,
more misleading than is the ordinary anaesthetic condition of our
apprehending faculties towards these fundamental forces and testimonies
of our lot and nature. Not the wholesale rejection, then, of even those
crude Dionysian witnessings, still less of the already more clarified
Orphic teaching, and least of all of Plato’s great utilizations and
spiritualizations can be required of us, but only a reinterpretation
of those first impressions and of mankind’s analogous experiences, and
a sifting and testing of the latter by the light of all that has been
deeply lived through, and seriously thought out, by spiritually awake
humanity ever since.--And we should remember that the history of the
doctrine among the Jews is, as has already been intimated, grandly free
from any such suspicious occasions and concomitances.


2. _Two Philosophical Difficulties._

Yet it is precisely this latter, social, body-and-soul-survival
doctrine which brings the second group of objections, the philosophical
difficulties, to clear articulation. For thus we are unavoidably driven
to one or other of the equally difficult alternatives, of a bodiless
life of the soul, and of a survival or resurrection of the body.

(1) Christianity, by its explicit teachings, and even more by its whole
drift and interior affinities, requires the survival of all that is
essential to the whole man, and conceives this whole as constituted,
not by thought alone but also by feeling and will and the power of
effectuation; so that the body, or some unpicturable equivalent to
it, seems necessary to this physico-spiritual, ultimately organic
conception of what man is and must continue to be, if he is to remain
man at all.--And Psychology, on its part, is showing us, more and more,
how astonishingly wide and deep is the dependence, at least for their
actuation, of the various functions and expressions of man’s character
and spirit upon his bodily frame. For not only is the reasoning
faculty seen, ever since Aristotle, to depend, for its material and
stimulation, upon the impressions of the senses, nor can we represent
it to ourselves otherwise than as seated in the brain or in some
such physical organism, but the interesting Lange-James observations
and theory make it likely that also the emotions,--the feelings as
distinct from sensations,--ever result, as a matter of fact, from
certain foregoing, physico-neural impressions and modifications, which
latter follow upon this or that perception of the mind, a perception
which would otherwise, as is the case in certain neural lesions and
anaesthesias, remain entirely dry and unemotional.[201]--And the
sense of the Infinite, which we have had such reason to take as the
very centre of religion, arises ever, within man’s life here below,
in contrast to, and as a concomitant and supplementation of, his
perception of the Finite and Contingent, and hence not without his
senses being alive and active.

Now all this fits in admirably with the whole Jewish-Christian respect
for, high claims upon, and constant training of the body, the senses,
the emotions, and with the importance attached to the Visible and
Audible,--History, Institutions, Society.--Yet our difficulties are
clear. For however spiritually we may conceive a bodily survival or
resurrection; however completely we may place the identity of the
various stages of the body in this life, and the sameness between
the body before death and after the resurrection, in the identity of
its quasi-creator, the body-weaving soul, we can in nowise picture
to ourselves such a new, indefinitely more spiritual, incorporation,
and we bring upon ourselves acute difficulties, for both before and
after this unpicturable event. Before the resurrection there would
have to be unconsciousness between death and that event; but thus
the future life is broken up, and for no spiritual reason. Or there
would be consciousness; but then the substitute for the body, that
occasions this consciousness, would, apparently, render all further
revivification of the body unnecessary. And if we take the resurrection
as effected, we promptly feel how mixed and clumsy, how inadequate,
how less, and not more, than the best and noblest elements of our
experience and aspirations even here and now, is such a, still
essentially temporal and spacial, mode of existence.

I take it that, against all this, we can but continue to maintain
two points. The soul’s life after bodily death is not a matter of
experience or of logical demonstration, but a postulate of faith and a
consequence from our realization of the human spirit’s worth; and hence
is as little capable of being satisfactorily pictured, as are all the
other great spiritual realities which can nevertheless be shown to be
presupposed and implicitly affirmed by every act of faith in the final
truth and abiding importance of anything whatsoever.--And again, it is
not worth while to attempt to rescue, Aristotle-wise, just that single,
and doubtless not the highest, function of man’s spirit and character,
his dialectic faculty, or even his intellectual intuitive power, for
the purpose of thus escaping, or at least minimizing, the difficulties
attendant upon the belief in Immortality. If we postulate, as we do,
man’s survival, we must postulate, without being able to fill in or to
justify any details of the scheme, the survival of all that may and
does constitute man’s true and ultimate personality. How much or how
little this may precisely mean, we evidently know but very imperfectly:
but we know enough to be confident that it means more than the
abstractive, increasingly dualistic school of Plato, Philo, Plotinus,
Proclus would allow.

(2) But speculative reason seems also to raise a quite general
objection, based upon man’s littleness within the immense Universe, and
upon the arbitrariness of excepting those tiny points, those centres of
human consciousness, men’s souls, from the flux, the ceaseless becoming
and undoing, of all the other parts of that mighty whole, immortal,
surely, only _as_ a whole.

Here we can safely say that, at least in this precise form, the
difficulty springs predominantly not from reason or experience, but
from an untutored imagination. For all our knowledge of that great
external world, which this objection supposes to englobe our small
internal world, as a part inferior, or at most but equal, to the other
parts of that whole, is dependent upon this interior world of ours; and
however truly inherent in that external world we may hold that world’s
laws to be, those laws can, after all, be shown to be as truly the
result of our own mind’s spontaneous work,--an architectonic building
up by this mind of the sense-impressions conveyed to it from without.
And that whole Universe, in so far as it is material, cannot be
compared, either in kind or in dignity, to Mind: only the indications
there, parallel in this to our experiences within our own mind, of a
Mind and Spirit infinitely greater and nobler than, yet with a certain
affinity to, our own,--only these constitute that outer world as great
as this our inner world. Indeed it is plain that Materialism is so
far from constituting the solution to the problem of existence, that
even Psycho-Physical Parallelism, even the attribution of any ultimate
reality to Matter, are on their trial. It is anyhow already clear that,
of the two, it is easier and nearer to the truth to maintain that
Matter and its categories are simply modes in the manifestation of Mind
to minds and in the apprehension of Mind by minds, than to declare Mind
to be but a function or resultant of Matter.[202]

But if all this is so, then no simply sensible predominance of the
sensible Universe, nor even any ascertainment of the mere flux and
interchange of and between all things material and their elements,
can reasonably affect the question as to the superiority and
permanence of Mind. But we shall return, in the next chapter, to the
difficulties special to the Immortality of individual human spirits or
personalities,--for this is, I think, the point at which the problem is
still acute.


3. _Three Ethico-Practical Difficulties._

The last group of objections is directly practical and ethical, and
raises three points: the small space and influence occupied and
exercised, apparently, by such a belief, in the spiritual life of even
serious persons; the seemingly selfish, ungenerous type of religion and
of moral tone fostered by definite belief in, or at least occupation
with, the thought of an individual future life, as contrasted with the
nobility of tone engendered by such denials or abstractions from all
such beliefs as we find in Spinoza and Schleiermacher; and, finally,
the plausibility of the teaching, on the part of some distinguished
thinkers and poets, that a positive conviction of this our short
earthly life being the sole span of our individual consciousness
is directly productive of a certain deep tenderness, an heroic
concentration of attention, and a virile truthfulness, which are
unattainable, which indeed are weakened or rendered impossible by,
the necessarily vague anticipation of an unending future life; a hope
which, where operative at all, can but dwarf and deaden all earthly
aspiration and endeavour.

(1) As to the first point, which has perhaps never been more
brilliantly affirmed than by Mr. Schiller,[203] I altogether doubt
whether the numerous appearances, which admittedly seem to point that
way, are rightly interpreted by such a conclusion. For it is, for one
thing, most certainly possible to be deeply convinced of the reality
and importance of the soul’s heightened after-life, and to have no
kind of belief or interest in Psychical Research, at least in such
Research as an intrinsically valuable aid to any specifically religious
convictions. No aloofness from such attempts to find spiritual
realities at the phenomenal level can, (unless it is clear that the
majority of educated Western Europeans share the naïve assumptions of
this position), indicate negation of, or indifference to, the belief in
Immortality.--And next, it is equally certain that precisely the most
fruitful form of the belief is that which conceives the After-life as
already involved in this one, and which, therefore, dwells specially,
not upon the posteriority in time, but upon the difference in kind
of that spiritual life of the soul which, even _hic et nunc_, can be
sought after and experienced, in ever imperfect degrees no doubt, yet
really and more and more. Here we ever get an approach to Simultaneity
and Eternity, instead of sheer succession and clock-time: and here
the fundamental attitude of the believer would appear only if pressed
to deny or exclude the deathlessness of the spirit and its life,--the
usual latency and simple implication of the positive conviction, in
nowise diminishing this conviction’s reality.--And, finally, it would
have to be seen whether those who are indifferent or sceptical as to
Immortal or Eternal Life, are appreciably fewer and largely other
than those who are careless as to the other deep implications and
requirements of spiritual experience. We may well doubt whether they
would turn out to be so.

(2) As to the second point, we have already found how utterly
insuppressible is the pleasure, normally concomitant upon every act of
noble self-conquest; and how, though we can and should perform such
and all other acts, as far as possible, from the ultimate, determining
motive of thereby furthering the realization of the Kingdom of God,
there can be no solid truthfulness or sane nobility in insisting upon
attempts at thinking away and denying the fact and utility of that
concomitant pleasure. But if so, then a further, other-world extension
of that realization and of this concomitant happiness, and a belief
here below in such an eventual extension, cannot of themselves be
ignoble or debasing. Occasions for every degree and kind of purely
selfish and faultily natural acts, of acts inchoatively supernatural
but still predominantly slavish, reappear here, in close parallel to
the variety of disposition displayed by men towards every kind of
reality and ideal, towards the Family, Science, the State, Humanity,
where the same concomitances and the same high uses and mean abuses are
ever possible and actual. Neither here nor there should we attempt to
impoverish truth and life, in order to exclude the possibility of their
abuse.--And it would, of course, be profoundly unfair to contrast such
a rarely noble spirit as Spinoza among the deniers with the average
mind from among the affirmers. The average or the majority of the
deniers would not, I think, appear as more generous and devoted than
the corresponding average or majority on the other side.

(3) And as to the supposed directly beneficial effects of a positive
denial of Immortality, such as have been sung for us by George
Eliot and Giovanni Pascoli, we can safely affirm that the special
tendernesses and quiet heroisms, deduced by them from such a negation,
are too obviously dependent upon spiritual implications and instincts,
for us to be able to put them directly to the credit of that denial.
Only in so far as Immortality were not a postulate intrinsically
connected with belief in objective and obligatory Beauty, Truth, and
Goodness,--in God as our origin and end,--could its persistent and
deliberate denial not be injurious to these fundamental convictions
and to the ultimate health of the soul’s life: and of this intrinsic
non-connection there is no sufficient evidence.--Certainly, in such
a case as Spinoza’s, the same strain of reasoning which makes him
abandon individual Immortality Ought, in logic, to prevent him, a
mere hopelessly determined link in the _Natura Naturata_, from ever
attaining to the free self-dedication of himself, as now a fully
responsible member of the _Natura Naturans_. And if not all the grand
depth of his spiritual instinct and moral nobility, and its persistence
in spite of its having no logical room in the fixedly naturalistic
element of his teaching, can be urged as an argument in favour of the
ultimate truth and ethical helpfulness of that whole element, neither
can it be urged with respect to what is presumably one part of that
element, his denial of personal Immortality.


II. CATHERINE’S GENERAL AFTER-LIFE CONCEPTIONS.

Now Catherine’s general After-Life Conceptions in part bring into
interesting prominence, in part really meet and overcome, the
perplexities and mutually destructive alternatives which we have just
considered. I shall here again leave over to the next chapter the
simply ultimate questions, such as that of the pure Eternity _versus_
the Unendingness of the soul; but shall allow myself, as to one set
of her general ideas, a little digression as to the probability of
their ultimate literary suggestion by Plato.--These Platonic passages
probably reached her too indirectly, and by means and in forms which I
have too entirely failed to discover, for me to be able to discuss them
in my chapter devoted to her assured and demonstrably direct literary
sources. But these sayings of Plato greatly help to illustrate the
meaning of her doctrine.--I shall group these, her general, positions
and implications under four heads, and shall consider three of these
as, in substance, profoundly satisfactory, but one of them, the second,
as acceptable only with many limitations, although this second has
obviously much influenced the form given by her to several of those
other conceptions.


1. _Forecasts of the Hereafter, based upon present experience._

First, then, we get, as the fundamental presupposition of the
whole Eschatology, a grandly sane, simple, and profound doctrine
formulated over and over again and applied throughout, with a splendid
consistency, as the key and limit to all her anticipations and
picturings. Only because of the fact, and of our conviction of the
fact, of the unbroken continuity and identity of God with Himself,
of the human soul with itself, and of the deepest of the relations
subsisting between that God and the soul, across the chasm formed by
our body’s death, and only in proportion as we can and do experience
and achieve, during this our earthly life, certain spiritual laws and
realities of a sufficiently elemental, universal, and fruitful, more or
less time- and space-less character, can we (whilst ever remembering
the analogical nature of such picturings even as to the soul’s life
here) safely and profitably forecast certain general features of the
future which is thus already so largely a present. But, given these
conditions in the present, we can and should forecast the future,
to the extent implied. And as Plato’s great imaginative projection,
his life-work, the _Republic_, achieves its original end, (of making
more readily understandable, by objectivizing on a large scale, the
life of the inner city of our own soul), in so far as he has rightly
understood the human soul and has found appropriate representations
of its powers, laws, and ideals in his future commonwealth, even
if we cannot accept this picture for political purposes and in all
its details: so is it also with Catherine’s projection, which, if
bolder in its subject-matter, is, most rightly, indefinitely more
general in its indications than is Plato’s great diagram of the soul.
Man’s spiritual personality, being held by her to survive death,--to
retain its identity and an at least equivalent consciousness, of that
identity,--the deepest experiences of that personality before the
body’s death are conceived as re-experienced by it, in a heightened
degree and form, after death itself. Hence these great pictures, of
what the soul will experience then, would remain profoundly true of
what the soul seeks and requires now, even if there were no _then_ at
all.

And note particularly how only with regard to one stage and condition
of the spirit’s future life,--that of the purification of the imperfect
soul,--does she indulge in any at all direct doctrine or detailed
picturing; and this, doubtless, not only because she has experienced
much concerning this matter in her own life here, but also because
the projection of these experiences would still give us, not the
ultimate state, but more or less only a prolongation of our mixed,
joy-in-suffering life upon earth. As to the two ultimate states, we get
only quite incidental glimpses, although even these are strongly marked
by her general position and method.


2. _Catherine’s forecasts and present experience correspondingly
limited._

And next, coming to the projection itself, we naturally find it
to present all the strength and limitations of her own spiritual
experiences which are thus projected: her attitude towards the body
and towards human fellowship, (two subjects which are shown to be
closely inter-related by the continuous manner in which they stand
and fall together throughout the history of philosophy and religion,)
thus constitute the second general peculiarity of her Eschatology. We
have already noted, in her life, her strongly ecstatic, body-ignoring,
body-escaping type of religion; and how, even in her case, it tended to
starve the corporate, institutional conceptions and affections. Here,
in the projection, we find both the cause and the effect again, and on
a larger scale. Her continuous psycho-physical discomforts and keen
thirst for a unity and simplicity as rapid and complete as possible,
the joy and strength derived from ecstatic habits and affinities, would
all make her, without even herself being aware of it, drop all further
thought as to the future fate of that oppressive “prison-house” from
which her spirit had at last got free.

Now such non-occupation with the fate of the body and of her
fellow-souls may appear quite appropriate in her Purgatorial
Eschatology, yet we cannot but find that, even here, it already
possesses grave disadvantages, and that it persists throughout all her
After-life conceptions. For in all the states and stages of the soul we
get a markedly unsocial, a _sola cum solo_ picture. And yet there is,
perhaps, no more striking difference, amongst their many affinities,
between Platonism and Christianity than the intense Individualism
which marks the great Greek’s doctrine, and the profoundly social
conception which pervades Our Lord’s own teaching,--in each case as
regards the next life as well as this one. Plotinus’s great culminating
commendation of “the flight of the alone to the Alone” continues
Plato’s tradition; whereas, if even St. Paul and the Joannine writings
speak at times as though the individual soul attained to its full
personality in and by direct intercourse with God alone, the Synoptic
Gospels, and at bottom also those two great lovers of Our Lord’s
spirit, never cease to emphasize the social constituent of the soul’s
life both here and hereafter. The Kingdom of Heaven, the Soul of
the Church, as truly constitutes the different personalities, their
spirituality and their joy, as they constitute it,--that great Organism
which, as such, is both first and last in the Divine thought and love.

Here, in the at least partial ignoring of these great social facts,
we touch the main defect of most mystical outlooks; yet this defect
does not arise from what they possess, but from what they lack. For
solitude, and the abstractive, unifying, intuitive, emotional, mystical
element is also wanted, and this element and movement Catherine
exemplifies in rare perfection. Indeed, in the great classical,
central period of her life she had, as we know, combined all this
with much of the outward movement, society, detailed observation,
attachment, the morally _en-static_, the immanental type. Unfortunately
the same ill-health and ever-increasing predominance of the former
element, which turned her, quite naturally, to these eschatological
contemplations, and which indeed helped to give them their touching
tone of first-hand experience, also tended, of necessity, to make her
drop even such slight and lingering social elements as had formerly
coloured her thought. It is, then, only towards the understanding and
deepening of the former of these two necessary movements of religion,
that these, her latter-day enlargements of some of her deepest
experiences and convictions will be found true helps.

Yet if the usual _ad extra_ disadvantages of such an abstractive
position towards the body are thus exemplified by her, in this her
unsocial, individualistic attitude, it is most interesting to note
how entirely she avoids the usual _ad intra_ drawbacks of this same
position. For if her whole attention, and, increasingly, even her
consciousness are, in true ecstatic guise, absorbed away from her
fellows and concentrated exclusively upon God in herself and herself
in God, yet this consciousness consists not only of _Noûs_, that dry
theoretic reason which, already by Plato, but still more by Aristotle,
is alone conceived as surviving the body, but contains also the upper
range of _Thumos_,--all those passions of the noblest kind,--love,
admiration, gratitude, utter self-donation, joy in purifying suffering
and in an ever-growing self-realization as part of the great plan of
God,--all the highest notes in that wondrous scale of deep feeling and
of emotionally coloured willing which Plato made dependent, not for its
character but for the possibility of its operation, upon the body’s
union with the soul.--And thus we see how, in her conception of the
soul’s own self within itself and of its relation to God, the Christian
idea of Personality, as of a many-sided organism in which Love and
Will are the very flower of the whole, has triumphed over the Platonic
presentation of the Spirit, in so far as this is taken to require and
achieve an ultimate sublimation free from all emotive elements. Thus
in her doctrine the whole Personality survives death, although this
Personality energizes only, as it were upwards, to God alone, and
not also sideways and downwards, towards its fellows and the lesser
children of God.


3. _Catherine’s forecast influenced by Plato._

Catherine’s third peculiarity consists in a rich and profound
organization of two doctrines, the one libertarian, the other
determinist; and requires considerable quotation from Plato, whose
teachings, bereft of all transmigration-fancies, seem clearly to
reappear here, (however complex may have been the mediation,) in
Catherine’s great conception.

The determinist doctrine maintains that virtue and vice, in proportion
as they are allowed their full development, spontaneously and
necessarily attain to their own congenital consummation, a consummation
which consists, respectively, in the bliss inseparable from the final
and complete identity between the inevitable results upon itself of
the soul’s deliberate endeavours, and the indestructible requirements
of this same soul’s fundamental nature; and in the misery of the, now
fully felt but only gradually superable, or even, in other cases,
insuperable, antagonism between the inevitable consequences within its
own self of the soul’s more or less deliberate choosings, and those
same, here also ineradicable, demands of its own truest nature.

As Marsilio Ficino says, in his _Theologia Platonica_, published in
Florence in 1482: “Virtue is reward in its first budding, reward is
virtue full-grown. Vice is punishment at the moment of its birth;
punishment is vice at its consummation. For, in each of these cases,
one and the same thing is first the simple seed and then the full ear
of corn; and one and the same thing is the full ear of corn and then
the food of man. Precisely the very things then that we sow in this our
(earthly) autumn, shall we reap in that (other-world) summer-day.”[204]
It is true that forensic terms and images are also not wanting in
Catherine’s sayings; but these, in part, run simply parallel to the
immanental conception without modifying it; in part, they are in
its service; and, in part, they are the work of the theologians’
arrangements and glosses discussed in my Appendix.

And the libertarian doctrine declares that it is the soul itself which,
in the beyond and immediately after death, chooses the least painful,
because the most expressive of her then actual desires, from among the
states which the natural effects upon her own self of her own earthly
choosings have left her interiorly free to choose.

Now it is in this second doctrine especially that we find so detailed
an anticipation by Plato of a whole number of highly original and
characteristic points and combinations of points, as to render a
fortuitous concurrence between Catherine and Plato practically
impossible. Yet I have sought in vain, among Catherine’s authentic
sayings, actions, possessions, or friends, for any trace of direct
acquaintance with any of Plato’s writings. But Ficino’s Latin
translation of Plato, published, with immense applause, in Florence in
1483, 1484, must have been known, in those intensely Platonizing times,
to even non-professed Humanists in Genoa, long before Catherine’s death
in 1510, so that one or other of her intimates may have communicated
the substance of these Platonic doctrines to her.[205] Plotinus, of
whom Ficino published a Latin translation in 1492, contains but a
feeble echo of Plato on this point. Proclus, directly known only very
little till much after Catherine’s time, is in even worse case. The
Areopagite, who has so continuously taken over whole passages from
all three writers, although directly almost exclusively from Proclus,
contains nothing more immediately to the purpose than his impressive
sayings concerning Providence’s continuous non-forcing of the human
personality in its fundamental constitution and its free elections with
their inevitable consequences; hence Catherine cannot have derived her
ideas, in the crisp definiteness which they retain in her sayings, from
her cousin the Dominican nun and the Areopagite. And it is certain, as
we have seen, how scattered and inchoate are the hints which she may
have found in St. Paul, the Joannine writings, and Jacopone da Todi.
St. Augustine contains nothing that would be directly available,--an
otherwise likely source considering Catherine’s close connection with
the Augustinian Canonesses of S. Maria delle Grazie.

In Plato, then, we get five conceptions and symbolic pictures that are
practically identical with those of Catherine.

(1) First we get the conception of souls having each, in exact
accordance with the respective differences of their moral and spiritual
disposition and character, as these have been constituted by them here
below, a “place” or environment, expressive of that character, ready
for their occupation after the body’s death. “The soul that is pure
departs at death, herself invisible, to the invisible world,--to the
divine, immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss.
But the soul that is impure at the time of her departure and is …
engrossed by the corporeal …, is weighed down and drawn back again into
the visible place (world).”

And this scheme, of like disposition seeking a like place, is then
carried out, by the help of the theory of transmigration, as a
re-incarnation of these various characters into environments, bodies,
exactly corresponding to them: gluttonous souls are assigned to asses’
bodies, tyrannous souls to those of wolves, and so on: in a word,
“there is no difficulty in assigning to all ‘a whither’ (a place)
answering to their general natures and propensities.”[206] For this
corresponds to a law which runs throughout all things,--a determinism
of consequences which does not prevent the liberty of causes. “The King
of the universe contrived a general plan, by which a thing of a certain
nature found a seat and place of a certain kind. But the formation of
this nature, he left to the wills of individuals.”

Or, with the further spacial imagery of movements up, level, or down,
we get: “All things that have a soul change … and, in changing, move
according to law and the order of destiny. Lesser changes of nature
move on level ground, but great crimes sink … into the so-called lower
places …; and, when the soul becomes greatly different and divine, she
also greatly changes her place, which is now altogether holy.”[207] The
original, divinely intended “places” of souls are all high and good,
and similar to each other though not identical, each soul having its
own special “place”; and for this congenital “place” each soul has a
resistible yet ineradicable home-sickness. “The first incarnation” of
human souls which “distributes each soul to a star,” is ordained to
be similar for all.… “And when they have been of necessity implanted
in bodily forms, should they master their passions … they live in
righteousness; if otherwise, in unrighteousness. And he who lived well
through his allotted time shall be conveyed once more to a habitation
in his kindred star, and there shall enjoy a blissful and congenial
life; but failing this he shall pass into … such a form of (further)
incarnation as fits his disposition … until he shall overcome, by
reason, all that burthen that afterwards clung around him.”[208]

If from all this we exclude the soul’s existence before any
beginning of its body, its transmigration into other bodies, and the
self-sufficiency of reason; and if we make it all to be penetrated
by God’s presence, grace, and love, and by our corresponding or
conflicting emotional and volitional as well as intellectual attitude:
we shall get Catherine’s position exactly.

(2) But again, in at least one phase of his thinking, Plato pictures
the purification of the imperfect soul as effected, of at least as
begun, not in a succession of “places” of an extensionally small but
organic kind, bodies, but in a “place” of an extensionally larger but
inorganic sort,--the shore of a lake, where the soul has to wait.
“The Acherusian lake is the lake to the shores of which the many go
when they are dead; and, after waiting an appointed time, which to
some is longer and to others shorter, they are sent back to be born
as animals.” Here we evidently get a survival of the conception,
predominant in Homer, of a pain-and-joyless Hades, but limited here to
the middle, the imperfect class of souls, and followed, in their case,
by transmigration, to which alone, apparently, purification is directly
attached.

In the same Dialogue we read later on: “Those who appear to have lived
neither well nor ill … go to the river Acheron, and are carried to the
lake; and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds … and
are absolved and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to
their deserts.” Here we have, evidently, still the same “many” and the
same place, the shores of the Acherusian lake, but also an explicit
affirmation of purification effected there, for this purification is
now followed directly, not by re-incarnation, but by the ultimate
happiness in the soul’s original and fundamentally congenial “place.”
And this scheme is far more conformable to Plato’s fundamental
position: for how can bodies, even lower than the human, help to purify
the soul which has become impure precisely on occasion of its human
body?--We can see how the Christian Purgatorial doctrine derives some
of its pictures from the second of these parallel passages; yet that
the “longer or shorter waiting” of the first passage also enters into
that teaching,--especially in its more ordinary modern form, according
to which there is, in this state, no intrinsic purification.

And lower down we find: “Those who have committed crimes which,
although great, are not unpardonable,--for these it is necessary to
plunge (ἐμπεσεῖν) into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled
to undergo for a year; but at the end of the year they are borne to
the Acherusian lake. But those who appear incurable by reason of the
greatness of their crimes … such their appropriate destiny hurls
(ῤίπτει) into Tartarus, whence they never come forth.” Here we get a
Purgatory, pictured as a watery substance in which the more gravely
impure of the curable souls are immersed before arriving at the easier
purification, the waiting on the dry land alongside the lake; this
Purgatory is, as a “place” and, in intensity, identical with Hell; and
into this place the curable souls “plunge” and the incurable ones are
“hurled.”--Of this third passage Catherine retains the identification
of the pains of Purgatory and those of Hell; the “plunge,” or
“hurling,” of two distinct classes of souls into these pains; and
the mitigation, after a time, previous to complete cessation, of the
suffering in the case of the curable class. But the “plunge,” with her,
is common to all degrees of imperfectly pure souls; there is, for all
these souls, no change of “place” during their purgation, but only a
mitigation of suffering; and this mitigation is at work gradually and
from the first. And the ordinary modern Purgatorial teaching is like
this passage, in that it keeps the curable souls in Tartarus, say, for
one year, and lets them suffer there, apparently without mitigation,
throughout that time: and that, in the case of both classes of souls,
it conceives the punishment as extrinsic, vindictive, and inoperative.

And a fourth _Phaedo_ passage tells us: “Those who are remarkable for
having led holy lives are released from this earthly prison, and go
to their pure home, which is above, and dwell in the purer earth,”
the Isles of the Just, in Oceanus. “And those, again, amongst these
who have duly purified themselves with philosophy, live henceforth
altogether without the body, in mansions fairer far than these.” Here
we get, alongside of the two Purgatories and the one Hell, two Heavens,
of which the first is but taken over from Homer and Pindar, but of
which the second is Plato’s own conception. Catherine, in entire accord
with the ordinary teaching, has got but one “place” of each kind; and
her Heaven corresponds, apart from his formal and final exclusion of
every sort of body, to the second of these Platonic Heavens; whilst,
here again, the all-encompassing presence of God’s love for souls as
of the soul’s love for God, which, in her teaching, is the beginning,
means, and end of the whole movement, effects an indefinite difference
between the two positions.[209]

(3) Yet Plato, in his most characteristic moods, explicitly anticipates
Catherine as to the intrinsic, ameliorative nature and work of
Purgatory: “The proper office of punishment is two-fold: he who
is rightly punished ought either to become better … by it, or he
ought to be made an example to his fellows, that they may see what
he suffers and … become better. Those who are punished by Gods and
men and improved, are those whose sins are curable … by pain and
suffering:--for there is no other way in which they can be delivered
from evil, as in this world so also in the other. But the others are
incurable--the time has passed at which they can receive any benefit
themselves.… Rhadamanthus,” the chief of the three nether-world judges,
“looks with admiration on the soul of some just one, who has lived in
holiness and truth … and sends him” without any intervening suffering
“to the Isles of the Blessed.… I consider how I shall present my soul
whole and undefiled before the Judge, in that day.”[210] Here the last
sentence is strikingly like in form as well as in spirit to many a
saying of St. Paul and Catherine.

(4) But the following most original passages give us a sentiment and an
image which, in their special drift, are as opposed to St. Paul, and
indeed to the ordinary Christian consciousness, as they are dear to
Catherine, in this matter so strongly, although probably unconsciously,
Platonist, indeed Neo-Platonist, in her affinities. “In the time of
Kronos, indeed down to that of Zeus, the Judgment was given on the day
on which men were to die,” _i.e._ immediately _before_ their death;
“and the consequence was, that the judgments were not well given,--the
souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus said: ‘The reason is,
that the judged have their clothes on, for they are alive.… There are
many, having evil souls, who are apparelled in fair bodies or wrapt
round in wealth and rank.… The Judges are awed by them; and they
themselves too have their clothes on when judging: their eyes and
ears and their whole bodies are interposed, as a veil, before their
own souls. What is to be done? … Men shall be entirely stript before
they are judged, for they shall be judged when dead; the Judge too
shall be naked, that is, dead: he, with his naked soul, shall pierce
into the other naked soul immediately _after_ each man dies … and is
bereft of all his kith and kin, and has left behind him all his brave
attire upon earth, and thus the Judgment will be just.’”[211]--If we
compare this with St. Paul’s precisely contrary instinct and desire to
be “clothed upon” at death, “lest we be found naked,” i.e. without the
protection of any kind of body; and then realize Catherine’s intense
longing for “nudità,”--to strip herself here, as far as possible, from
all imperfection and self-delusion before the final stripping off of
the body in death, and to appear, utterly naked, before the utterly
naked eye of God, so that no “clothes” should remain requiring to
be burnt away by the purifying fires,[212] the profound affinity of
sentiment and imagery between Catherine and Plato--and this on a point
essentially Platonic,--is very striking.

(5) But, above all, in his deep doctrine as to the soul’s spontaneous
choice after death of that condition, “place,” which, owing to the
natural effects within her of her earthly willings and self-formation,
she cannot but now find the most congenial to herself, Plato appears as
the ultimate source of a literary kind for Catherine’s most original
view, which otherwise is, I think, without predecessors. “The souls,”
he tells us in the _Republic_, “immediately on their arrival in the
other world, were required to go to Lachesis,” one of the three Fates.
And “an interpreter, having taken from her lap a number of lots and
plans of life, spoke as follows: ‘Thus saith Lachesis, the daughter of
Necessity.… “Your destiny shall not be allotted to you, but you shall
choose it for yourselves. Let him who draws the first lot, be the first
to choose a life which shall be his irrevocably.… The responsibility
lies with the chooser, Heaven is guiltless.”’” “No settled character
of soul was included in the plans of life, because, with the change
of life, the soul inevitably became changed itself.” “It was a truly
wonderful sight, to watch how each soul selected its life.… When all
the souls had chosen their lives, Lachesis dispatched with each of
them the Destiny he had selected, to guard his life and satisfy his
choice.”[213] And in the _Phaedrus_ Plato tells us that “at the end of
the first thousand years” (of the first incarnation) “the good souls
and also the evil souls both come to cast lots and to choose their
second life; and they may take any that they like.”[214]

In both the dialogues the lots are evidently taken over from popular
mythology, but are here made merely to introduce a certain orderly
succession among the spontaneous choosings of the souls themselves,
whilst the lap of the daughter of Necessity, spread out before all
the choosers previous to their choice, and the separate, specially
appropriate Destiny that accompanies each soul after its choice,
indicate plainly that, although the choice itself is the free act
and pure self-expression of each soul’s then present disposition,
yet that this disposition is the necessary result of its earthly
volitions and self-development or self-deformation, and that the
choice now made becomes, in its turn, the cause of certain inevitable
consequences,--of a special environment which itself is then productive
of special effects upon, and of special occasions for, the final
working out of this soul’s character.--Plotinus retains the doctrine:
“the soul chooses there” in the Other world,--“its Daemon and its kind
of life.”[215] But neither Proclus nor Dionysius has the doctrine,
whilst Catherine, on the contrary, reproduces it with a penetrating
completeness.


4. _Simplifications characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology._

And under our last, fourth head, we can group the simplifications
characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology.

(1) One simplification has, of course, for now some fifteen hundred
years, been the ordinary Christian conception: I mean the elimination
of the time-element between the moment of death and the beginning of
the three states. Yet it is interesting to note how by far the greatest
of the Latin Fathers, St. Augustine, who died in A.D. 430, still clings
predominantly to the older Christian and Jewish conception of the soul
abiding in a state of shrunken, joy-and-painless consciousness from
the moment of the body’s death up to that of the general resurrection
and judgment. “After this short life, thou wilt not yet be where the
saints will be,” _i.e._ in Heaven. “Thou wilt not yet be there: who
is ignorant of this? But thou canst straightway be where the rich
man descried the ulcerous beggar to be a-resting, far away,” _i.e._
in Limbo. “Placed in that rest, thou canst await the day of judgment
with security, when thou shalt receive thy body also, when thou shalt
be changed so as to be equal to an Angel.”[216] Only with regard to
Purgatory, a state held by him, in writings of his last years, 410-430
A.D., to be possible, indeed probable, does he make an exception to
his general rule: for such purification would have to take place” in
the interval of time between the death of the body and the last day of
condemnation and reward.”[217]

It is doubtless the still further fading away of the expectation, so
vivid and universal in early Christian times, of the proximity of Our
Lord’s Second Advent, and the tacit prevalence of Greek affinities and
conceptions concerning the bodiless soul, that helped to eliminate,
at last universally, this interval of waiting, in the case of souls
too good or too bad for purgation, from the general consciousness
of at least Western Christendom. The gain in this was the great
simplification and concentration of the immediate outlook and interest;
the loss was the diminished apprehension of the essentially complex,
concrete, synthetic character of man’s nature, and of the necessity for
our assuming that this characteristic will be somehow preserved in this
nature’s ultimate perfection.

(2) There is a second simplification in Catherine which, though here
St. Augustine leads the way, is less common among Christians: her three
other-world “places” are not, according to her ultimate thought, three
distinct spacial extensions and localities, filled, respectively, with
ceaselessly suffering, temporarily suffering, and ceaselessly blessed
souls; but they are, (notwithstanding all the terms necessitated by
such spacial picturings as “entering,” “coming out,” “plunging into”),
so many distinct states and conditions of the soul, of a painful,
mixed, or joyful character. We shall have these her ultimate ideas very
fully before us presently. But here I would only remark that this her
union of a picturing faculty, as vivid as the keenest sense-perception,
and of a complete non-enslavement to, a vigorous utilization of,
these life-like spacial projections, by a religious instinct and
experience which never forgets that God and souls are spirits, to whom
our ordinary categories of space and extension, time and motion, do
not and cannot in strictness apply, is as rare as it is admirable;
and that, though her intensely anti-corporeal and non-social attitude
made such a position more immediately easy for her than it can be for
those who remain keenly aware of the great truths involved in the
doctrines of the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints,
this her trend of thought brings into full articulation precisely the
deepest of our spiritual apprehensions and requirements, whilst it is
not her fault if it but further accentuates some of our intellectual
perplexities.

We get much in St. Augustine, which he himself declares to have
derived, in the first instance, from “the writings of the Platonists,”
which doubtless means above all Plotinus, (that keen spiritual thinker
who can so readily be traced throughout this part of the great
Convert’s teaching), as to this profound incommensurableness between
spiritual presence, energizing, and affectedness on the one hand, and
spacial position, extension, and movement on the other. “What place is
there within me, to which my God can come? … I would not exist at all,
unless Thou already wert within me.” “Thou wast never a place, and yet
we have receded from Thee; and we have drawn near to Thee, yet Thou
art never a place.” “ Are we submerged and do we emerge? Yet it is not
places into which we are plunged and out of which we rise. What can be
more like to places and yet more unlike? For here the affections are in
case,--the impurity of our spirit, which flows downwards, oppressed by
the love of earthly cares; and the holiness of Thy Spirit, which lifts
us upwards with the love of security.”[218] For, as he teaches “the
spiritual creature can only be changed by times,”--a succession within
a duration: “by remembering what it had forgotten, or by learning
what it did not know, or by willing what it did not will. The bodily
creature can be changed by times and places,” by spacial motion, “from
earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, from east to west.” “That thing
is not moved through space which is not extended in space … the soul is
not considered to move in space, unless it be held to be a body.”[219]

In applying the doctrine just expressed to eschatological matters, St.
Augustine concludes: “If it be asked whether the soul, when it goes
forth from the body, is borne to some corporeal places, or to such as,
though incorporeal, are like to bodies, or to what is more excellent
than either: I readily answer that, unless it have some kind of body,
it is not borne to bodily places at all, or, at least, that it is not
borne to them by bodily motion.… But I myself do not think that it
possesses any body, when it goes forth from this earthly body.… It gets
borne, according to its deserts, to spiritual conditions, or to penal
places having a similitude to bodies.”[220]

The reader will readily note a curiously uncertain frame of mind
in this last utterance. I take it that Plotinian influences are
here being checked by the Jewish conception of certain, definitely
located, provision-chambers (_promptuaria_), in which all souls are
placed for safe keeping, between the time of the body’s death and its
resurrection. So in the Fourth Book of Esra (of about 90 A.D.), “the
souls of the just in their chambers said: ‘How long are we to remain
here?’”; and in the Apocalypse of Baruch (of about 150-250 A.D.), “at
the coming of the Messiah, the provision-chambers will open, in which
the” whole, precise “number of the souls of the just have been kept,
and they will come forth.”[221]

But it is St. Thomas Aquinas who, by the explicit and consistent
adoption and classification of these _promptuaria receptacula_, reveals
to us more clearly the perplexities and fancifulnesses involved in
the strictly spacial conception. “Although bodies are not assigned
to souls (immediately) after death, yet certain bodily places are
congruously assigned to these souls in accordance with the degree of
their dignity, in which places they are, as it were, locally, in the
manner in which bodiless things can be in space: each soul having a
higher place assigned to it, according as it approaches more or less
to the first substance, God, whose seat, according to Scripture, is
Heaven.” “In the Scriptures God is called the Sun, since He is the
principle of spiritual life, as the physical sun is of bodily life;
and, according to this convention, … souls spiritually illuminated have
a greater fitness for luminous bodies, and sin-darkened souls for dark
places.” “It is probable that, as to local position, Hell and the Limbo
of the Fathers constitute one and the same place, or are more or less
continuous.” “The place of Purgatory adjoins (that of) Hell.” “There
are altogether five places ready to receive (_receptanda_) souls bereft
of their bodies: Paradise, the Limbo of the Fathers, Purgatory, Hell,
and the Limbo of Infants.”[222]

No doubt all these positions became the common scholastic teaching. But
then, as Cardinal Bellarmine cogently points out: “no ancient, as far
as I know, has written that the Earthly Paradise was destroyed … and I
have read a large number who affirm its existence. This is the doctrine
of all the Scholastics, beginning with St. Thomas, and of the Fathers.
… St. Augustine indeed appears to rank this truth amongst the dogmas
of faith.”[223] We shall do well, then, not to press these literal
localization-schemes, especially since, according to St. Augustine’s
penetrating analysis, our spiritual experiences, already in this our
earthly existence, have a distinctly non-spacial character. Catherine’s
position, if applied to the central life of man here, and hence
presumptively hereafter, remains as true and fresh and unassailable as
ever.

(3) And her last simplification consists in taking the Fire of Hell,
the Fire of Purgatory, and the Fire and Light of Heaven as profoundly
appropriate symbols or descriptions of the variously painful or joyous
impressions produced, through the differing volitional attitudes of
souls towards Him, by the one God’s intrinsically identical presence
in each and all. In all three cases, throughout their several grades,
there are ever but two realities, the Spirit-God and the spirit-soul,
in various states of inter-relation.

Here again it is Catherine’s complete abstraction from the body which
renders such a view easy and, in a manner, necessary for her mind. But
here I would only emphasize the impressive simplicity and spirituality
of view which thus, as in the material world it finds the one sun-light
and the one fire-heat, which, in themselves everywhere the same, vary
indefinitely in their effects, owing to the varying condition of the
different bodies which meet the rays and flames; so, in the Spiritual
World it discovers One supreme spiritual Energy and Influence which,
whilst ever self-identical, is assimilated, deflected, or resisted by
the lesser spirits, with inevitably joyous, mixed, or painful states
of soul, since they can each and all resist, but cannot eradicate that
Energy’s impression within their deepest selves. And though, even with
her, the Sun-light image remains quasi-Hellenic and Intellectual, and
the Fire-heat picture is more immediately Christian and Moral: yet
she also frequently takes the sunlight as the symbol of the achieved
Harmony and Peace, and the Fire-heat as that of more or less persisting
Conflict and Pain. She is doubtless right in keeping both symbols, and
in ever thinking of each as ultimately implying the other, for God is
Beauty and Truth, as well as Goodness and Love, and man is made with
the indestructible aspiration after Him in His living completeness.

And here again Catherine has a complicated doctrinal history behind her.

We have already considered the numerous Scriptural passages where
God and His effects upon the soul are symbolized as light and fire;
and those again where joy or, contrariwise, trial and suffering are
respectively pictured by the same physical properties. And Catherine
takes the latter passages as directly explanatory of the first, in
so far as these joys and sufferings are spiritual in their causes or
effects.

Among the Greek Fathers, Clement of Alexandria tells us that “the Fire”
of Purgatory,--for he has no Eternal Damnation,--“is a rational,”
spiritual, “fire that penetrates the soul”; and Origen teaches that
“each sinner himself lights the flame of his own fire, and is not
thrown into a fire that has been lit before that moment and that exists
in front of him.… His conscience is agitated and pierced by its own
pricks.” Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzum are more or
less influenced by Origen on this point. And St. John Damascene, who
died in about 750 A.D., says explicitly that the fire of Hell is not a
material fire, that it is very different from our ordinary fire, and
that men hardly know what it is.[224]

Among the Latins, St. Ambrose declares: “neither is the gnashing, a
gnashing of bodily teeth; nor is the everlasting fire, a fire of bodily
flames; nor is the worm, a bodily one.”--St. Jerome, in one passage,
counts the theory of the non-physical fire as one of Origen’s errors;
but elsewhere he mentions it without any unfavourable note, and even
enumerates several Scripture-texts which favour it, and admits that
“‘the worm which dieth not and the fire which is not quenched,’ is
understood, by the majority of interpreters (_a plerisque_), of the
conscience of sinners which tortures them.”[225]--St. Augustine, in
413 A.D., declares: “In the matter of the pains of the wicked, both
the unquenchable fire and the intensely living worm are interpreted
differently by different commentators. Some interpreters refer both
to the body, others refer both to the soul; and some take the fire
literally, in application to the body, and the worm figuratively,
in application to the soul, which latter opinion appears the more
credible.” Yet when, during the last years of his life, he came,
somewhat tentatively, to hold an other-world Purgatory as well, he
throughout assimilated this Purgatory’s fire to the fire of this-world
sufferings. Thus in 422 A.D.: “Souls which renounce the wood, hay,
straw, built upon that foundation (I Cor. iii, 11-15), not without pain
indeed (since they loved these things with a carnal affection), but
with faith in the foundation, a faith operative through love … arrive
at salvation, through a certain fire of pain.… Whether men suffer these
things in this life only, or such-like judgments follow even after
this life--in either case, this interpretation of that text is not
discordant with the truth.” “‘He shall be saved yet so as by fire,’
because the pain, over the loss of the things he loved, burns him. It
is not incredible that some such thing takes place even after this life
… that some of the faithful are saved by a certain purgatorial fire,
more quickly or more slowly, according as they have less or more loved
perishable things.”[226]

St. Thomas, voicing and leading Scholastic opinion, teaches that the
fire of Purgatory is the same as that of Hell; and Cardinal Bellarmine,
who died in 1621, tells us: “The common opinion of theologians is that
the fire of Purgatory is a real and true fire, of the same kind as an
earthly fire. This opinion, it is true, is not of faith, but it is very
probable,”--because of the “consent of the scholastics, who cannot be
despised without temerity,” and also because of “the eruptions of Mount
Etna.”[227] Yet the Council of Florence had, in 1439, restricted itself
to the quite general proposition that “if men die truly penitent,
in the love of God, before they have satisfied … for their sins …
their souls are purified by purgatorial pains after death”; thus
very deliberately avoiding all commitment as to the nature of these
pains.[228] Cardinal Gousset, who died in 1866, tells us: “The more
common opinion amongst theologians makes the sufferings of Purgatory
to consist in the pain of fire, or at least in a pain analogous to
that of fire.”[229] This latter position is practically identical with
Catherine’s.

As to the fire of Hell, although here especially the Scholastics, old
and new, are unanimous, it is certain that there is no definition or
solemn judgment of the Church declaring it to be material. On this
point again we find St. Thomas and those who follow him involved in
practically endless difficulties and in, for us now, increasingly
intolerable subtleties, where they try to show how a material fire
can affect an immaterial spirit. Bossuet, so severely orthodox in all
such matters, preaching, before the Court, about sin becoming in Hell
the chastisement of the sinner, does not hesitate to finish thus: “We
bear within our hearts the instrument of our punishment. ‘I shall
produce fire from thy midst, which shall devour thee’ (Ezek. xxviii,
18). I shall not send it against thee from afar, it will ignite in
thy conscience, its flames will arise from thy midst, and it will be
thy sins which will produce it.”[230]--And the Abbé F. Dubois, in a
careful article in the Ecclesiastical _Revue du Clergé Français_ of
Paris, has recently expressed the conviction that “the best minds of
our time, which are above being suspected of yielding to mere passing
fashions, feel the necessity of abandoning the literal interpretation,
judged to be insufficient, of the ancient symbols; and of returning
to a freer exegesis, of which some of the Ancients have given us the
example.”[231] Among these helpful “Ancients” we cannot but count
Catherine, with her One God Who is the Fire of Pain and the Light of
Joy to souls, according as they resist Him or will Him, either here or
hereafter.


III. CATHERINE AND ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.


_Introductory: four doctrines and difficulties to be considered._

Taking now the three great after-life conditions separately, in the
order of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, I would first of all note that
some readers may be disappointed that Catherine did not, like our
own English Mystic, the entirely orthodox optimist, Mother Juliana
of Norwich--her _Revelations_ belong to the year 1373 A.D.--simply
proclaim that, whilst the teaching and meaning of Christ and His
Church would come true, all, in ways known to God alone, would yet
be well.[232] In this manner, without any weakening of traditional
teaching, the whole dread secret as to the future of evil-doers is
left in the hands of God, and a beautifully boundless trust and hope
glows throughout those contemplations.

Yet, as I hope to show as we go along, certain assumptions and
conceptions, involved in the doctrine of Eternal Punishment, cannot
be systematically excluded, or even simply ignored, without a grave
weakening of the specifically Christian earnestness; and that,
grand as is, in certain respects, the idea of the Apocatastasis,
the Final Restitution of all Things and Souls--as taught by Clement
and Origen--it is not, at bottom, compatible with the whole drift,
philosophy, and tone, (even apart from specific sayings) of Our Lord.
And this latter teaching--of the simply abiding significance and effect
of our deliberate elections during this our one testing-time,--and
not that of an indefinite series of chances and purifications with
an ultimate disappearance of all difference between the results of
the worst life and the best, answers to the deepest postulates and
aspirations of the most complete and delicate ethical and spiritual
sense. For minds that can discriminate between shifting fashions and
solid growth in abiding truth, that will patiently seek out the deepest
instinct and simplest implications underlying the popular presentations
of the Doctrine of Abiding Consequences, and that take these
implications as but part of a larger whole: this doctrine still, and
now again, presents itself as a permanent element of the full religious
consciousness.

It would certainly be unfair to press Catherine’s rare and incidental
sayings on Hell into a formal system. Yet those remarks are deep and
suggestive, and help too much to interpret, supplement, and balance
her central, Purgatorial teaching, and indeed to elucidate her general
religious principles, for us to be able to pass them over. We have
already sufficiently considered the question as to the nature of the
Fire; and that as to Evil Spirits is reserved for the next Chapter.
Here I shall consider four doctrines and difficulties, together with
Catherine’s attitude towards them: the soul’s final fate, dependent
upon the character of the will’s act or active disposition at the
moment of the body’s death; the total moral perversion of the lost; the
mitigation of their pains; and the eternity of their punishment.


1. _Eternity dependent on the earthly life’s last moment._

Now as to the soul’s final fate being made dependent upon the
character of that soul’s particular act or disposition at the last
moment previous to death, this teaching, prominent in parts of the
_Trattato and Vita_, goes back ultimately to Ezekiel, who, as Prof.
Charles interestingly shows, introduces a double individualism into
the older, Social and Organic, Eschatology of the Hebrew Prophets.
For Man is seen, by him, as responsible for his own acts alone, and
as himself working out separately his own salvation or his own doom;
and this individual man again is looked at, not in his organic unity,
but as repeating himself in a succession of separate religious acts.
The individual act is taken to be a true expression of the whole man
at the moment of its occurrence: and hence, if this act is wicked at
the moment of the advent of the Kingdom, the agent will rightfully be
destroyed; but if it be righteous, he will be preserved.[233]--Now
the profound truth and genuine advance thus proclaimed, who can doubt
them? And yet it is clear that the doctrine here is solidly true, only
if taken as the explicitation and supplement, and even in part as the
corrective, of the previously predominant teaching. Take the Ezekielian
doctrine as complete, even for its own time, or as final over against
the later, the Gospel depth of teaching, (with its union of the social
body and of individual souls, and of the soul’s single acts and of the
general disposition produced by and reacting upon these acts), and you
get an all but solipsistic Individualism and an atomistic Psychology,
and you offend Christianity and Science equally.

It is evident that Catherine, if she can fairly be taxed with what,
if pressed, would, in her doctrine rather than in her life, be an
excessive Individualism, is, in her general teaching and practice,
admirably free from Psychological Atomism; indeed did any soul ever
understand better the profound reality of habits, general dispositions,
tones of mind and feeling and will, as distinct from the single acts
that gradually build them up and that, in return, are encircled and
coloured by them all? Her whole Purgatorial doctrine stands and falls
by this distinction, and this although, with a profound self-knowledge,
she does not hesitate to make the soul express, in one particular act
after death,--that of the Plunge,--an even deeper level of its true
attitude of will and of its moral character than is constituted by
those imperfect habits of the will, habits which it will take so much
suffering and acceptance of suffering gradually to rectify.

Thus the passages in which Catherine seems to teach that God can and
does, as it were, catch souls unawares, calling them away, and finally
deciding their fate on occasion of any and every _de facto_ volitional
condition at the instant of death, however little expressive of the
radical determination of that soul such an act or surface-state may be,
will have, (even if they be genuine, and most of them have doubtlessly
grown, perhaps have completely sprung up, under the pen of sermonizing
scribes), to be taken as hortatory, hence as partly hyperbolical.
And such an admission will in nowise deny the possibility for the
soul to express its deliberate and full disposition and determination
in a single act or combination of acts; nor that the other-world
effects will follow according to such deep, deliberate orientations
of the character: it will only deny that, at any and every moment,
any and every act of the soul sufficiently expresses its deliberate
disposition. Certainly it is comparatively rarely that the soul exerts
its full liberty, in an act of true, spiritual self-realization; and
an analogous rarity cannot but be postulated by religious philosophy
for contrary acts, of an approximately equal fulness of deliberation
and accuracy of representation, with regard to the soul’s volitional
state. And yet the operative influence towards such rare, fully
self-expressive acts of the right kind, and the aid towards similar,
massive, and truly representative volitions of the wrong kind, afforded
by even quite ordinary half-awake acts and habits of respectively good
or evil quality are so undeniable, and it is so impossible to draw
a general line as to where such wishes pass into full willings and
deliberate states: that the prevalence of a hortatory attitude towards
the whole subject is right and indeed inevitable.


2. _The reprobate will of the lost._

As to Moral Perversion, the reprobate will of the lost, we find that
Catherine approaches the question from two different, and at bottom,
on this point, incompatible, systems; but some incidental and short
sayings of hers give us suggestive hints towards a consistent position
in this difficult matter.

Catherine has a double approach. For, consistently with the strong
Neo-Platonist, Dionysian strain in her mind, she frequently teaches and
implies that Evil is the absence of Good, of Love, and nothing positive
at all. In this case Evil would not only be less strong than good--only
Manichaeans would maintain that they were equal--but, as against the
constructive force of good, it would have no kind even of destructive
strength. Varying amounts, degrees, and kinds of good, but good and
only good, everywhere, would render all, even transitory, pollution of
the soul, and all, even passing, purification of it, so much actual
impossibility and theoretical superstition. All that survived at all,
could but be good; and at most some good might be added, but no evil
could be removed, since none would exist.--Yet all this is, of course,
strongly denied and supplanted by the, at first sight, less beautiful,
but far deeper and alone fully Christian, position of her specifically
Purgatorial teaching. Here Evil is something positive, an active
disposition, orientation, and attachment of the will; it is not without
destructive force; and its cure is a positive change in that will and
its habits, and not a mere addition of good. Yet it is plain that, even
exclusively within the implications of this deeper conviction, there
is no necessity to postulate unmixed evil in the disposition of any
soul. In some the evil would be triumphing over the good; in others
good would be triumphing over evil,--each over the other, in every
degree of good or of evil, up to the all but complete extinction of all
inclinations to evil or to good respectively.

And Catherine has suggestive sayings. For one or two of them go, at
least in their implications, beyond a declaration as to the presence
of God’s extrinsic mercy in Hell, a presence indicated by a mitigation
of the souls’ sufferings to below what these souls deserve; and even
beyond the Areopagite’s insistence upon the presence of some real good
in these souls, since he hardly gets beyond their continuous possession
of those non-moral goods, existence, intelligence, and will-power.[234]
For when she says, “The ray of God’s mercy shines even in Hell,” she
need not, indeed, mean more than that extrinsic mercy, and its effect,
that mitigation. But when she declares: “if a creature could be found
that did not participate in the divine Goodness,--that creature would,
as it were, be as malignant as God is good,” we cannot, I think, avoid
applying this to the moral dispositions of such souls.[235]

Now I know that St. Thomas had already taught, in at first sight
identical terms: “Evil cannot exist (quite) pure without the admixture
of good, as the Supreme Good exists free from all admixture of evil.…
Those who are detained in Hell, are not bereft of all good”;[236] and
yet he undoubtedly maintained the complete depravation of the will’s
dispositions in these souls. And, again, after Catherine’s first
declaration there follow, (at least in the text handed down in the
_Vita_), words which explain that extrinsic mercy, not as mitigating
the finite amount of suffering due to the sinner, but as turning the
infinite suffering due to the sinner’s infinite malice, into a finite,
though indefinite amount; and hence, in the second declaration, a
corresponding interior mercy may be signified--God’s grace preventing
the sinner from being infinitely wicked.

But Catherine, unlike St. Thomas, expressly speaks not only of Good and
Evil, but of Good and Malignancy; and Malignancy undoubtedly refers
to dispositions of the will. And even if the words, now found as the
sequel to the first saying, be authentic, they belong to a different
occasion, and cannot be allowed to force the meaning of words spoken
at another time. In this latter saying the words “as it were” show
plainly that she is not thinking of a possible infiniteness of human
wickedness which has been changed, through God’s mercy, to an actual
finitude of evil; but is simply asking herself whether a man could be,
not infinitely but wholly, malignant. For she answers that, were this
possible, a man would “as it were” be as malignant as God is good, and
thus shows that the malignancy, which she denies, would only in a sense
form a counterpart to God’s benevolence: since, though the man would be
as entirely malignant as God is entirely good, God would still remain
infinite in His goodness as against the finitude of Man’s wickedness.

The difficulties of such a combination of convictions are, of course,
numerous and great. Psychologically it seems hard to understand why
this remnant of good disposition should be unable to germinate further
and further good, so that, at last, good would leaven the whole
soul. From the point of view of any Theodicy, it appears difficult
to justify the unending exclusion of such a soul from growth in, and
the acquirement of, a predominantly good will and the happiness that
accompanies such a will. And the testimony of Our Lord Himself and of
the general doctrine of the Church appear definitely opposed: for does
not His solemn declaration: “Hell, where their worm dieth not” (Mark
ix, 48), find its authoritative interpretation in the common Church
teaching as to the utterly reprobate will of the lost? And indeed
Catherine herself, in her great saying that if but one little drop of
Love could fall into Hell (that is, surely, if but the least beginning
of a right disposition towards God could enter those souls) Hell would
be turned into Heaven, seems clearly to endorse this position.

And yet, we have full experience in this life of genuinely good
dispositions being present, and yet not triumphing or even spreading
within the soul; of such conditions being, in various degrees, our own
fault; and of such defeat bringing necessarily with it more or less of
keen suffering.--There would be no injustice if, after a full, good
chance and sufficient aid had been given to the soul to actualize its
capabilities of spiritual self-constitution, such a soul’s deliberately
sporadic, culpably non-predominant, good did not, even eventually, lead
to the full satisfaction of that soul’s essential cravings.--The saying
attributed to Our Lord, which appears in St. Mark alone, is a pure
quotation from Isaiah lxvi, 24 and Ecclesiasticus vii, 17, and does not
seem to require more than an abiding distress of conscience, an eternal
keenness of remorse.

Again, the common Church-teaching is undoubtedly voiced by St. Thomas
in the words, “Since these souls are completely averse to the final end
of right reason, they must be declared to be without any good will.”
Yet St. Thomas himself (partly in explanation of the Areopagite’s
words, “the evil spirits desire the good and the best, namely, to
be, to live, and to understand”), is obliged to distinguish between
such souls’ deliberate will and their “natural will and inclination,”
and to proclaim that this latter, “which is not from themselves but
from the Author of nature, who put this inclination into nature … can
indeed be good.”[237] And, if we would not construct a scheme flatly
contradictory of all earthly experience, we can hardly restrict the
soul, even in the beyond, to entirely indeliberate, good inclinations,
and to fully deliberate, bad volitions, but cannot help interposing
an indefinite variety of inchoative energizings, half-wishes, and
the like, and thinking of these as mixed with good and evil. Indeed
this conclusion seems also required by the common teaching that the
suffering there differs from soul to soul, and this because of the
different degrees of the guilt: for such degrees depend undoubtedly
even more upon the degree of deliberation and massiveness of the will
than upon the degree of objective badness in the deed, and hence can
hardly fail to leave variously small or large fragments of more or less
good and imperfectly deliberate wishings and energizings present in the
soul.

And finally Catherine’s “little drop of Love” would, she says, “at
once” turn Hell into Heaven, and hence cannot mean some ordinary good
moral disposition or even such supernatural virtues as theological
Faith and Hope, but Pure Love alone, which latter queen of all the
virtues she is explicitly discussing there. Thus she in nowise requires
the absence from these souls of a certain remnant of semi-deliberate
virtue of a less exalted, and not necessarily regenerative kind.


3. _Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost._

As to the Mitigation of the Suffering, it is remarkable that Catherine,
who has been so bold concerning the source of the pains, and the
dispositions, of the lost souls, does not more explicitly teach such
an alleviation. I say “remarkable,” because important Fathers and
Churches, that were quite uninfected by Origenism, have held and have
acted upon such a doctrine. St. Augustine, in his _Enchiridion_ (A.D.
423 (?)) tells us that “in so far as” the Offering of the Sacrifice of
the Altar and Alms “profit” souls in the beyond, “they profit them by
procuring a full remission (of the punishment), or at least that their
damnation may become more tolerable.” And after warning men against
believing in an end to the sufferings of the lost, he adds: “But let
them consider, if they like, that the sufferings of the damned are
somewhat mitigated during certain intervals of time.”[238]--Saints
John Chrysostom and John Damascene, thoroughly orthodox Greek Fathers,
and the deeply devout hymn-writer Prudentius among the Latins, teach
similar doctrine; and in many ancient Latin missals, ranging from the
eleventh to the fourteenth century, prayers for the Mitigation of the
Sufferings of the Damned are to be found.[239]

Hence the great Jesuit Theologian Petau, though not himself
sharing this view, can declare: “Concerning such a breathing-time
(_respiratio_) of lost souls, nothing certain has as yet been decreed
by the Catholic Church, so that this opinion of most holy Fathers
should not temerariously be rejected as absurd, even though it be
foreign to the common opinion of Catholics in our time.”[240] And the
Abbé Emery, that great Catholic Christian, the second founder of St.
Sulpice, who died in 1811, showed, in a treatise _On the Mitigation
of the Pains of the Damned_, that this view had also been held by
certain Scholastic Theologians, and had been defended, without any
opposition, by Mark of Ephesus, in the Sessions of the Council of
Florence (A.D. 1439); and concluded that this doctrine was not contrary
to the Catholic Faith and did not deserve any censure. The most learned
Theologians in Rome found nothing reprehensible in this treatise, and
Pope Pius VII caused his Theologian, the Barnabite General, Padre
Fontana, to thank M. Emery for the copy sent by him to the Holy
Father.[241]

Catherine herself cannot well have been thinking of anything but some
such Mitigation when she so emphatically teaches that God’s mercy
extends even into Hell. Indeed, even the continuation of this great
saying in the present _Vita_-text formally teaches such Mitigation, yet
practically withdraws it, by making it consist in a rebate and change,
from an infinitude in degree and duration into a finitude in degree
though not in duration.[242] But, as we have already found, this highly
schematic statement is doubtless one of the later glosses, in which
case her true meaning must have been substantially that of the Fathers
referred to, viz. that the suffering, taken as anyhow finite in its
degree, gets mercifully mitigated for these souls.--And, if she was
here also faithful to her general principles, she will have conceived
the mitigation, not as simply sporadic and arbitrary, but as more or
less progressive, and connected with the presence in these souls of
those various degrees of semi-voluntary good inclinations and wishes,
required by her other saying. Even if these wishings could slowly and
slightly increase, and the sufferings could similarly decrease, this
would in nowise imply or require a final full rectification of the
deliberate will itself, and hence not a complete extinction of the
resultant suffering. Hell would still remain essentially distinct
from Purgatory; for in Purgatory the deliberate, active will is good
from the first, and only the various semi-volitions and old habits are
imperfect, but are being gradually brought into full harmony with that
will, by the now complete willing of the soul; and hence this state
has an end; whereas in Hell the deliberate, active will is bad from
the first, and only various partially deliberate wishes and tendencies
are good, but cannot be brought to fruition in a full virtuous
determination of the dominant character of the soul, and hence _this_
state has no end.


4. _The Endlessness of Hell._

And lastly, as to the Endlessness of this condition of the Lost, it is,
of course, plain that Catherine held this defined doctrine; and again,
that “the chief weight, in the Church-teaching as to Hell, rests upon
Hell’s Eternity.”[243]

Here I would suggest five groups of considerations:

(1) Precisely this Eternity appears to be the feature of all others
which is ever increasingly decried by contemporary philosophy and
liberal theology as impossible and revolting. Thus it is frequently
argued as though, not the indiscriminateness nor the materiality nor
the forensic externality nor the complete fixity of the sufferings, nor
again the complete malignity of the lost were incredible, and hence
the unendingness of such conditions were impossible of acceptance;
but, on the contrary, as though,--be the degree and nature of those
sufferings conceived as ever so discriminated, spiritual, interior, and
relatively mobile, and as occasioned and accompanied by a disposition
in which semi-voluntary good is present,--the simple assumption of
anything unending or final about them, at once renders the whole
doctrine impossible to believe. It is true that Tennyson and Browning
take the doctrine simply in its popular Calvinistic form, and then
reject it; and even John Stuart Mill and Frederick Denison Maurice
hardly consider the eternity separately. But certainly that thoughtful
and religious-minded writer, Mr. W. R. Greg, brings forward the
eternity-doctrine as, already in itself, “a _curiosa infelicitas_ which
is almost stupidity on the part of the Church.”[244]

(2) Yet it is plain how strongly, even in Mr. Greg’s case, the supposed
(local, physical, indiscriminate, etc.) nature of the state affects
the writer’s judgment as to the possibility of its unendingness,--as
indeed is inevitable. And it is even clearer, I think, that precisely
this eternity-doctrine stands for a truth which is but an ever-present
mysterious corollary to every deeply ethical or spiritual, and,
above all, every specifically Christian view of life. For every such
view comes, surely, into hopeless collision with its own inalienable
requirements if it _will_ hold that the deepest ethical and spiritual
acts and conditions are,--avowedly performed though they be in time
and space--simply temporary in their inmost nature and effects;
whereas every vigorously ethical religion, in so far as it has reached
a definite personal-immortality doctrine at all, cannot admit that
the soul’s deliberate character remains without any strictly final
and permanent results. The fact is that we get here to a profound
ethical and spiritual postulate, which cannot be adequately set aside
on the ground that it is the product of barbarous ages and vindictive
minds, since this objection applies only to the physical picturings,
the indiscriminateness, non-mitigation, and utter reprobation; or on
the ground that a long, keen purification, hence a temporally finite
suffering, would do as well, since, when all this has completely
passed away, there would be an entire obliteration of all difference
in the consequences of right and wrong; or that acts and dispositions
built up in time cannot have other than finite consequences, since
this is to naturalize radically the deepest things of life; or finally
that “Evil,” as the Areopagite would have it, “is not,”[245] since
thus the very existence of the conviction as to free-will and sin
becomes more inexplicable than the theoretical difficulties against
Libertarianism are insoluble.--Against this deep requirement of the
most alert and complete ethical and spiritual life the wave of any
Apocatastasis-doctrine or -emotion will, in the long run, ever break
itself in vain.

(3) The doctrine of Conditional Immortality has, I think, many
undeniable advantages over every kind of Origenism. This view does not,
as is often imputed to it, believe in the annihilation by Omnipotence
of the naturally immortal souls of impenitent grave sinners; but simply
holds that human souls begin with the capacity of acquiring, with the
help of God’s Spirit, a spiritual personality, built up out of the mere
possibilities and partial tendencies of their highly mixed natures,
which, if left uncultivated and untranscended, become definitely fixed
at the first, phenomenal, merely individual level,--so that spiritual
personality alone deserves to live on and does so, whilst this animal
individuality does not deserve and does not do so. The soul is thus
not simply born as, but can become more and more, that “inner man” who
alone persists, indeed who “is renewed day by day, even though our
outward man perish.”[246]

This conception thus fully retains, indeed increases, the profound
ultimate difference between the results of spiritual and personal, and
of animal and simply individual life respectively,--standing, as it
does, at the antipodes to Origenism; it eliminates all unmoralized,
unspiritualized elements from the ultimate world, without keeping souls
in an apparently fruitless suffering; and it gives full emphasis to a
supremely important, though continually forgotten fact,--the profoundly
expensive, creative, positive process and nature of spiritual
character. No wonder, then, that great thinkers and scholars, such
as Goethe, Richard Rothe, Heinrich Holtzmann, and some Frenchmen and
Englishmen have held this view.[247]

Yet the objections against this view, taken in its strictness, are
surely conclusive. For how can an originally simply mortal substance,
force, or entity become immortal, and a phenomenal nature be leavened
by a spiritual principle which, _ex hypothesi_, is not present within
it? And how misleadingly hyperbolical, according to this, would be
the greatest spiritual exhortations, beginning with those of Our Lord
Himself!

(4) And yet the conception of Conditional Immortality cannot be
far from the truth, since everything, surely, points to a lowered
consciousness in the souls in question, or at least to one lower
than that in the ultimate state of the saved. This conception of the
shrunken condition of these souls was certainly held by Catherine,
even if the other, the view of a heightened, consciousness, appears
in hortatory passages which just _may_ be authentic; and indeed only
that conception is conformable with her fundamental position that
love alone is fully positive and alone gives vital strength, and that
all fully deliberate love is absent from the lost souls. And if we
consider how predominantly hortatory in tone and object the ordinary
teaching on this point cannot fail to be; and, on the other hand, how
close to Manichaeism, any serious equating of the force and intensity
of life and consciousness between the Saved and the Lost would be, we
can hardly fail to find ourselves free, indeed compelled, to hold a
lesser consciousness for the Lost than for the Saved. Whilst the joyful
life of the Saved would range, in harmonious intensity, beyond all that
we can experience here, the painful consciousness of the Lost would
be, in various degrees, indefinitely less. The Saved would thus not be
only _other_ than the Lost, they would actually be _more_: for God is
Life supreme, and, where there is more affinity with God, there is more
life, and more consciousness.

(5) But, if the view just stated is the more likely one, then we
cannot soften the sufferings of those souls, by giving them a sense of
Eternity, of one unending momentary Now, instead of our earthly sense
of Succession, as Cardinal Newman and Father Tyrrell have attempted to
do, in a very instructive and obviously orthodox manner.[248] I shall
presently argue strongly in favour of some consciousness of Eternity
being traceable in our best moments here, and of this consciousness
being doubtless more extended in the future blessed life. But here I
have only to consider whether for one who, like Catherine, follows the
analogy of earthly experience, the Lost should be considered nearer to,
or farther from, such a _Totum-Simul_ consciousness than we possess
now, here below, at our best? And to this the answer must, surely, be
that they are further away from it. Yet God in His mercy may allow
this greater successiveness, if unaccompanied by any keen memory or
prevision, to help in effecting that mitigation of the suffering which
we have already allowed.


IV. CATHERINE AND PURGATORY.


1. _Introductory._


(1) _Changed feeling concerning Purgatory._

In the matter of a Purgatory, a very striking return of religious
feeling towards its normal equilibrium has been occurring in the most
unexpected, entirely unprejudiced quarters, within the last century
and a half. In Germany we have Lessing, who, in the wake of Leibniz,
encourages the acceptance of “that middle state which the greater part
of our fellow-Christians have adopted”: Schleiermacher, who calls the
overpassing of a middle state by a violent leap at death “a magical
proceeding”; David F. Strauss, who entirely agrees; Carl von Hase, who,
in his very Manual of Anti-Roman Polemics admits that “most men when
they die are probably too good for Hell, but they are certainly too bad
for Heaven”; the delicately thoughtful philosopher Fechner who, in the
most sober-minded of his religious works, insists upon our “conceiving
the life beyond according to the analogy of this-life conditions,” and
refers wistfully to “the belief which is found amongst all peoples
and is quite shrunken only among Protestants--that the living can
still do something to aid the dead”; and Prof. Anrich, probably the
greatest contemporary authority on the Hellenic elements incorporated
in Christian doctrine, declares, all definite Protestant though he
is, that “legitimate religious postulates underlie the doctrine of
Purgatory.”[249] And in England that sensitively religious Unitarian,
W. R. Greg, tells us “Purgatory, ranging from a single day to a century
of ages, offers that borderland of discriminating retribution for which
justice and humanity cry out”; and the Positivist, John Stuart Mill,
declares at the end of his life: “All the probabilities in case of a
future life are that such as we have been made or have made ourselves
before the change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter.… To
imagine that a miracle will be wrought at death … making perfect every
one whom it is His will to include among His elect … is utterly opposed
to every presumption that can be adduced from the light of nature.”[250]


(2) _Causes of the previous prejudice._

Indeed the general principle of ameliorative suffering is so obviously
true and inexhaustibly profound that only many, long-lived abuses
in the practice, and a frequent obscuration in the teaching, of the
doctrine, can explain and excuse the sad neglect, indeed discredit,
into which the very principle and root-doctrine has fallen among
well-nigh one-half of Western Christendom. As to the deplorably
widespread existence, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, of
both these causes, which largely occasioned or strengthened each other,
we have the unimpeachable authority of the Council of Trent itself: for
it orders the Bishops “not to permit that uncertain doctrines, or such
as labour under the presumption of falsity, be propagated and taught,”
and “to prohibit, as so many scandals and stones of stumbling for the
faithful, whatever belongs to a certain curiosity or superstition or
savours of filthy lucre.”[251] The cautious admissions of the strictly
Catholic scholar-theologian, Dr. N. Paulus, and the precise documentary
additions and corrections to Paulus furnished, directly from the
contemporary documents, by the fair-minded Protestant worker at
Reformation History, Prof. T. Brieger, now furnish us, conjointly, with
the most vivid and detailed picture of the sad subtleties and abuses
which gave occasion to that Decree.[252]


(3) _Catherine’s purgatorial conceptions avoid those causes. Her
conceptions harbour two currents of thought._

It is surely not a small recommendation of Catherine’s mode of
conceiving Purgatory, that it cuts, as we shall see, at the very root
of those abuses. Yet we must first face certain opposite dangers and
ambiguities which are closely intertwined with the group of terms
and images taken over, for the purpose of describing an immanental
Purgation, by her and her great Alexandrian Christian predecessors,
from the Greek Heathen world. And only after the delimitation of the
defect in the suggestions which still so readily operate from out of
these originally Hellenic ideas, can we consider the difficulties and
imperfections peculiar to the other, in modern times the predominant,
element in the complete teaching as to the Middle State, an element
mostly of Jewish and Roman provenance, and aiming at an extrinsically
punitive conception. Both currents can be properly elucidated only if
we first take them historically.


1. _Jewish prayers for the dead._

It is admitted on all hands that, in the practical form of Prayers for
the Dead, the general doctrine of a Middle State can be traced back, in
Judaism, up to the important passage in the Second Book of Maccabees,
c. ii, vv. 43-45, where Judas Maccabaeus sends about two thousand
drachms of silver to Jerusalem, in order that a Sin-Offering may be
offered up for the Jews fallen in battle against Gorgias, upon whose
bodies heathen amulets had been found. “He did excellently in this …
it is a holy and devout thought. Hence he instituted the Sin-Offering
for the dead, that they might be loosed from their sins.” That battle
occurred in B.C. 166, and this book appears to have been written in
B.C. 124, in Egypt, by a Jew of the school of the Pharisees.

Now it is difficult not to recognize, in the doctrinal comment upon the
facts here given, rather as yet the opinions of a Judaeo-Alexandrian
circle, which was small even at the time of the composition of the
comment, than the general opinion of Judaism at the date of Judas’s
act. For if this act had been prompted by a clear and generally
accepted conviction as to the resurrection, and the efficacy of prayers
for the dead, the writer would have had no occasion or inclination to
make an induction of his own as to the meaning and worth of that act;
and we should find some indications of such a doctrine and practice in
the voluminous works of Philo and Josephus, some century and a half
later on. But all such indications are wanting in these writers.

And in the New Testament there is, with regard to helping the dead,
only that curious passage: “If the dead do not arise, what shall they
do who are baptized for the dead?”[253] where St. Paul refers, without
either acceptance or blame, to a contemporary custom among Christian
Proselytes from Paganism, who offered up that bath of initiation for
the benefit of the souls of deceased relatives who had died without any
such purification. Perhaps not till Rabbi Akiba’s time, about 130 A.D.,
had prayers for the dead become part of the regular Synagogue ritual.
By 200 A.D. Tertullian speaks of the practice as of an established
usage among the Christian communities: “we make oblations for the Dead,
on their anniversary, every year”; although “if you ask where is the
law concerning this custom in Scripture, you cannot read of any such
there. Tradition will appear before you as its initiator, custom as its
confirmer, and faith as its observer.”[254]

It is interesting to note how considerably subsequent to the practice
is, in this instance also, its clear doctrinal justification. Indeed
the Jews are, to this hour, extraordinarily deficient in explicit,
harmonious conceptions on the matter. Certainly throughout Prof. W.
Bacher’s five volumes of Sayings of the Jewish Rabbis from 30 B.C.
to 400 A.D., I can only find the following saying, by Jochanan the
Amoraean, who died 279 A.D.: “There are three books before God, in
which men are inscribed according to their merit and their guilt: that
of the perfectly devout, that of the perfect evil-doers, and that of
the middle, the uncertain souls. The devout and the evil-doers receive
their sentence on New Year’s day … the first, unto life; the second,
unto death. As to middle souls, their sentence remains in suspense
till the day of Atonement: if by then they have done penance, they get
written down alongside of the devout; if not, they are written down
alongside of the evil-doers.”[255]


2. _Alexandrine Fathers on Purgatory._

Yet it is the Platonizing Alexandrian Fathers Clement and Origen,
(they died, respectively, in about 215 and in 254 A.D.), who are the
first, and to this hour the most important, Christian spokesmen for
a state of true intrinsic purgation. We have already deliberately
rejected their Universalism; but this error in no way weakens the
profound truth of their teaching as to the immanental, necessary
inter-connection between suffering and morally imperfect habits, and
as to the ameliorative effects of suffering where, as in Purgatory, it
is willed by a right moral determination. Thus Clement: “As children
at the hands of their teacher or father, so also are we punished by
Providence. God does not avenge Himself, for vengeance is to repay
evil by evil, but His punishment aims at our good.” “Although a
punishment, it is an emendation of the soul.” “The training which
men call punishments.”[256] And Origen: “The fury of God’s vengeance
profits unto the purification of souls; the punishment is unto
purgation.” “These souls receive, in the prison, not the retribution
of their folly, but a benefaction in the purification from the evils
contracted in that folly,--a purification effected by means of salutary
troubles.”[257]

Now Clement is fully aware of the chief source for his formulation of
these deeply spiritual and Christian instincts and convictions. “Plato
speaks well when he teaches that ‘men who are punished, experience in
truth a benefit: for those who get justly punished, profit through
their souls becoming better.’”[258] But Plato, in contradistinction
from Clement, holds that this applies only to such imperfect souls as
“have sinned curable sins”; he has a Hell as well as a Purgatory: yet
his Purgatory, as Clement’s, truly purges: the souls are there because
they are partially impure, and they cease to be there when they are
completely purified.

And Plato, in his turn, makes no secret as to whence he got his
suggestions and raw materials, _viz._ the Orphic priesthood and
its literature, which, ever since the sixth century B.C., had been
succeeding to and supplanting the previous Orgiastic Dionysianism.[259]
Plato gives us vivid pictures of their doings in Athens, at the time
of his writing, in about 380 B.C. “Mendicant prophets go to rich men’s
doors, and persuade these men that they have a power committed to them
of making an atonement for their sins, or for those of their fathers,
by sacrifices and incantations … and they persuade whole cities that
expiations and purifications of sin may be made by sacrifices and
amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of
the living and the dead.”[260]--Yet from these men, thus scorned as
well-nigh sheer impostors, Plato takes over certain conceptions and
formulations which contribute one of the profoundest, still unexhausted
elements to his teaching,--although this element is, at bottom, in
conflict with that beautiful but inadequate, quite anti-Orphic,
conception of his--the purely negative character of Evil. For the
Orphic literary remains, fragmentary and late though they be, plainly
teach that moral or ritual transgressions are a defilement of the soul,
an infliction of positive stains upon it; that these single offences
and “spots” produce a generally sinful and “spotted” condition;
and that this condition is amenable to and requires purification by
suffering,--water, or more frequently fire, which wash or burn out
these stains of sin. So Plutarch (who died about 120 A.D.) still
declares that the souls in Hades have stains of different colours
according to the different passions; and the object of the purificatory
punishment is “that, these stains having been worn away, the soul may
become altogether resplendent.” And Virgil, when he declares “the
guilt which infects the soul is washed out or burnt out … until a
long time-span has effaced the clotted stain, and leaves the heavenly
conscience pure”: is utilizing an Orphic-Pythagorean Hades-book.[261]

This conception of positive stains is carefully taken over by the
Alexandrian Fathers: Clement speaks of “removing, by continuous prayer,
the stains (κηλίδας) contracted through former sins,” and declares
that “the Gnostic,” the perfect Christian, “fears not death, having
purified himself from all the spots (σπίλους) on his soul.” And Origen
describes “the pure soul that is not weighed down by leaden weights of
wickedness,” where the spots have turned to leaden pellets such as were
fastened to fishing-nets. Hence, says Clement, “post-baptismal sins
have to be purified out” of the soul; and, says Origen, “these rivers
of fire are declared to be of God, who causes the evil that is mixed up
with the whole soul to disappear from out of it.”[262]

In Pseudo-Dionysius the non-Orphic, purely negative, view prevails:
“Evil is neither in demons nor in us as an existent evil, but as a
failure and dearth in the perfection of our own proper goods.” And St.
Thomas similarly declares that “different souls have correspondingly
different stains, like shadows differ in accordance with the difference
of the bodies which interpose themselves between the light.”[263]

But Catherine, in this inconsistent with her own general
Privation-doctrine, again conceives the stain, the “macchia del
peccato,” as Cardinal Manning has acutely observed, not simply as a
deprivation of the light of glory, but “as the cause, not the effect,
of God’s not shining into the soul”: it includes in it the idea of
an imperfection, weakness with regard to virtue, bad (secondary)
dispositions, and unheavenly tastes.[264]


3. _The true and the false in the Orphic conception._

Now precisely in this profoundly true conception of Positive Stain
there lurk certain dangers, which all proceed from the original Orphic
diagnosis concerning the source of these stains, and these dangers will
have to be carefully guarded against.

(1) The conviction as to the purificatory power of fire was no doubt,
originally, the direct consequence from the Orphic belief as to the
intrinsically staining and imprisoning effect of the body upon the
soul. “The soul, as the Orphics say, is enclosed in the body, in
punishment for the punishable acts”; “liberations” from the body,
and “purifications” of the living and the dead, ever, with them,
proceed together. And hence to burn the dead body was considered
to purify the soul that had been stained by that prison-house: the
slain Clytemnestra, says Euripides, “is purified, as to her body, by
fire,” for, as the Scholiast explains, “fire purifies all things,
and burnt bodies are considered holy.”[265] And such an intensely
anti-body attitude we find, not only fully developed later on into a
deliberate anti-Incarnational doctrine, among the Gnostics, but, as we
have already seen, slighter traces of this same tone may be found in
the (doubtless Alexandrian) Book of Wisdom, and in one, not formally
doctrinal passage, a momentary echo of it, in St. Paul himself.
And Catherine’s attitude is generally, and often strongly, in this
direction.

(2) A careful distinction is evidently necessary here. The doctrine
that sin defiles,--affects the quality of the soul’s moral and
spiritual dispositions, and that this defilement and perversion, ever
occasioned by the search after facile pleasure or the flight from
fruitful pain, can normally be removed and corrected only by a long
discipline of fully accepted, gradually restorative pain, either here,
or hereafter, or both: are profound anticipations, and have been most
rightly made integral parts, of the Christian life and conception. The
doctrine that the body is essentially a mere accident or superaddition
or necessary defilement to the soul, is profoundly untrue, in its
exaggeration and one-sidedness: for if the body is the occasion of
the least spiritual of our sins, it can and should become the chief
servant of the spirit; the slow and difficult training of this servant
is one of the most important means of development for the soul itself;
and many faults and vices are not occasioned by the body at all, whilst
none are directly and necessarily caused by it. Without the body, we
should not have impurity, but neither should we have specifically
human purity of soul; and without it, given the persistence and
activity of the soul, there could be as great, perhaps greater, pride
and _solipsism_, the most anti-Christian of all the vices. Hence if,
in Our Lord’s teaching, we find no trace of a Gnostic desire for
purification from all things bodily as essentially soul-staining, we do
find a profound insistence upon purity of heart, and upon the soul’s
real, active “turning,” conversion, (an interior change from an un- or
anti-moral attitude to an ethical and spiritual dependence upon God),
as a _sine qua non_ condition for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.
And the Joannine teachings re-affirm this great truth for us as a
_Metabasis_, a moving from Death over to Life.


4. _Catherine’s conceptions as to the character of the stains and of
their purgation._

And this idea, as to an intrinsic purgation through suffering of
impurities contracted by the soul, can be kept thoroughly Christian,
if we ever insist, with Catherine in her most emphatic and deepest
teachings, that Purgation can and should be effected in this life,
hence in the body,--in and through all the right uses of the body,
as well as in and through all the legitimate and will-strengthening
abstentions from such uses; that the subject-matter of such purgation
are the habits and inclinations contrary to our best spiritual lights,
and which we have largely ourselves built up by our variously perverse
or slothful acts, but which in no case are directly caused by the body,
and in many cases are not even occasioned by it; and, finally, that
holiness consists primarily, not in the absence of faults, but in the
presence of spiritual force, in Love creative, Love triumphant,--the
soul becoming flame rather than snow, and dwelling upon what to do,
give and be, rather than upon what to shun.--Catherine’s predominant,
ultimate tone possesses this profound positiveness, and corrects all
but entirely whatever, if taken alone, would appear to render the
soul’s substantial purity impossible in this life; to constitute the
body a direct and necessary cause of impurity to the soul; and to find
the ideal of perfection in the negative condition of being free from
stain. In her greatest sayings, and in her actual life, Purity is
found to be Love, and this Love is exercised, not only in the inward,
home-coming, recollective movement,--in the purifying of the soul’s
dispositions, but also in the outgoing, world-visiting, dispersive
movement,--in action towards fellow-souls.


5. _Judaeo-Roman conception of Purgatory._

And this social side and movement brings us to the second element and
current in the complete doctrine of a Middle State,--a constituent
which possesses affinities and advantages, and produces excesses
and abuses, directly contrary to those proper to the element of an
intrinsic purgation.

(1) Here we get early Christian utilizations, for purposes of a
doctrine concerning the Intermediate State, of sayings and images which
dwell directly only upon certain extrinsic consequences of evil-doing,
or which, again, describe a future historical and social event,--the
Last Day. For already Origen interprets, in his beautiful _Treatise on
Prayer_, XXIX, 16, Our Lord’s words as to the debtor: “Thou shalt be
cast into prison, thou shalt not come forth from thence, until thou
hast paid the uttermost farthing,” Matt, v, 25, 26, as applying to
Purgatory. And in his _Contra Celsum_, VII, 13, he already takes, as
the Biblical _locus classicus_ for a Purgatory, St. Paul’s words as to
how men build, upon the one foundation Christ, either gold, silver,
gems, or wood, hay, stubble; and how fire will test each man’s work;
and, if the work remain, he shall receive a reward, but if it be burnt,
he shall suffer loss and yet he himself shall be saved yet so as by
fire, 1 Cor. iii, 10-15. It appears certain, however, that St. Paul
is, in this passage, thinking directly of the Last Day, the End of the
World, with its accompaniment of physical fire, and as to how far the
various human beings, then on earth, will be able to endure the dread
stress and testing of that crisis; and he holds that some will be fit
to bear it and some will not.

Such a destruction of the world by fire appears elsewhere in
Palestinian Jewish literature,--in the Book of Enoch and the Testament
of Levi; and in the New Testament, in 2 Peter iii, 12: “The heavens
being on fire shall be dissolved, the elements shall melt with fervent
heat.” Josephus, _Antiquities_, XI, ii, 3, teaches a destruction by
fire and another by water. And the Stoics, to whom also Clement and
Origen appeal, had gradually modified their first doctrine of a simply
cosmological Ekpyrōsis, a renovation of the physical universe by fire,
into a moral purification of the earth, occasioned by, and applied
to, the sinfulness of man. Thus Seneca has the double, water-and-fire,
instrument: “At that time the tide” of the sea “will be borne along
free from all measure, for the same reason which will cause the future
conflagration. Both occur when it seems fit to God to initiate a better
order of things and to have done with the old.… The judgment of mankind
being concluded, the primitive order of things will be recalled, and to
the earth will be re-given man innocent of crimes.”[266]

(2) It is interesting to note how--largely under the influence of the
forensic temper and growth of the Canonical Penitential system, and
of its successive relaxations in the form of substituted lighter good
works, Indulgences,--the Latin half of Christendom, ever more social
and immediately practical than the Greek portion, came, in general,
more and more to dwell upon two ideas suggested to their minds by
those two, Gospel and Pauline, passages. The one idea was that souls
which, whilst fundamentally well-disposed, are not fit for Heaven at
the body’s death, can receive instant purification by the momentary
fire of the Particular Judgment; and the other held that, thus already
entirely purified and interiorly fit for Heaven, they are but detained
(in what we ought, properly, to term a _Satisfactorium_), to suffer
the now completely non-ameliorative, simply vindictive, infliction of
punishment,--a punishment still, in strict justice, due to them for
past sins, of which the guilt and the deteriorating effects upon their
own souls have been fully remitted and cured.

In this way it was felt that the complete unchangeableness of the
condition of every kind of soul after death, or at least after the
Particular Judgment (a Judgment held practically to synchronize with
death), was assured. And indeed how could there be any interior growth
in Purgatory, seeing that there is no meriting there? Again it was
thought that thus the vision of God at the moment of Judgment was given
an operative value for the spiritual amelioration of souls which,
already in substantially good dispositions, could hardly be held to
pass through so profound an experience without intrinsic improvement,
as the other view seemed to hold.--And, above all, this form of the
doctrine was found greatly to favour the multiplication among the
people of prayers, Masses and good-works for the dead; since the _modus
operandi_ of such acts seemed thus to become entirely clear, simple,
immediate, and, as it were, measurable and mechanical. For these souls
in their “Satisfactorium,” being, from its very beginning, already
completely purged and fit for Heaven,--God is, as it were, free to
relax at any instant, in favour of sufficiently fervent or numerous
intercessions, the exigencies of his entirely extrinsic justice.

(3) The position of a purely extrinsic punishment is emphasized, with
even unusual vehemence, in the theological glosses inserted, in about
1512 to 1529, in Catherine’s _Dicchiarazione_. Yet it is probably
the very influential Jesuit theologian Francesco Suarez, who died
in 1617, who has done most towards formulating and theologically
popularizing this view. All the guilt of sin, he teaches, is remitted
(in these Middle souls) at the first moment of the soul’s separation
from the body, by means of a single act of contrition, whereby the
will is wholly converted to God, and turned away from every venial
sin. “And in this way sin may be remitted, as to its guilt, in
Purgatory, because the soul’s purification dates from this moment”;--in
strictness, from before the first moment of what should be here termed
the “Satisfactorium.” As to bad habits and vicious inclinations,
“we ought not to imagine that the soul is detained for these”: but
“they are either taken away at the moment of death, or expelled by an
infusion of the contrary virtues when the soul enters into glory.”[267]
This highly artificial, inorganic view is adopted, amongst other
of our contemporary theologians, by Atzberger, the continuator of
Scheeben.[268]


6. _The Judaeo-Roman conception must be taken in synthesis with the
Alexandrine._

Now it is plain that the long-enduring Penitential system of the Latin
Church, and the doctrine and practice of Indulgences stand for certain
important truths liable to being insufficiently emphasized by the Greek
teachings concerning an intrinsically ameliorative _Purgatorium_, and
that there can be no question of simply eliminating these truths.
But neither are they capable of simple co-ordination with, still
less of super-ordination to, those most profound and spiritually
central immanental positions. As between the primarily forensic and
governmental, and the directly ethical and spiritual, it will be the
former that will have to be conceived and practised as, somehow, an
expression and amplification of, and a practical corrective and means
to, the latter.[269]

(1) The ordinary, indeed the strictly obligatory, Church teaching
clearly marks the suggested relation as the right one, at three, simply
cardinal points. We are bound, by the Confession of Faith of Michael
Palaeologus, 1267 A.D., and by the Decree of the Council of Florence,
1429 A.D., to hold that these Middle souls “are purged after death by
purgatorial or cathartic pains”; and by that of Trent “that there is
a Purgatory.”[270] Yet we have here a true _lucus a non lucendo_, if
this place or state does not involve purgation: for no theologian dares
explicitly to transfer and restrict the name “Purgatory” to the instant
of the soul’s Particular Judgment; even Suarez, as we have seen, has to
extend the name somehow.

Next we are bound, by the same three great Decrees, to hold indeed that
“the Masses, Prayers, Alms, and other pious offices of the Faithful
Living are profitable towards the relief of these pains,” yet this by
mode of “suffrage,” since, as the severely orthodox Jesuit, Father H.
Hurter, explains in his standard _Theologiae Dogmaticae Compendium_,
“the fruit of this impetration and satisfaction is not infallible, for
it depends upon the merciful acceptance of God.”[271] Hence in no case
can we, short of superstition, conceive such good works as operating
automatically: so that the _a priori_ simplest view concerning the
mode of operation of these prayers is declared to be mistaken. We can
and ought, then, to choose among the conceptions, not in proportion to
their mechanical simplicity, but according to their spiritual richness
and to their analogy with our deepest this-life experiences.

And we are all bound, by the Decree of Trent and the Condemnation of
Baius, 1567 A.D., to hold that Contrition springing from Perfect Love
reconciles man with God, even before Confession, and this also outside
of cases of necessity or of martyrdom.[272] Indeed, it is the common
doctrine that one single act of Pure Love abolishes, not only Hell,
but Purgatory, so that, if the soul were to die whilst that act was
in operation, it would forthwith be in Heaven. If then, in case of
perfect purity, the soul is at once in heaven, the soul cannot be quite
pure and yet continue in Purgatory.

(2) It is thus plain that, as regards Sin in its relation to the
Sinner, there are, in strictness, ever three points to consider: the
guilty act, the reflex effect of the act upon the disposition the
agent, and the punishment; for all theologians admit that the more or
less bad disposition, contracted through the sinful act, remains in
the soul, except in the case of Perfect Contrition, after the guilt
of the act has been remitted. But whilst the holders of an Extrinsic,
Vindictive Purgatory, work for a punishment as independent as possible
of these moral effects of sin still present in the pardoned soul, the
advocates of an Intrinsic, Ameliorative Purgatory find the punishment
centre in the pain and difficulty attendant upon “getting slowly
back to fully virtuous dispositions, through retracing the steps we
have taken in departing from it.”[273] And the system of Indulgences
appears, in this latter view, to find its chief justification in that
it keeps up a link with the past Penitential system of the Church; that
it vividly recalls and applies the profound truth of the interaction,
for good even more than for evil, between all human souls, alive and
dead; and that it insists upon the readily forgotten truth of even the
forgiven sinner, the man with the good determination, having ordinarily
still much to do and to suffer before he is quit of the effects of his
sin.

(3) And the difficulties and motives special to those who supplant
the Intrinsic, Ameliorating Purgatory by an Extrinsic, Vindicative
_Satisfactorium_, can indeed be met by those who would preserve that
beautifully dynamic, ethical, and spiritual conception. For we can
hold that the fundamental condition,--the particular determination
of the active will,--remains quite unchanged, from Death to Heaven,
in these souls; that this determination of the active will requires
more or less of time and suffering fully to permeate and assimilate to
itself all the semi-voluntary wishes and habits of the soul; and that
this permeation takes place among conditions in which the soul’s acts
are too little resisted and too certain of success to be constituted
meritorious. We can take Catherine’s beautiful Plunge-conception as
indicating the kind of operation effected in and by the soul, at and
through the momentary vision of God. And we can feel convinced that
it is ever, in the long run, profoundly dangerous to try to clarify
and simplify doctrines beyond or against the scope and direction of
the analogies of Nature and of Grace, which are ever so dynamic and
organic in type: for the poor and simple, as truly as the rich and
learned, ever require, not to be merely taken and left as they are, but
to be raised and trained to the most adequate conceptions possible to
each.--It is, in any case, very certain that the marked and widespread
movement of return to belief in a Middle State is distinctly towards a
truly Purgative Purgatory, although few of these sincere truth-seekers
are aware, as is Dr. Anrich, that they are groping after a doctrine
all but quite explained away by a large body of late Scholastic and
Neo-Scholastic theologians.[274]

(4) Yet it is very satisfactory to note how numerous, and especially
how important are, after all is said, the theologians who have
continued to walk, in this matter, in the footsteps of the great
Alexandrines. St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches a healing of the soul in the
beyond and a purification by fire.[275] St. Augustine says that “fire
burns up the work of him who thinketh of the things of this world,
since possessions, that are loved, do not perish without pain on the
part of their possessor. It is not incredible that something of this
sort takes place after this life.”[276]

St. Thomas declares most plainly: “Venial guilt, in a soul which
dies in a state of grace, is remitted after this life by the purging
fire, because that pain, which is in some manner accepted by the
will, has, in virtue of grace, the power of expiating all such guilt
as can co-exist with a state of grace.” “After this life … there can
be merit with respect to some accidental reward, so long as a man
remains in some manner in a state of probation: and hence there can be
meritorious acts in Purgatory, with respect to the remission of venial
sin.”[277]--Dante (_d._ 1321) also appears, as Father Faber finely
notes, to hold such a voluntary, immanental Purgatory, where the poet
sees an Angel impelling, across the sea at dawn, a bark filled with
souls bent for Purgatory: for the boat is described as driving towards
the shore so lightly as to draw no wake upon the water.[278]

Cardinal Bellarmine, perhaps the greatest of all anti-Protestant
theologians (_d._ 1621) teaches that “venial sin is remitted in
Purgatory _quoad culpam_,” and that “this guilt, as St. Thomas rightly
insists, is remitted in Purgatory by an act of love and patient
endurance.”[279] St. Francis of Sales, that high ascetical authority
(_d._ 1622), declares: “By Purgatory we understand a place where souls
undergo purgation, for a while, from the stains and imperfections which
they have carried away with them from this mortal life.”[280]

And recently and in England we have had Father Faber, Cardinal Manning,
and Cardinal Newman, although differing from each other on many other
points, fully united in holding and propagating this finely life-like,
purgative conception of purgatory.[281]


7. _A final difficulty._

One final point concerning a Middle State. In the Synoptic tradition
there is a recurrent insistence upon the forgiveness of particular
sins, at particular moments, by particular human and divine acts of
contrition and pardon. In the Purgatorial teaching the stress lies
upon entire states and habits, stains and perversities of soul, and
upon God’s general grace working, in and through immanently necessary,
freely accepted sufferings, on to a slow purification of the complete
personality. As Origen says: “The soul’s single acts, good or bad, go
by; but, according to their quality, they give form and figure to to
the mind of the agent, and leave it either good or bad, and destined
for pains or for rewards.”[282]

The antagonism here is but apparent. For the fact that a certain
condition of soul precedes, and that another condition succeed, each
act of the same soul, in proportion as this act is full and deliberate,
does not prevent the corresponding, complimentary fact that such acts
take the preceding condition as their occasion, and make the succeeding
condition into a further expression of themselves. Single acts which
fully express the character, whether good or bad, are doubtless rarer
than is mostly thought. Yet Catherine, in union with the Gospels and
the Church, is deeply convinced of the power of one single act of Pure
Love to abolish, not of course the effects outward, but the reflex
spiritual consequences upon the soul itself, of sinful acts or states.

Catherine’s picture again, of the deliberate Plunge into Purgatory,
gives us a similar heroic act which, summing up the whole soul’s active
volitions, initiates and encloses the whole subsequent purification,
but which itself involves a prevenient act of Divine Love and mercy, to
which this act of human love is but the return and response. Indeed,
as we know, this plunge-conception was but the direct projection,
on to the other-world-picture, of her own personal experience at
her conversion, when a short span of clock-time held acts of love
received and acts of love returned, which transformed all her previous
condition, and initiated a whole series of states ever more expressive
of her truest self.--Act and state and state and act, each presupposes
and requires the other: and both are present in the Synoptic pictures,
and both are operative in the Purgatorial teaching; although in the
former the accounts are so brief as to make states and acts alike look
as though one single act; and, in the latter, the descriptions are so
large as to make the single acts almost disappear behind the states.


V. CATHERINE AND HEAVEN--THREE PERPLEXITIES TO BE CONSIDERED.

We have found a truly Purgational Middle state, with its sense of
succession, its mixture of joy and suffering, and its growth and
fruitfulness, to be profoundly consonant with all our deepest spiritual
experiences and requirements. But what about Heaven, which we must,
apparently, hold to consist of a sense of simultaneity, a condition
of mere reproductiveness and utterly uneventful finality, and a state
of unmixed, unchanging joy?--Here again, even if in a lesser degree,
certain experiences of the human soul can help us to a few general
positions of great spiritual fruitfulness, which can reasonably
claim an analogical applicability to the Beyond, and which, thus
taken as our ultimate ideals, cannot fail to stimulate the growth of
our personality, and, with it, of further insight into these great
realities. I shall here consider three main questions, which will
roughly correspond to the three perplexities just indicated.


1. _Time and Heaven._

Our first question, then, is as to the probable character of man’s
happiest ultimate consciousness,--whether it is one of succession or
of simultaneity: in other words, whether, besides the disappearance of
the category of space (a point already discussed), there is likely to
be the lapse of the category of time also.--And let it be noted that
the retention of the latter sense for Hell, and even for Purgatory,
does not prejudge the question as to its presence or absence in Heaven,
since those two states are admittedly non-normative, whereas the latter
represents the very ideal and measure of man’s full destination and
perfection.

(1) Now it is still usual, amongst those who abandon the ultimacy
of the space-category, simultaneously to drop, as necessarily
concomitant, the time-category also. Tennyson, among the poets, does
so, in his beautiful “Crossing the Bar”: “From out our bourne of Time
and Place, the flood may bear me far”; and Prof. H. J. Holtzmann,
among speculative theologians, in criticising Rothe’s conception of
man as a quite ultimately spacial-temporal being, treats these two
questions as standing and falling together.[283]--Yet a careful study
of Kant’s critique of the two categories of Space and Time suffices
to convince us of the indefinitely richer content, and more ultimate
reality, of the latter. Indeed, I shall attempt to show more fully in
the next Chapter, with the aid of M. Henri Bergson, that mathematical,
uniform clock-time is indeed an artificial compound, which is made up
of our profound experience of a duration in which the constituents
(sensations, imaginations, thoughts, feelings, willings) of the
succession ever, in varying degrees, overlap, interpenetrate, and
modify each other, and the quite automatic and necessary simplification
and misrepresentation of this experience by its imaginary projection on
to space,--its restatement, by our picturing faculty, as a perfectly
equable succession of mutually exclusive moments. It is in that
interpenetrative duration, not in this atomistic clock-time, that our
deeper human experiences take place.

(2) But that sense of duration, is it indeed our deepest apprehension?
Dr. Holtzmann points out finely how that we are well aware, in our
profoundest experiences, of “that permanently incomprehensible
fact,--the existence of, as it were, a prism, through which the
unitary ray of light, which fills our consciousness with a real
content, is spread out into a colour-spectrum, so that what, in itself,
exists in pure unitedness” and simultaneity, “becomes intelligible to
us only as a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time. Beyond
the prism, there are no such two things.” And he shows how keenly
conscious we are, at times, of that deepest mode of apprehension and
of being which is a Simultaneity, an eternal Here and Now; and how
ruinous to our spiritual life would be a full triumph of the category
of time.[284]

But it is St. Augustine who has, so far, found the noblest expression
for the deepest human experiences in this whole matter of Duration and
Simultaneity, as against mere Clock-Time, although, here as with regard
to Space, he is deeply indebted to Plotinus. “In thee, O my soul, I
measure time,--I measure the impression which passing events make
upon thee, who remainest when those events have passed: this present
impression then, and not those events which had to pass in order to
produce it, do I measure, when I measure time.” “The three times,”
tenses, “past, present, and future … are certain three affections in
the soul, I find them there and nowhere else. There is the present
memory of past events, the present perception of present ones, and the
present expectation of future ones.” God possesses “the splendour of
ever-tarrying Eternity,” which is “incomparable with never-tarrying
times,” since in it “nothing passes, but the content of everything
abides simply present.” And in the next life “perhaps our own thoughts
also will not be flowing, going from one thing to another, but we shall
see all we know simultaneously, in one intuition.” St. Thomas indeed is
more positive: “All things will,” in Heaven, “be seen simultaneously
and not successively.”[285]

(3) If then, even here below, we can so clearly demonstrate the
conventionality of mere Clock-Time, and can even conceive a perfect
Simultaneity as the sole form of the consciousness of God, we cannot
well avoid holding that, in the other life, the clock-time convention
will completely cease, and that, though the sense of Duration is
not likely completely to disappear, (since, in this life at least,
this sense is certainly not merely phenomenal for man, and its
entire absence would apparently make man into God), the category of
Simultaneity will, as a sort of strong background-consciousness,
englobe and profoundly unify the sense of Duration. And, the more
God-like the soul, the more would this sense of Simultaneity
predominate over the sense of Duration.


2. _The Ultimate Good, concrete, not abstract._

Our second question concerns the kind and degree of variety in unity
which we should conceive to characterize the life of God, and of the
soul in its God-likeness. Is this type and measure of all life to be
conceived as a maximum of abstraction or as a maximum of concretion;
as pure thought alone, or as also emotion and will; as solitary and
self-centred, or as social and outgoing; and as simply reproductive, or
also as operative?

(1) Now it is certain that nothing is easier, and nothing has been
more common, than to take the limitations of our earthly conditions,
and especially those attendant upon the strictly contemplative, and,
still more, those connected with the technically ecstatic states, as so
many advantages, or even as furnishing a complete scheme of the soul’s
ultimate life.

As we have already repeatedly seen in less final matters, so here once
more, at the end, we can trace the sad impoverishment to the spiritual
outlook produced by the esteem in which the antique world generally
held the psycho-physical peculiarities of trances, as directly
valuable or even as prophetic of the soul’s ultimate condition; the
contraposition and exaltation, already on the part of Plato and
Aristotle, of a supposed non-actively contemplative, above a supposed
non-contemplatively active life; the largely excessive, not fully
Christianizable, doctrines of the Neo-Platonists as to the Negative,
Abstractive way, when taken as self-sufficient, and as to Quiet,
Passivity, and Emptiness of Soul, when understood literally; and the
conception, rarely far away from the ancient thinkers, of the soul as a
substance which, full-grown, fixed and stainless at the first, requires
but to be kept free from stain up to the end.

And yet the diminution of vitality in the trance, and even the
inattention to more than one thing at a time in Contemplation, are,
in themselves, defects, at best the price paid for certain gains; the
active and the contemplative life are, ultimately, but two mutually
complementary sides of life, so that no life ever quite succeeds in
eliminating either element, and life, _caeteris paribus_, is complete
and perfect, in proportion as it embraces both elements, each at
its fullest, and the two in a perfect interaction; the Negative,
Abstractive way peremptorily requires also the other, the Affirmative,
Concrete way; the Quiet, Passivity, Emptiness are really, when
wholesome, an incubation for, or a rest from, Action, indeed they are
themselves a profound action and peace, and the soul is primarily a
Force and an Energy, and Holiness is a growth of that Energy in Love,
in full Being, and in creative, spiritual Personality.

(2) Now on this whole matter the European Christian Mystics, strongly
influenced by, yet also largely developing, certain doctrines of the
Greeks, have, I think, made two most profound contributions to the
truths of the spirit, and have seriously fallen short of reality in
three respects.

The first contribution can, indeed, be credited to Aristotle, whose
luminous formulations concerning Energeia, Action, (as excluding
Motion, or Activity), we have already referred to. Here to _be_ is
to _act_, and Energeia, a being’s perfect functioning and fullest
self-expression in action, is not some kind of movement or process;
but, on the contrary, all movement and process is only an imperfect
kind of Energeia. Man, in his life here, only catches brief glimpses of
such an Action; but God is not so hampered,--He is ever completely all
that He can be, His Action is kept up inexhaustibly and ever generates
supreme bliss; it is an unchanging, unmoving Energeia.[286]--And St.
Thomas echoes this great doctrine, for all the Christian schoolmen: “A
thing is declared to be perfect, in proportion as it is in act,”--as
all its potentialities are expressed in action; and hence “the First
Principle must be supremely in act,” “God’s Actuality is identical with
His Potentiality,” “God is Pure Action (_Actus Purus_).”[287]--Yet it
is doubtless the Christian Mystics who have most fully experienced, and
emotionally vivified, this great truth, and who cease not, in all their
more characteristic teachings, from insisting upon the ever-increasing
acquisition of “Action,” the fully fruitful, peaceful functioning of
the whole soul, at the expense of “activity,” the restless, sterile
distraction and internecine conflict of its powers. And Heaven, for
them, ever consists in an unbroken Action, devoid of all “activity,”
rendering the soul, in its degree, like to that Purest Action, God,
who, Himself “Life,” is, as our Lord declared, “not the God of the dead
but of the living.”[288]

And the second contribution can, in part, be traced back to Plato,
who does not weary, in the great middle period of his writings, from
insisting upon the greatness of the nobler passions, and who already
apprehends a Heavenly Eros which in part conflicts with, in part
transcends, the Earthly one. But here especially it is Christianity,
and in particular Christian Mysticism, which have fully experienced
and proclaimed that “God” is “Love,” and that the greatest of all the
soul’s acts and virtues is Charity, Pure Love. And hence the Pure
Act of God, and the Action of the God-like soul, are conceived not,
Aristotle-like, as acts of pure intelligence alone, but as tinged
through and through with a noble emotion.

(3) But in three matters the Mystics, as such and as a whole, have,
here especially under the predominant influence of Greek thought,
remained inadequate to the great spiritual realities, as most fully
revealed to us by Christianity. The three points are so closely
interconnected that it will be best first to illustrate, and then to
criticise them, together.

(i) Aristotle here introduces the mischief. For it is he who in his
great, simply immeasurably influential, theological tractate, Chapters
VI to X of the Twelfth Book of his _Metaphysic_, has presented to us
God as “the one first unmoved Mover” of the Universe, but Who moves it
as desired by it, not as desiring it, as outside of it, not as also
inside it. God here is sheer Pure Thought, Noēsis, for “contemplation
is the most joyful and the best” of actions. And “Thought” here
“thinks the divinest and worthiest, without change,” hence “It thinks
Itself, and the Thinking is a Thinking of Thought.”[289] We have here,
as Dr. Caird strikingly puts it, a God necessarily shut up within
Himself, “of purer eyes than to behold, not only iniquity but even
contingency and finitude, and His whole activity is one act of pure
self-contemplation.” “The ideal activity which connects God with the
world, appears thus as in the world and not in God.”[290]

(ii) Now we have already allowed that the Mystics avoid Aristotle’s
elimination of emotion from man’s deepest action, and of emotion’s
equivalent from the life of God. But they are, for the most part, much
influenced in their speculations by this intensely Greek, aristocratic,
intellectualist conception, in the three points of a disdain of the
Contingent and Historical; of a superiority to volitional, productive
energizing; and of a presentation of God as unsocial, and as occupied
directly with Himself alone. We have already studied numerous examples
of the first two, deeply un-Christian, errors as they have more or
less influenced Christian Mysticism; the third mistake, of a purely
Transcendental, Deistic God, is indeed never consistently maintained
by any Christian, and Catherine, in particular, is ever dominated by
the contrary great doctrine, adumbrated by Plato and fully revealed by
Our Lord, of the impulse to give Itself intrinsic to Goodness, so that
God, as Supreme Goodness, becomes the Supreme Self-giver, and thus the
direct example and motive for our own self-donation to Him. Yet even
so deeply religious a non-Christian as Plotinus, and such speculative
thinkers as Eriugena and Eckhart (who certainly intended to remain
Christians) continue all three mistakes, and especially insist upon a
Supreme Being, Whose true centre, His Godhead, is out of all relation
to anything but Himself. And even the orthodox Scholastics, and St.
Thomas himself, attempt at times to combine, with the noblest Platonic
and the deepest Christian teachings, certain elements, which, in
strictness, have no place in an Incarnational Religion.

(iii) For, at times, the fullest, deepest Action is still not
conceived, even by St. Thomas, as a Harmony, an Organization of all
Man’s essential powers, the more the better. “In the active life,
which is occupied with many things, there is less of beatitude than
in the contemplative life, which is busy with one thing alone,--the
contemplation of Truth”; “beatitude must consist essentially in the
action of the intellect; and only accidentally in the action of the
will.”[291] God is still primarily intelligence: “God’s intelligence
is His substance”; whereas “volition must be in God, since there is
intelligence in Him,” and “Love must of necessity be declared to be
in God, since there is volition in Him.”[292] God is still, in a
certain sense, shut up in Himself: “As He understands things other
than Himself, by understanding His own essence, so He wills things
other than Himself, by willing His own goodness.” “God enjoys not
anything beside Himself, but enjoys Himself alone.”[293]--And we get,
in correspondence to this absorption of God in Himself, an absorption
of man in God, of so direct and exclusive a kind, as, if pressed, to
eliminate all serious, permanent value, for our soul, in God’s actual
creation of our fellow-creatures. “He who knoweth Thee and creatures,
is not, on this account, happier than if he knows them not; but he is
happy because of Thee alone.” And “the perfection of Love is essential
to beatitude, with respect to the Love of God, not with respect to
the Love of one’s neighbour. If there were but one soul alone to
enjoy God, it would be blessèd, even though it were without a single
fellow-creature whom it could love.”[294]

(iv) And yet St. Thomas’s own deeply Christian sense, explicit sayings
of Our Lord or of St. Paul, and even, in part, certain of the fuller
apprehensions of the Greeks, can make the great Dominican again
uncertain, or can bring him to entirely satisfactory declarations,
on each of these points. For we get the declaration that direct
knowledge of individual things, and quasi-creative operativeness are
essential to all true perfection. “To understand something merely
in general and not in particular, is to know it imperfectly”; Our
Lord Himself has taught us that “the very hairs of your head are all
numbered”; hence God must “know all other individual things with
a distinct and proper knowledge.”--And “a thing is most perfect,
when it can make another like unto itself. But by tending to its
own perfection, each thing tends to become more and more like God.
Hence everything tends to be like God, in so far as it tends to be
the cause of other things.”[295]--We get a full insistence, with St.
Paul, (in I Cor. xiii), upon our love of God, an act of the will,
as nobler than our cognition of Him; and with Plato and St. John,
upon God’s forthgoing Love for His creatures, as the very crown and
measure of His perfection. “Everything in nature has, as regards its
own good, a certain inclination to diffuse itself amongst others, as
far as possible. And this applies, in a supreme degree, to the Divine
Goodness, from which all perfection is derived.” “Love, Joy, Delight
can be predicated of God”; Love which, of its very essence “causes
the lover to bear himself to the beloved as to his own self”: so that
we must say with Dionysius that “He, the very Cause of all things,
becomes ecstatic, moves out of Himself, by the abundance of His loving
goodness, in the providence exercised by Him towards all things
extant.”[296]

(v) And we get in St. Thomas, when he is too much dominated by the
abstractive trend, a most interesting, because logically necessitated
and quite unconscious, collision with certain sayings of Our Lord. For
he then explains Matt. xviii, 10, “their,” the children’s, “Angels
see without ceasing the face of their Father who is in Heaven” as
teaching that “the action (_operatio_), by which Angels are conjoined
to the increate Good, is, in them, unique and sempiternal”; whereas his
commentators are driven to admit that the text, contrariwise, implies
that these Angels have two simultaneous “operations,” and that their
succouring action in nowise disturbs their intellectual contemplation.
Hence, even if we press Matt. xxii, 30, that we “shall be as the Angels
of God,” we still have an organism of peaceful Action, composed of
intellectual, affective, volitional, productive acts operating between
the soul and God, and the soul and other souls, each constituent and
object working and attained in and through all the others.

(vi) Indeed all Our Lord’s Synoptic teachings, as to man’s ultimate
standard and destiny, belong to this God-in-man and man-in-God type
of doctrine: for there the two great commandments are strictly
inseparable; God’s interest in the world is direct and detailed,--it
is part of His supreme greatness that He cares for every sparrow that
falls to the ground; and man, in the Kingdom of God, will sit down
at a banquet, the unmistakable type of social joys.--And even the
Apocalypse, which has, upon the whole, helped on so much the conception
of an exclusive, unproductive entrancement of each soul singly in
God alone, shows the deepest emotion when picturing all the souls,
from countless tribes and nations, standing before the throne,--an
emotion which can, surely, not be taken as foreign to those souls
themselves.[297] But, indeed, Our Lord’s whole life and message become
unintelligible, and the Church loses its deepest roots, unless the
Kingdom of God is, for us human souls, as truly a part of our ultimate
destiny as is God Himself, that God who fully reveals to us His own
deepest nature as the Good Shepherd, the lover of each single sheep and
of the flock as a whole.[298]

(4) We shall, then, do well to hold that the soul’s ultimate beatitude
will consist in its own greatest possible self-realization in its
God-likeness,--an Action free from all Activity, but full of a knowing,
feeling, willing, receiving, giving, effectuating, all which will
energize between God and the soul, and the soul and other souls,--each
force and element functioning in its proper place, but each stimulated
to its fullest expansion, and hence to its deepest delight, by the
corresponding vitalization of the other powers and ends, and of other
similar centres of rich action.


3. _The pain-element of Bliss._

And our third, last question is whether our deepest this-life
apprehensions and experiences give us any reason for holding that a
certain equivalent for what is noblest in devoted suffering, heroic
self-oblivion, patient persistence in lonely willing, will be present
in the life of the Blessed. It would certainly be a gain could we
discover such an equivalent, for a pure glut of happiness, an unbroken
state of sheer enjoyment, can as little be made attractive to our most
spiritual requirements, as the ideal of an action containing an element
of, or equivalent for, devoted and fruitful effort and renunciation can
lose its perennial fascination for what is most Christian within us.

(1) It is not difficult, I take it, to find such an element, which we
cannot think away from any future condition of the soul without making
that soul into God Himself. The ultimate cause of this element shall
be considered, as Personality, in our next Chapter: here I can but
indicate this element at work in our relations to our fellow-men and
to God.--Already St. Thomas, throughout one current of his teaching,
is full of the dignity of right individuality. “The Multitude and
Diversity of natures in the Universe proceed directly from the
intention of God, who brought them into being, in order to communicate
His goodness to them, and to have It represented by them. And since
It could not be sufficiently represented by one creature alone, He
produced many and diverse ones, so that what is wanting to the one
towards this office, should be supplied by the other.”[299] Hence the
multiplication of the Angels, who differ specifically each from all
the rest, adds more of nobility and perfection to the Universe, than
does the multiplication of men, who differ only individually.[300] And
Cardinal Nicolas of Coes writes, in 1457 A.D., “Every man is, as it
were, a separate species, because of his perfectibility.”[301] As Prof.
Josiah Royce tells us in 1901, “What is real, is not only a content of
experience and the embodiment of a type; but an individual content of
experience, and the unique embodiment of a type.”[302]

(2) Now in the future beatitude, where the full development of this
uniqueness in personality cannot, as so often here, be stunted or
misapplied, all this will evidently reach its zenith. But, if so,
then it follows that, although one of the two greatest of the joys of
those souls will be their love and understanding of each other,--this
love and trust, given as it will be to the other souls, in their full,
unique personality, will, of necessity, exceed the comprehension of
the giving personalities. Hence there will still be an equivalent for
that trust and venture, that creative faith in the love and devotion
given by us to our fellows, and found by us in them, which are, here
below, the noblest concomitants and conditions of the pain and the
cost and the joy in every virile love and self-dedication.--There
is then an element of truth in Lessing’s words of 1773: “The human
soul is incapable of even one unmixed emotion,--one that, down to its
minutest constituent, would be nothing but pleasurable or nothing but
painful: let alone of a condition in which it would experience nothing
but such unmixed emotions.”--For, as Prof. Troeltsch says finely in
1903, “Everything historical retains, in spite of all its relation to
absolute values, something of irrationality,”--of impenetrableness to
finite minds, “and of individuality. Indeed just this mixture is the
special characteristic of the lot and dignity of man; nor is a Beyond
for him conceivable in which it would altogether cease. Doubt and
unrest can indeed give way to clear sight and certitude: yet this very
clarity and assurance will, in each human soul, still bear a certain
individual character,” fully comprehensible to the other souls by love
land trust alone.[303]

(3) And this same element we find, of course, in a still greater
degree,--although, as I shall argue later on, our experimental
knowledge of God is greater than is our knowledge of our
fellow-creatures,--in the relations between our love of God and our
knowledge of Him. St. Thomas tells us most solidly: “Individual
Being applies to God, in so far as it implies Incommunicableness.”
Indeed, “_Person_ signifies the most perfect thing in nature,”--“the
subsistence of an individual in a rational nature.” “And since the
dignity of the divine nature exceeds every other dignity, this name
of Person is applicable, in a supreme degree, to God.” And again:
“God, as infinite, cannot be held infinitely by anything finite “;
and hence “only in the sense in which comprehension is opposed to
a seeking after Him, is God comprehended, _i.e._ possessed, by the
Blessed.” And hence the texts: “I follow, if that I may apprehend,
seeing that I also am apprehended” (Phil. iii, 12); “then shall I
know even as I am known” (1 Cor. xiii, 12); and “we shall see Him as
He is” (1 John iii, 2): all refer to such a possession of God. In the
last text “the adverb ‘as’ only signifies ‘we shall see His essence’
and not ‘we shall have as perfect a mode of vision as God has a mode
of being.’”[304]--Here again, then, we find that souls loving God in
His Infinite Individuality, will necessarily love Him beyond their
intellectual comprehension of Him; the element of devoted trust, of
free self-donation to One fully known only through and in such an act,
will thus remain to man for ever. St. John of the Cross proclaimed this
great truth: “One of the greatest favours of God, bestowed transiently
upon the soul in this life, is its ability to see so distinctly, and
to feel so profoundly, that … it cannot comprehend Him at all. These
souls are herein, in some degree, like to the souls in heaven, where
they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is
infinitely incomprehensible; for those that have the less clear vision,
do not perceive so distinctly as the others how greatly He transcends
their vision.”[305] With this teaching, so consonant with Catherine’s
experimental method, and her continuous trust in the persistence of the
deepest relations of the soul to God, of the self-identical soul to the
unchanging God, we can conclude this study of her Eschatology.




CHAPTER XIII

THE FIRST THREE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MORALITY,
MYSTICISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN
EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE. MYSTICISM AND THE NATURE OF EVIL


I take the ultimate questions involved in the religious positions
which are taken up by Catherine, and indeed by the Christian Mystics
generally, and which we have studied in the preceding two chapters,
to be four. In the order of their increasing difficulty they are: the
question as to the relations between Morality, Mysticism, Philosophy,
and Religion; that as to the Limits of Human Knowledge, and as to the
special character and worth of the Mystics’ claim to Trans-subjective
Cognition; that as to the Nature of Evil and the Goodness or Badness
of Human Nature; and that as to Personality,--the character of, and
the relations between, the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. The
consideration of these deepest matters in the next two chapters will, I
hope, in spite of its inevitable element of dimness and of repetition,
do much towards binding together and clarifying the convictions which
we have been slowly acquiring,--ever, in part, with a reference to
these coming ultimate alternatives and choices.


I. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MORALITY AND MYSTICISM PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.

Now the first of these questions has not, for most of the more
strenuous of our educated contemporaries, become, so far again, a
living question at all. A morally good and pure, a socially useful and
active life,--all this in the sense and with the range attributed to
these terms by ordinary parlance: this and this alone is, for doubtless
the predominant public present-day consciousness, the true object,
end, and measure of all healthy religion; whatever is alongside of,
or beyond, or other than, or anything but a direct and exclusive
incentive to this, is so much superstition and fanaticism. According to
this view, at least one half of Catherine’s activity at all times, and
well-nigh the whole of it during her last period, would be practically
worthless. Thus only certain elements of such a life would be retained
even for and in religion, and even these would be bereft of all that
has hitherto been held to be their specifically religious sense and
setting.


1. _Kant’s non-mystical religion._

It is doubtless Kant who, among the philosophers, has been the most
consistent and influential in inculcating such non-Mystical Religion.
“Religion,” he says in 1793, “is, on its subjective side, the cognition
of all our duties as so many Divine Commandments.” “The delusion that
we can effect something, in view of our justification before God, by
means of acts of religious worship, is religious superstition; and
the delusion that we can effect something by attempts at a supposed
intercourse with God, is religious fanaticism.… Such a feeling of the
immediate presence of the Supreme Being, and such a discrimination
between this feeling and every other, even moral, feeling, would
imply a capacity for an intuition, which is without any corresponding
organ in human nature.… If then a Church doctrine is to abolish or
to prevent all religious delusion, it must,--over and above its
statutory teachings, with which it cannot, for the present, entirely
dispense,--contain within itself a principle which shall enable it to
bring about the religion of a pure life, as the true end of the whole
movement, and then to dispense with those temporary doctrines.”[306]

It is deeply instructive to note how thoroughly this, at first sight,
solid and triumphant view, has not only continued to be refuted by the
actual practice and experience of specifically religious souls, but how
explicitly it is being discredited by precisely the more delicately
perceptive, the more truly detached and comprehensive, students and
philosophers of religion of the present day,--heirs, let us not forget
in justice to Kant, of the intervening profound development of the
historical sense, and of the history and psychology of religion.--Thus
that most vigorous, independent thinker, Prof. Simmel of Berlin,
writes in 1904: “Kant has, I think, simply passed by the essentials
of religion,--that is to say, of that reality which historically bears
the name of religion. Only the reflection, that the harmony of complete
happiness with complete morality is producible by a Divine Being
alone, is here supposed to lead us to believe in such a Being. There
is here a complete absence of that direct laying hold of the Divine
by our souls, because of our intrinsic needs, which characterizes
all genuine piety. And the religious sense is not recognized as an
organism with a unity of its own, as a growth springing from its own
root. The entirely specific character of religion, which is resolvable
neither into morality nor into a thirst after happiness: the direct
self-surrender of the soul to a higher reality, the giving and taking,
the unification and differentiation,--that quite organic unity of the
religious experience, which we can but most imperfectly indicate by
a multiplicity of some such, simultaneously valid, antitheses: this,
there is no evidence to show, was ever really known to Kant. What
was religion for Augustine and Francis of Assisi, he was unable to
reproduce in himself; indeed religion, of this type, he readily rejects
as fanaticism. Here lay the limit both of his own nature and of his own
times.”[307]

The rich mind of Prof. Troeltsch is, perhaps, more entirely just: “As
Kant’s theory of knowledge is throughout dependent upon the state of
contemporary psychology, so also is his theory of religious knowledge
dependent upon the psychology of religion predominant in his day.
Locke, Leibniz, Pascal had already recognized the essentially practical
character of all religion; and since their psychology was unable to
conceive the ‘practical’ otherwise than as the moral, it had looked
upon Religion as Morality furnished forth with its metaphysical
concomitants. And as soon as this psychology had become the very
backbone of his conception of Religion, Morality gained an entirely
one-sided predominance over Kant’s mind,--considerably, indeed, beyond
his own personal feelings and perceptions.” For he remains deeply
penetrated by “the conceptions of Regeneration and Redemption; the idea
of divine Grace and Wisdom, which accepts the totality of a soul’s
good disposition in lieu of that soul’s ever defective single good
works; the belief in a Providence which strengthens the Good throughout
the world against Evil; adoring awe in face of the majesty of the
Supersensible”: and “all these” conceptions “are no more simply moral,
they are specifically religious thoughts.”[308]

Such a fuller conception of religion is admirably insisted on by that
penetrating philosopher and historian of philosophy, Prof. Windelband:
“Actual Religion, in its complete reality, belongs to all the spheres
of life, and yet transcends them all, as something new and _sui
generis_. It is first an interior life--an apprehending, cognizing,
feeling, willing, accomplishing. But this accomplishing leads it on to
being also an exterior life: an acting out, according to their various
standards, of such feeling and willing; and an outward expression of
that inner life in general, in ritual acts and divine worship. Yet
this worship takes it beyond the little circle of the individual, and
constitutes the corporate acts of a community, a social, external
organization with visible institutions. And yet Religion ever claims to
be more than the whole series of such empirical facts and doings, it
ever transcends mere earthly experience, and is an intercourse with the
inmost nature and foundation of all reality; it is a life in and with
God, a metaphysical life. All these elements belong to the complete
concept of actual religion.”[309] I would add, that they each stimulate
the other, the external, _e.g._ being not only the expression of the
awakened internal, but also the occasion of that awakening.

And the great Dutch scholar, Prof. C. P. Tiele, unexcelled in the
knowledge of the actual course taken by the great religions of the
world, declares: “All progress, not only in Morality, but also in
Science, Philosophy, Art, necessarily exerts an influence upon that
of Religion. But … Religion is not, on that account, identical with
Ethics any more than with Philosophy or Art. All these manifestations
of the human spirit respond to certain needs of man; but none of them,
not even Morality, is capable of supplying the want which Religion
alone can satisfy.… Religion differs from the other manifestations
of the human mind” in this, that whereas “in the domain of Art, the
feelings and the imagination predominate; in that of Philosophy,
abstract thought is paramount”; and “the main object of Science is to
know accurately, whilst Ethics are chiefly concerned with the emotions
and with the fruit they yield: in Religion all these factors operate
alike, and if their equilibrium be disturbed, a morbid religious
condition is the result.”[310]


2. _Ritschlian modification of Kant’s view._

It is deeply interesting to note the particular manner in which Kant’s
impoverishment of the concept of religion has been in part retained, in
part modified, by the Ritschlian school,--I am thinking especially of
that vigorous writer, Prof. Wilhelm Hermann.

(1) If in Kant we get the belief in God derived from reflection
upon Goodness and Happiness, and as the only possible means of
their ultimate coalescence: in Hermann we still get the Categorical
Imperative, but the thirst for Happiness has been replaced by the
historic figure of Jesus Christ. “Two forces of different kinds,”
he says, “ever produce the certainty of Faith: the impression of an
Historic Figure which approaches us in Time; and the Moral Law which,
when we have heard it, we can understand in its Eternal Truth. Faith
arises, when a man recognizes, in the appearance of Jesus, that symbol
of his own existence which gives him the courage to recognize in the
Eternal, which claims him in the Moral Imperative, the source of true
life for his own self.”[311]--And these two sole co-efficients of
all entirely living religion are made to exclude, as we have already
seen, especially all Mysticism from the life of Faith. “True, outside
of Christianity, Mysticism will everywhere arise, as the very flower
of the religious development. But a Christian is bound to declare the
mystical experience of God to be a delusion. Once he has experienced
his elevation, by Christ alone, above his own previous nature, he
cannot believe that another man can attain the same result, simply by
means of recollection within his own self.… We are Christians precisely
because we have struck, in the person of Jesus, upon a fact which is
incomparably richer in content than the feelings that arise within
ourselves.” “Only because Christ is present for us can we possess
God with complete clearness and certainty.” And, with Luther,--who
remained, however, thoroughly faithful to the Primitive and Mediaeval
high esteem for the Mystical element of religion;--“right prayer is
a work of faith, and only a Christian can perform it.” And, more
moderately: “We have no desire to penetrate through Christ on to
God: for we consider that in God Himself we still find nothing but
Christ.”[312]

(2) Now it is surely plain that we have here a most understandable,
indeed respectable, reaction against all empty, sentimental
Subjectivism, and a virile affirmation of the essential importance
of the Concrete and Historical. And, in particular, the insistence
upon the supreme value and irreplaceable character and function of
Christ is profoundly true.--Yet three counter-considerations have
ever to be borne in mind.

(i) It remains certain that we do not know, or experience anything,
to which we can attribute any fuller reality, which is either purely
objective or purely subjective; and that there exists no process of
knowing or experiencing such a reality which would exclude either the
objective or the subjective factor. “Whatever claims to be fully real,”
either as apprehending subject or as apprehended object, “must be an
individual … an organic whole, which has its principle of unity in
itself.” The truly real, then, is a thing that has an inside; and the
sharp antithesis drawn, although in contrary directions, by Aristotle
and by Kant, between the Phenomenal and the Intelligible worlds, does
not exist in the reality either of our apprehending selves, or of our
apprehended fellow-men, or God.[313]--But Hermann is so haunted by the
bogey-fear of the subjective resonance within us being necessarily
useless towards, indeed obstructive of, the right apprehension
of the object thus responded to, that he is driven to follow the
will-o’-the-wisp ideal of a pure, entirely exclusive objectivity.

(ii) Bent on this will-o’-the-wisp quest of an exclusive objectivity,
he has to define all Mysticism in terms of Exclusive Mysticism, and
then to reject such an aberration. “Wherever the influence of God upon
the soul is sought and found solely in an interior experience of the
individual soul, in an excitation of the feelings which is supposed
directly to reveal the true nature of this experience, _viz._ in a
state of possession by God, and this without anything exterior being
apprehended and held fast with a clear consciousness, without the
positive content of some mental contemplation setting thoughts in
motion and raising the spiritual level of the soul’s life; _there_ is
Mystical Piety.”[314]

Now it is, of course, true that false Mysticism does attempt such an
impossible feat as the thing at which Hermann is thus aiming. But, even
here, the facts and problems are again misstated. Just now the object
presented was everything, and the apprehending subject was nothing.
Here, on the contrary, the apprehension by the subject is pressed to
the degree of requiring the soul to remain throughout reflexly aware of
its own processes.

Already in 1798 Kant had, in full acceptance of the great distinction
worked out by Leibniz in the years 1701-1709, but not published till
1765, declared: “We can be mediately conscious of an apprehension as to
which we have no direct consciousness”; and “the field of our obscure
apprehensions,--that is, apprehensions and impressions of which we are
not directly conscious, although we can conclude without doubt that we
have them,--is immeasurable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but
a very few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”[315]
This great fact psychologists can now describe with greater knowledge
and precision: yet the observations and analyses of Pierre Janet,
William James, James Ward and others, concerning Subconsciousness,
have but confirmed and deepened the Leibnizian-Kantian apprehensions.
Without much dim apprehension, no clear perception; nothing is more
certain than this.

And it is certain, also, that this absence of reflex consciousness, of
perceiving that we are apprehending, applies not only to impressions
of sensible objects, or to apprehensions of realities inferior
in richness, in interiority, to our own nature, but also, indeed
especially, to apprehensions of realities superior, in dignity and
profundity of organization, to our own constitution. When engrossed
in a great landscape of Turner, the Parthenon sculptures, a sonata of
Beethoven, Dante’s _Paradiso_; or when lost in the contemplation of the
seemingly endless spaces of the heavens, or of the apparently boundless
times of geology; or when absorbed in the mysterious greatness of
Mind, so incommensurable with matter, and of Personality, so truly
presupposed in all these appreciations yet so transcendent of even
their collectivity--we are as little occupied with the facts of our
engrossment, our self-oblivion, our absorption, or with the aim and
use of such immensely beneficial self-oblivion, as we are, in our
ordinary, loosely-knit states, occupied with the impression which,
nevertheless, is being produced upon our senses and mind by some small
insect or slight ray of light to which we are not giving our attention,
or which may be incapable of impressing us sufficiently to be thus
attended to and clearly perceived.[316] And, as in the case of these
under-impressions, so in that of those over-impressions, we can often
judge, as to their actual occurrence and fruitfulness, only from their
after-effects, although this indirect proof will, in each case, be of
quite peculiar cogency.--All this leaves ample room for that prayer
of simple quiet, so largely practised by the Saints, and indeed for
all such states of recollection which, though the soul, on coming
from them, cannot discover definite ideas or picturings to have been
contained in them, leave the soul braced to love, work, and suffer
for God and man, beyond its previous level. Prof. William James is
too deeply versed a Psychologist not fully to understand the complete
normality of such conditions, and the entire satisfactoriness of such
tests.[317]

(iii) And finally, it is indeed true that God reveals Himself to us,
at all fully, in Human History alone, and within this history, more
fully still, in the lives and experiences of the Saints of all the
stages of religion, and, in a supreme and normative manner, in the life
and teaching of Jesus Christ; that we have thus a true immanence of
the Divine in the Human; and that it is folly to attempt the finding
or the making of any shorter way to God than that of the closest
contact with His own condescensions. Yet such a wisely Historical and
fully Christian attitude would be imperilled, not secured, by such an
excessive Christocentrism, indeed such _Panchristism_, as that of Prof.
Hermann.

We shall indeed beware of all indifferentist levelling-down of the
various religions of the world. For, as Prof. Robertson Smith, who
knew so well the chief great religions, most wisely said, “To say
that God speaks to all men alike, and gives the same communication
directly to all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion
to Pure Mysticism. In point of fact it is not true of any man that
what he believes and knows of God, has come to him directly through
the voice of nature and conscience.” And he adds: “History has not
taught us anything in true religion to add to the New Testament. Jesus
Christ still stands as high above us as He did above His disciples,
the perfect Master, the supreme head of the fellowship of all true
religion.”[318]

Yet we must equally guard against making even Our Lord into so
exclusive a centre and home of all that is divine, as to cause Him
to come into an entirely God-forsaken, completely God-forgetting
world, a world which did not and could not, in any degree or manner
whatsoever, rightly know, love, or serve God at all; and against so
conceiving the religion, taught and practised by Him, as to deprive it
of all affinity with, or room for, such admittedly universal forces
and resultants of the human soul and the religious sense as are dim
apprehension, formless recollection, pictureless emotion, and the
sense of the Hiddenness and Transcendence of the very God, Who is also
Immanent and Self-Revealing, in various degrees and ways, in every
place and time. Indeed, these two forces: the diffused Religiosity and
more or less inchoate religion, readily discoverable, by a generous
docility, more or less throughout the world of human souls, and the
concentrated spirituality and concrete, thoroughly characteristic
Religion, which has its culmination, after its ample preludings in the
Hebrew Prophets, in the Divine-Human figure and spirit of Jesus Christ:
are interdependent, in somewhat the way in which vague, widely spread
Subconsciousness requires, and is required by, definite, narrowly
localized Consciousness in each human mind. Precisely because there
have been and are previous and simultaneous lesser communications
of, and correspondences with, the one “Light that enlighteneth every
man that cometh into the world”; because men can and do believe
according to various, relatively preliminary, degrees and ways, in God
and a Providence, in Sin and Contrition, without a knowledge of the
Historic Christ (although never without the stimulation of some, often
world-forgotten, historic personality, and ever with some real, though
unconscious approximation to His type of life and teaching), therefore
can Christ be the very centre, and sole supreme manifestation and
measure of all this light. Not only can Christ remain supreme, even
though Moses and Elijah, Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel; and
indeed, in their own other degrees and ways, Plato and Plotinus,
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Gautama Buddha and Rabbi Akiba be all
revered as God-loved and God-loving, as, in various amounts, truly,
spiritually great: but only thus can His central importance be fully
realized.

There is certainly much in Our Lord’s own attitude, as we have already
found, to demand such a view; and Clement of Alexandria, Origen and St.
Justin Martyr have emphasized it continually. And there is no necessary
Naturalism here--for the position is entirely compatible with the
profoundest belief in the great truth that it is Grace which everywhere
produces the various degrees of God-pleasing religion to be found
scattered throughout the world. Father Tyrrell has admirably said:
“God’s salutary workings in man’s heart have always been directed,
however remotely, to the life of Grace and Glory; of ‘the Order of mere
nature,’ and its exigencies, we have no experimental knowledge … In the
present order, Theism is but embryonic Christianity, and Christianity
is but developed Theism: ‘purely natural’ religion is what might have
been, but never was.”[319]

(3) Now this must suffice as a sketch of the relations between
(Historical) Religion and Mysticism, and will have shown why I cannot
but regret that so accomplished a scholar as Prof. Morice Jastrow
should class all and every Mysticism, whether Pure or Mixed, as
so far forth a religious malady; why I rejoice that so admirably
circumspect an investigator as Prof. C. P. Tiele should, (in the
form of a strenuous insistence upon the apprehension, indeed the
ontological action of, the Infinite, by and within the human spirit,
as the very soul and mainspring of Religion), so admirably reinforce
the fundamental importance of the Mystical apprehensions; why I most
warmly endorse Prof. Rauwenhoff’s presentment of Mysticism as, with
Intellectualism and Moralism, one of the three psychological forms
of religion, which are each legitimate and necessary, and which each
require the check of the other two, if they are not to degenerate each
into some corruption special to the exclusive development of that
particular form; and why I cordially applaud the unequalled analysis
and description by Prof. Eucken of the manner in which “Universal
Religion” is at work, as an often obscure yet (in the long run) most
powerful leaven, throughout all specifically human life,--Sciences,
Art, Philosophy, and Ethics, calling for, and alone satisfied with, the
answering force and articulation of “Characteristic Religion,” each
requiring and required by the other, each already containing the other
in embryo, and both ever operating together, in proportion as Man and
Religion attain to their fulness.[320]


3. _Hermann’s impossible simplification concerning philosophy._

But what shall we say as to the relations between Religion and
Philosophy? Here again Hermann is the vigorous champion of a very
prevalent and plausible simplification. “There exists no Theory of
Knowledge for such things as we hold to be real in the strength of
faith. In such religious affirmations, the believer demolishes every
bridge between his conviction and that which Science can recognize as
real.” Indeed Hermann’s attitude is here throughout identical with that
of his master, Albrecht Ritschl: Metaphysics of any and every kind
appear everywhere, to both writers, as essentially unnecessary, unreal,
misleading, as so much inflation and delusion of soul.--Yet this again
is quite demonstrably excessive, and can indeed be explained only as an
all but inevitable recoil from the contrary metaphysical excesses of
the Hegelian school.

(1) Since the culmination of that reaction, “it has,” as Prof. H.
J. Holtzmann, himself so profoundly historical and so free from
all extreme metaphysical bent, tells us, “become quite impossible
any further to deny the metaphysical factors which had a share in
constituting such types of New Testament doctrine as the Pauline and
Joannine. Indeed, not even if we were to reduce the New Testament to
the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts on the one hand, and to the Pastoral
Epistles, the Epistle of James and the Apocalypse on the other hand,
would the elements which spring from speculative sources be entirely
eliminated. And since, again, the Old Testament religion, in its last
stage, assimilated similarly metaphysical materials from the East
and from the West; since Mohammedanism, in its Persian and Indian
branches, did the same with regard to the older civilized religions of
Middle and Eastern Asia; since also these latter religions received
a speculative articulation in even the most ancient times, so that
they are both Philosophy and Religion simultaneously: we are forced
to ask ourselves, whether so frequent a concomitant of religion is
satisfactorily explicable as a mere symptom of falsification or decay.”
And whilst answering that the primary organ for religion is Feeling
and Conscience, he points out how large an amount of Speculation was,
nevertheless, required and exercised by a St. Augustine, even after his
unforgettable experiences of the sufferings attendant upon Sin, and of
their cure by Grace alone.[321]

(2) The fact is that, if man cannot apprehend the objects,--the
historic and other facts,--of Religion, without certain subjective
organs, dispositions, and effects, any more than can all these
subjective capacities, without those objects, produce religious
convictions and acts, or be waked up into becoming efficient forces:
neither can man thus experience and effect the deepest foundations and
developments of his own true personality in and through contact with
the divine Spirit, without being more or less stimulated into some
kind of, at least rudimentary, Philosophy as to these his profoundest
experiences of reality, and as to their rights and duties towards the
rest of what he is and knows.

(3) Indeed his very Religion is already, in itself, the profoundest
Metaphysical Affirmation. As the deeply historical-minded Prof. Tiele
admits: “Every man in his sound senses, who does not lead the life of
a half-dormant animal, philosophizes in his own way”; and “religious
doctrine rests on a metaphysical foundation; unless convinced of the
reality of a supersensual world, it builds upon sand.”[322] Or as Prof.
Eucken, the most eloquent champion of this central characteristic
of all vital religion, exclaims: “If we never, as a matter of fact,
get beyond merely subjective psychological processes, and we can
nowhere trace within us the action of cosmic forces; if we in no case
experience through them an enlargement, elevation, and transformation
of our nature: then not all the endeavours of its well-meaning friends
can preserve religion from sinking to the level of a mere illusion.
Without a universal and real principle, without hyper-empirical
processes, there can be no permanence for religion.”[323]

(4) Some kind of philosophy, then, will inevitably accompany, follow,
and stimulate religion, were it only as the, necessarily ever
inadequate, attempt at giving a fitting expression to the essentially
metaphysical character of belief in a super-sensible world, in God, in
man’s spiritual capacities and in God’s redemption of man. Not because
the patient analysis of the completer human personalities, (as these
are to be found throughout the length and breadth of history), requires
the elimination of a wholesome Mysticism and a sober Metaphysic from
among the elements and effects of the fullest Manhood and Religion; but
because of the ever serious difficulties and the liability to grave
abuses attendant upon both these forces, the inevitably excessive
reactions against these abuses, and the recurrent necessity of
remodelling much of the theory and practice of both, in accordance with
the growth of our knowledge of the human mind, (a necessity which, at
first sight, seems to stultify all the hyper-empirical claims of both
these forces): only because of this have many men of sense and goodness
come to speak as though religion, even at its fullest, could and should
get on without either, contenting itself to be a somewhat sentimental,
Immanental Ethics.

(5) Yet, against such misgivings, perhaps the most immediately
impressive counter-argument is the procession, so largely made up
of men and of movements not usually reckoned as exclusively or
directly religious, whose very greatness,--one which humanity will
not let die,--is closely interwoven with Mystical and Metaphysical
affirmations. There are, among philosophers, a Spinoza and a Leibniz,
a Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, a Trendelenburg and a Lotze, with the
later stages of a John Mill, a Littré, and a Herbert Spencer; among
poets, a Pindar and Aeschylus, a Lucretius and Vergil, a Lessing and a
Goethe, a Wordsworth and a Browning; among historians, a Thucydides and
a Tacitus, a St. Simon and de Tocqueville, a Carlyle, a Jacob Grimm,
a Droysen and a Ranke; among scientists, a Copernicus and a Kepler, a
Newton, a Lyell, indeed, largely still, also a Darwin; and among men of
action, a Moltke and a Gordon, a Burke and a von Stein. Shear any of
these men of their Mystical and Metaphysical elements, and you will
have shorn Samson of his locks.

And if we can frame a contrary list of men of force and distinction,
who have represented an un- or even an anti-Mystical and
anti-Metaphysical type: Caesar and Hannibal, Napoleon and Bismarck,
Voltaire and Laplace, Hume and Bentham, Huxley and Mommsen, we must
ever remember the complex truth as to the Polarity of Life,--the strict
necessity of the movement towards an intensely close contact with
empirical reality, as well as of the movement back to recollection;
the frequent sickliness of the recollective movement, as found in the
average practice of life, which cannot but produce a reaction and
contrary excess; and hence the legitimacy of what this second type
has got of positiveness and of corrective criticism. Yet here too the
greatness will consist directly in what these men are and have, not
in what they are not; and wherever this their brutal-seeming sense of
the apparent brutalities of life is combined with an apprehension of a
higher world and of a deeper reality, _there_ something fuller and more
true has been attained than is reached by such strong but incomplete
humanity alone.


4. _Religion and Morality, their kinship and difference._

And, finally, as to Religion and Morality, we should note how that the
men, who deny all essential connection between Religion and Mysticism
and Religion and Philosophy, ever, when they do retain Religion at
all, tend to identify it with Morality, if not as to the motives, yet
as to the contents of the two forces. And yet it is not difficult to
show that, if the relation between Religion and Morality is closer than
that between Religion and Philosophy, though not as intimate as is that
between Historical-Institutional Religion and Mysticism: Religion and
Morality are nevertheless not identical.

(1) This non-identity is indicated by the broad historical fact that,
though the development of Religion tells upon that of Morality, and
_vice versa_: yet that the rate of development of these two forces is
practically never the same, even in one and the same soul, still less
in any one country or race. In each case we get various inequalities
between the two developments, which would be impossible, were the two
forces different only in name.

We reach again the same conclusion, if we note, what Dr. Edward Caird
has so well pointed out, “the imperfection of the subjective religion
of the prophets and psalmists of Israel,”--who nevertheless already
possessed a very advanced type of profoundly ethical religion,--“shown
by its inability to overcome the legal and ceremonial system of
worship to which it was opposed”; as, “in like manner, Protestantism
… has never been able decisively to conquer the system of Rome.”[324]
For this, as indeed the failure of Buddhism to absorb and supersede
Hindooism, evidently implies that Religion cannot find its full
development and equilibrium in an exclusive concentration upon Morality
Proper, as alone essential; and hence that complete Religion embraces
other things besides Morality.

Once more we find non-identity between the very Ethics directly
postulated by Religion at its deepest, and the Ethics immediately
required by the Family, Society, the State, Art, Science, and
Philosophy. As Prof. Troeltsch admirably puts it, “the special
characteristic of our modern consciousness resides in the insistence
both upon the Religious, the That-world Ends, _and_ upon the Cultural,
This-World Ends, which latter are taken as Ends-in-themselves: it
is precisely in this combination that this consciousness finds its
richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful interior tension
and its difficult problems.” “As in Christian Ethics we must recognize
the predominance of an Objective Religious End,--for here certain
relations of the soul to God are the chief commandments and the supreme
good,--so in the Cultural Ends we should frankly recognize objective
Moral Ends of an Immanental kind.” And in seeking after the right
relations between the two, we shall have to conclude that “Ethics, for
us, are not, at first, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amongst
a number of moral ends, the unification of which is his life’s task and
problem, and not its starting-point.” And this multiplicity “is” more
precisely “a polarity in human nature, for it contains two poles--that
of Religious and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be ignored
without moral damage, but which, nevertheless, cannot be brought under
a common formula.” “We can but keep a sufficient space open for the
action of both forms, so that from their interaction there may ever
result, with the least possible difficulty, the deepening of the Humane
Ends by the Christian Ethics, and the humanizing of the Christian End
by the Humane Ethics, so that life may become a service of God within
the Cultural Ends, and that the service of God may transfigure the
world.”[325]

We can perceive the difference between the two forces most clearly
in Our Lord’s life and teaching--say, the Sermon on the Mount; in
the intolerableness of every exegesis which attempts to reduce the
ultimate meaning and worth of this world-renewing religious document to
what it has of literal applicability in the field of morality proper.
Schopenhauer expressed a profound intuition in the words: “It would be
a most unworthy manner of speech to declare the sublime Founder of the
Christian Religion, whose life is proposed to us as the model of all
virtue, to have been the most reasonable of men, and that his maxims
contained but the best instruction towards an entirely reasonable
life.”[326]

(2) The fact is that Religion ever insists, even where it but seems
to be teaching certain moral rules and motives as appropriate to this
visible world of ours, upon presenting them in the setting of a fuller,
deeper world than that immediately required as the field of action and
as the justification of ordinary morality. Thus whilst, in Morality
Proper, the concepts of Responsibility, Prudence, Merit, Reward,
Irretrievableness, are necessarily primary; in Religious Ethics the
ideas of Trust, Grace, Heroism, Love, Free Pardon, Spiritual Renovation
are, as necessarily, supreme. And hence it is not accidental, although
of course not necessary, that we often find men with a keen religious
sense but with a defective moral practice or even conception, and men
with a strong moral sense and a want of religious perception; that
Mystics, with their keen sense for one element of religion, so often
seem, and sometimes are, careless of morality proper; and that, in such
recent cases (deeply instructive in their very aberrations) as that of
Nietzsche, we get a fierce anti-Moralism combined with a thirst for
a higher and deeper world than this visible one, which not all its
fantastic form, nor even all Nietzsche’s later rant against concrete
religion, can prevent from being essentially religious.[327]

(3) We have then, here, the deepest instance of the law and
necessity which we have, so often, found at the shallower levels of
the spirit’s life. For here, once more, there is one apprehension,
force, life,--This-world Morality,--which requires penetration and
development, in nowise destruction, by another, a deeper power,
That-world Ethics and Religion. Let the one weaken or blunt the edge
and impact of the other, and it has, at the same time, weakened itself.
For here again we have, not a Thing which simply exists, by persistence
in its dull unpenetratingness and dead impenetrability, but a Life,
growing by the incorporation and organization, within its ampler range,
of lesser lives, each with its own legitimate autonomy.


II. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE.

But have not even the most sober-minded of the Partial Mystics greatly
exceeded the limits of human knowledge, more or less continuously,
throughout their conclusions? Is Kant completely in the wrong? And are
not the Positivists right in restricting all certain cognition to the
experiences of the senses and to the Mathematico-Physical Sciences
built upon those experiences? And, again, is there such a thing at all
as specifically Mystical Experience or Knowledge? And, if so, what is
its worth?--I must keep the elaboration of the (ultimately connected)
question, as to the nature of the realities experienced or known--as
to the human spirit and the Divine Spirit, and their inter-relations,
hence as to Pantheism and Personality--for the next chapter, and can
here but prepare the ground for it, by the elucidation of certain
important points in general Epistemology, and of the more obvious
characteristics of Mystical apprehension.


1. _Positivist Epistemology an error._

As regards general Epistemology, we may well take up the following
positions.

(1) We cannot but reject, with Prof. Volkelt, as a mere vulgar error,
the Positivist limitation of trans-subjectively valid knowledge to
direct sense-perception and to the laws of the so-called Empirical
Sciences. For, as he shows conclusively, the only fact which is
absolutely indubitable, is that of the bare occurrence of our (possibly
utterly misleading) sensations and impressions. Some of these are, it
is true, accompanied by a certain pressure upon our minds to credit
them with trans-subjective validity; and the fact of this (possibly
quite misleading) pressure is itself part of our undeniable experience.
Yet we can, if we will, treat this pressure also as no more than a
meaningless occurrence, and not as evidencing the trans-subjective
reality which it seems to indicate. No man, it is true, has ever
succeeded in consistently carrying out such a refusal of assent,--since
no scepticism is so thorough but that it derives its very power,
against the trans-subjective validity of some of the impressions
furnished with trans-subjective pressure, from an utterly inconsistent
acceptance, as trans-subjectively valid, of other impressions furnished
with a precisely similar trans-subjective intimation. Yet the fact
remains that, in all such cases of trans-subjective pressure, the
mind has “an immediate experience of which the content is precisely
this, that we are justified in proceeding with these concepts into
what is absolutely beyond the possibility of being experienced by
us.” “Positivistic Cognition,” to which no man, Positivist included,
can systematically restrict himself, “abides absolutely within the
immediately experienced. Logical Cognition,” which every man practises
surreptitiously if not avowedly, “exceeds experience at every step,
and conceptually determines what is absolutely incapable of being
experienced, yet the justification for this kind of cognition is, here
also, an immediately experienced certitude.”[328]

We have, “then, immediately experienced presentations which of
themselves already constitute a knowledge,--our first knowledge,
and the only one possessed of absolute indubitableness.” And some
of these presentations “are accompanied by a kind of immediate
certainty or revelation that, in some way, they reach right into the
Thing-in-Itself, that they directly express something objectively
valid, present in that Thing-in-Itself”; and “this pressure ever
involves, should the contradictory of what it enunciates be admitted as
objectively existent, the self-destruction of objective reality.”--“And
this pressure can, in any one case, be resisted by the mind; an act of
endorsement, of a kind of faith, is necessary on the part of the mind:
for these presentations, furnished with such pressure, do not transform
themselves into the Things-in-Themselves directly,--we do not come to
see objective reality simply face to face.”[329] And we find thus that
“_in principle_ the entire range of reality, right down to its last
depths, lies open to cognition, proceeding according to the principle
of the necessities of thought. For he who recognizes this principle,
thereby admits that the necessities of thought have trans-subjective
significance, so that, if any affirmation concerning the ultimate
reasons and depths of Reality can be shown to be necessary in thought,
this affirmation possesses as rightful a claim to trans-subjective
validity, as any determination, necessary in thought, which concern
only such parts of the Thing-in-Itself as are the nearest neighbours to
our sense-impressions concerning it. Everywhere our principle leaves us
only the question whether thought, as a matter of fact, does or does
not react, under the given problems, with the said logical constraint
and pressure.”[330]

(2) We can next insist upon how we have thus already found that the
acquisition of even so rudimentary an outline of Reality, as to be
ever in part presupposed in the attacks of the most radical sceptics,
necessarily involves a certain emotive disposition and volitional
action. And, over and above this partially withholdable assent, such
quite elementary thinking will also ever require the concomitant
energizing of the picturing faculty. And again, the more interior and
spiritual are this thinking’s subject-matters, the more will it be
permeated by, and be inseparable from, deep feeling. It is then all
man’s faculties conjoined, it is the whole man, who normally thus
gives, without reflecting on it, his all, to gain even this elementary
nucleus of certainty as to Reality. “Even receptivity,” as Prof. Ward
well says, “is activity”; for even where non-voluntary, it is never
indifferent. “Not mere receptivity, but conative or selective activity,
is the essence of subjective reality.” Or, with Prof. Volkelt: “Purely
isolated thought,”--which, in actual life ever more or less of a
fiction, is not rarely set up by individuals as an ideal,--“is, however
intensified and interiorized, something ever only formal, something, in
the final resort, insignificant and shadowy.”--And, concurrently with
the recognition of this fact, man will come to find that “the ultimate
Substance or Power of and in the world,”--that objective reality which
is the essential counterpart to his own subjective reality,--“is
something possessed of a true, deep content and of a positive aim,
and alive according to the analogy of a willing individual. The
world would thus be a Logical Process only in the sense that this
concrete fundamental Power is bound by the ideal necessity of its own
nature.”[331]

(3) And again, I would note with Volkelt how Kant, owing to his
notoriously intense natural tendency to universal Dualism, never
admits, even as a point for preliminary settlement, the possibility
that our subjective conceptions of Objective Reality may have some true
relation to that Reality. His professed ignorance as to the nature
of that Reality changes instantaneously, quite unbeknown to himself,
into an absolutely unvarying, negative knowledge concerning that
Reality,--he simply _knows_ that it is _utterly heterogeneous_ to our
conception of it. Thus he finds the view that “God has implanted into
the human mind certain categories and concepts of a kind spontaneously
to harmonize with things,” to be “the most preposterous solution that
we could possibly choose.”[332] Thus the epistemological difference
between Presentation and Thing-in-Itself becomes a metaphysical
exclusion of each by the other. And yet we know of no fact, whether
of experience or of thought, to prevent something which is _my_
presentation existing also, in so far as it is the content of that
presentation, outside of this presentment. Indeed Psychology and
Epistemology have, driven by every reason and stopped by none, more and
more denied and refuted this excessive, indeed gratuitous, Dualism.

As Prof. Henry Jones well puts it: “The hypothesis that knowledge
consists of two elements which are so radically different as to be
capable of description only by defining each negatively in terms of
the other, the pure manifold or differences of sense, and a purely
universal or relative thought,” breaks down under the fact that “pure
thought and the manifold of sense pass into each other, the one proving
meaningless and the other helpless in its isolation.” These elements
“are only aspects of one fact, co-relates mutually penetrating each
other, distinguishable in thought, but not separable as existences.”
Hence we must not “make logical remnants do the work of an intelligence
which is never purely formal, upon a material which is nowhere a pure
manifold”: for “the difference between the primary data of thought
on the one hand, and the highest kinds of systematized knowledge on
the other, is no difference … between a mere particular and a mere
universal, or a mere content and a mere form; but it is a difference
in comprehensiveness of articulation.” However primary may be the
distinction of subjective and objective, “we are not entitled to
forget the unity of the reality in which the distinction takes place.”
If we begin with the purely subjective, we must doubtless end there;
but then, in spite of certain, never self-consistent, philosophical
hypotheses, “the purely subjective is as completely beyond our reach as
the purely objective.”[333]

Prof. Ward indeed pushes the matter, I think rightly, even a step
further. He points out how readily, owing to the ambiguous term
“consciousness,” “we confound experience with knowledge”; but holds
that experience is the wider term. “Knowledge must fall within
experience, and experience extend beyond knowledge. Thus I am not
left to infer my own being from my knowing.… Objective reality is
immediately ‘given,’ or immediately ‘there,’ not inferred.” But the
subjective reality is not immediately given, immediately there.
“There is no such parallelism between the two.… The subjective factor
in experience is not _datum_ but _recipiens_: it is not ‘there’ but
‘here’; a ‘here’ relative to that ‘there.’”[334] Nothing of this,
I think, really conflicts with the positions we have adopted from
Volkelt, since “experience” is evidently used here in a sense inclusive
of the presentations, the trans-subjective pressure and the endorsement
of the latter’s estimations,--the three elements which, according also
to Volkelt, form an organism which even the most daring subjectivism
can never consistently reject. At most, the term “experience” is more
extended in Prof. Ward, since it includes all three elements, than in
Prof. Volkelt, who restricts it to the two first.

(4) And further, we must take care to find room for the only unforced
explanation of the wondrous fact that “although,” as Dr. Volkelt
strikingly says, “the various schools of philosophy “--this is largely
true of those of theology also,--are “in part essentially determined
by historical currents, forces which follow other standards than
those of logical necessity”: yet “these points of view and modes
of thought, thus determined by” apparently non-logical “history,
subserve nevertheless logical necessity, indeed represent its” slow,
intermittent, yet real “progressive realization.” The explanation is
that “the forces of history are, unbeknown to themselves, planned,
in their depths, for agreement with the necessities and ends of
thought and of truth.” “And thus the different spheres” and levels
“of spiritual life and endeavour appear as originally intended for
each other, so that each sphere, whilst consciously striving only
after its own particular laws and standards, in reality furthers
the objects of the rest.” For “only the operative presence of such
an original, teleological inter-relation can explain how historic
forces, by their influence upon, and determination of, philosophical
thinking, can, instead of staining and spoiling it by the introduction
of religious, artistic, political, and other motives, actually
advance it most essentially.”[335]--Here then we get a still further
enlargement of the already wide range of interaction, within the human
mind, between forces which, at first sight, appear simply external
to, indeed destructive of, each other; and a corresponding increase
in the indications of the immense breadth, depth, and closeness
of inter-penetration characterizing the operative ground-plan,
the pre-existing Harmony and Teleology of the fundamental forces
of Reality. Thus once more man’s spirit appears as possessed of a
large interiority; and as met, supported and penetrated, by a Spirit
stupendously rich in spiritual energy.

(5) And finally, let us never forget that “the only experience
immediately accessible to us” men, “is our own; this, in spite of
its complexity, is the first we know.”[336] And this means that we
have direct experience and anything like adequate knowledge, (because
knowledge from within,) not of things, but of mind and will, of
spiritual life struggling within an animal life; and that in face,
say, of plant-life, and still more of a pebble or of a star, we have a
difficulty as to an at all appropriate and penetrative apprehension,
which, if opposite to, is also in a sense greater than, the difficulty
inherent to our apprehension of God Himself. For towards this latter
apprehension we have got the convergent testimony of certain great,
never quite obliterable facts without us and within ourselves.

There is the upward trend, the ever-increased complexity of
organization, the growing depth and interiority in the animate
world,--Plant-Life itself being already, very probably, possessed of a
vague consciousness, and Man, at the other end of the scale, summing up
the tendency of the whole series in a deep self-consciousness which, at
the same time, makes him alone keenly aware of the great difference,
in the midst of the true kinship, between himself and the humbler
members of that one world. For Natural Selection can but describe the
results and explain part of the method of this upward trend, but cannot
penetrate to its ultimate cause and end.

There is, again, the great, deep fact of the mutually necessary,
mutually stimulating presence and interaction, within our own mental
and spiritual life, of sense-impressions, imaginative picturings,
rational categories, emotional activities, and volitional acts;
and, again, of subject and object; and, once more, of general,
philosophic Thought and the contingencies of History. For the
immanental inter-adaptation and Teleology, that mysteriously link
together all these, profoundly disparate-seeming, realms and forces
is far too deep-down, it too much surprises, and exacts too much of
us, it too much reveals itself, precisely at the end of much labour
of our own and in our truest and most balanced moods, as the mostly
unarticulated presupposition and explanation of both the great cost
and the rich fruitfulness of every approximately complete actuation of
all our faculties, each with and in the others, and in and with their
appropriate objects, to be permanently ruled out of court as mere
sentimentalism or baseless apologetic.

And there is the deepest fact of all, the one which precisely
constitutes the specific characteristic of all true humanity, the sense
of mental oppression, of intolerable imprisonment inflicted by the
very idea of the merely contingent, the simply phenomenal and Finite,
and the accompanying noble restlessness and ready dwarfing of all
man’s best achievements by the agent’s own Ideal of Perfection. For
this latter sense is, precisely in the greater souls, so spontaneous
and so keen, so immensely operative in never leaving our, otherwise
indolent and readily self-delusive, self-complacent race fully and
long satisfied with anything that passes entirely away, or that
is admittedly merely a subjective fancy, even though this fancy be
shared by every member of the human race; and this sense operates so
explosively within Sceptics as well as Dogmatists, within would-be
Agnostic Scientists as well as in the most Intellectualist Theologians;
it so humbles, startles, and alone so braces, sweetens, widens, indeed
constitutes our humanity: as to be unforcedly explicable only by
admitting that man’s spirit’s experience is not shut up within man’s
own clear analysis or picturing of it; that it is indefinitely wider,
and somehow, in its deepest reaches, is directly touched, affected, in
part determined, by the Infinite Spirit Itself. “Man never knows how
anthropomorphic he is,” says Goethe. Yes, but it was a man, Goethe,
it is at bottom all men, in proportion as they are fully, sensitively
such, who have somehow discovered this truth; who suffer from its
continuous evidences, as spontaneously as from the toothache or from
insomnia; and whose deepest moments give them a vivid sense of how
immensely the Spirit, thus directly experienced by their spirit,
transcends, and yet also is required by and is immanent in, their keen
sense of the Finitude and Contingency present throughout the world of
sense-perception and of clear intellectual formulation.

(6) With Plato and Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine,
St. Bernard, Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and Leibniz in the past; with
Cardinal Newman, Professors Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson,
Siegwart, Eucken, Troeltsch and Tiele, Igino Petrone and Edward Caird,
in the present; with the explicit assent of practically all the great
Mystics of all ages and countries, and the implicit instinct, and at
least partial, practical admission, of all sane and developed human
souls; we will then have to postulate here, not merely an intellectual
reasoning upon finite data, which would somehow result in so operative
a sense of the Infinite; nor even simply a mental category of
Infinitude which, evoked in man by and together with the apprehension
of things finite, would, somehow, have so massive, so explosive an
effect against our finding satisfaction in the other categories,
categories which, after all, would not be more subjective, than itself:
but the ontological presence of, and the operative penetration by
the Infinite Spirit, within the human spirit. This Spirit’s presence
would produce, on occasion of man’s apprehension or volition of things
contingent and finite, the keen sense of disappointment, of contrast
with the Simultaneous, Abiding, and Infinite.--And let the reader note
that this is not Ontologism, for we here neither deduce our other ideas
from the idea of God, nor do we argue from ideas and their clarity, but
from living forces and their operativeness.

We thus get man’s spirit placed within a world of varying degrees of
depth and interiority, the different levels and kinds of which are
necessary, as so many materials, stimulants, obstacles, and objects,
for the development of that spirit’s various capacities, which
themselves again interact the one upon the other, and react upon
and within that world. For if man’s experience of God is not a mere
discursively reasoned conclusion from the data of sense, yet man’s
spirit experiences the Divine Spirit and the spirits of his fellow-men
on occasion of, and as a kind of contrast, background, and support
to, the actuation of his senses, imagination, reason, feeling, and
volition, and, at least at first and in the long run, not otherwise.


2. _No distinct faculty of Mystical apprehension._

Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a specifically
distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical mode of apprehending Reality?
I take it, _distinctly not_; and that all the errors of the Exclusive
Mystic proceed precisely from the contention that Mysticism does
constitute such an entirely separate, completely self-supported kind of
human experience.--This denial does not, of course, mean that soul does
not differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and kind of the
recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element possessed and exercised
by it concurrently or alternately with other elements,--the sense of
the Infinite within and without the Finite springing up in the soul on
occasion of its contact with the Contingent; nor, again, that these
more or less congenital differences and vocations amongst souls cannot
and are not still further developed by grace and heroism into types of
religious apprehension and life, so strikingly divergent, as, at first
sight, to seem hardly even supplementary the one to the other. But it
means that, in even the most purely contingent-seeming soul, and in its
apparently but Institutional and Historical assents and acts, there
ever is, there never can fail to be, _some_, however implicit, however
slight, however intermittent, sense and experience of the Infinite,
evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction with the Finite, except as
this Finitude is an occasion for growth in, and a part-expression of,
that Infinite, our true home. And, again, it means, that even the most
exclusively mystical-seeming soul ever depends, for the fulness and
healthiness of even the most purely mystical of its acts and states,
as really upon its past and present contacts with the Contingent,
Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts and elements, as upon its
movement of concentration, and the sense and experience, evoked on
occasion of those contacts or of their memories, of the Infinite within
and around those finitudes and itself.

Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full dignity, which
consists precisely in being, not everything in any one soul, but
something in every soul of man; and in presenting, at its fullest, the
amplest development, among certain special natures with the help of
certain special graces and heroisms, of what, in some degree and form,
is present in every truly human soul, and in such a soul’s every, at
all genuine and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state.
And only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain all the strength
and escape the weaknesses and dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism, as
regards the mode and character of Religious Experience, Knowledge, and
Life.


3. _The first four pairs of weaknesses and strengths special to the
Mystics._

I take the Mystic’s weaknesses and strengths to go together in pairs,
and that there are seven such pairs. Only the first four shall be
considered here; the fifth and the last two couples are reserved
respectively for the following, and for the last section, of this
chapter.

(1) The Mystic finds his joy in the recollective movement and moments
of the soul; and hence ever tends, _qua_ Mystic, to ignore and neglect,
or to over-minimize, the absolutely necessary contact of the mind and
will with the things of sense. He will often write as though, could he
but completely shut off his mind from all sense-perceptions,--even of
grand scenery, or noble works of art, or scenes of human devotedness,
suffering, and peace,--it would be proportionately fuller of God.--Yet
this drift is ever more or less contradicted by his practice, often
at the very moment of such argument: for no religious writers are
more prolific in vivid imagery derived from noble sensible objects
and scenes than are the Mystics,--whose characteristic mood is an
intuition, a resting in a kind of vision of things invisible.--And
this contradiction is satisfactory, since it is quite certain that
if the mind, heart, and will could be completely absorbed, (from the
first or for any length of time), in the flight from the sensible,
it would become as dangerously empty and languid concerning things
invisible themselves as, with nothing but an outgoing occupation
with the sensible, it would become distracted and feverish. It is
this aversion from Outgoing and from the world of sense, of the
contemporaneous contingencies environing the soul, that gives to
Mysticism, as such, its shadowy character, its floating above, rather
than penetrating into, reality,--in contradiction, where this tendency
becomes too exclusive, to the Incarnational philosophy and practice of
Christianity, and indeed of every complete and sound psychology.

And yet the Incoming, what the deep religious thinker
Kierkegaard has so profoundly analyzed in his doctrine of
“Repetition,”[337]--recollection and peaceful browsing among the
materials brought in by the soul’s Outgoing,--is most essential. Indeed
it is the more difficult, and, though never alone sufficient, yet ever
the more centrally religious, of the two movements necessary for the
acquisition of spiritual experience and life.

(2) Again, the Mystic finds his full delight in all that approximates
most nearly to Simultaneity, and Eternity; and consequently turns
away, _qua_ Mystic, from the Successive and Temporal presented by
History.--Yet here also there are two movements, both necessary for
man. He will, by the one, once more in fullest sympathy with the grand
Christian love of lowliness, strive hard to get into close, and ever
closer, touch with the successivenesses of History, especially those
of Our Lord’s earthly life and of His closest followers. Without this
touch he will become empty, inflated, as St. Teresa found to be the
case with herself, when following the false principle of deliberate and
systematic abstraction from Christ’s temporal words and acts: for man’s
soul, though it does not energize in mere Clock-Time, cannot grow if
we attempt to eliminate Duration, that interpenetrative, overlapping
kind of Succession, which is already, as it were, halfway to the
Simultaneity of God. It is this aversion from Clock-Time Succession and
even from Duration which gives to Mysticism, as such, its remarkable
preference for Spacial images, and its strong bent towards concepts of
a Static and Determinist type, profoundly antagonistic though these
are to the Dynamic and Libertarian character which ever marks the
occasions and conditions for the acquiring of religious experience.

And yet, here again, the Mystic is clinging, even one-sidedly, to the
more central, more specifically religious, of the two movements. For
it is certain that God is indeed Simultaneous and Eternal; that it
is right thus to try and apprehend, what appears to us stretched out
successively in time, as simultaneously present in the one great Now
of God; and that our deepest experiences testify to History itself
being ever more than mere process, and to have within it a certain
contribution from, a certain approximation to and expression of,
Eternity.

(3) And again, the Mystic finds his joy in the sense of a Pure
Reception of the Purely Objective; that God should do all and should
receive the credit of all, is here a primary requirement.--And yet
all penetrating Psychology, Epistemology, and Ethics find this very
receptivity, however seemingly only such, to be, where healthy and
fruitful, ever an action, a conation of the soul,--an energizing and
volition which, as we have seen, are present in its very cognition of
anything affirmed by it as trans-subjective, from a grain of sand up to
the great God Himself. This antipathy to even a relative, God-willed
independence and power of self-excitation, gives Mysticism, as such,
its constant bent towards Quietism; and hence, with regard to the
means and nature of knowledge, its tendency to speak of such a purely
spiritual effect as Grace, and such purely spiritual beings as the
Soul and God, as though they were literally sensible objects sensibly
impressing themselves upon the Mystic’s purely passive senses. This
tendency reinforces the Mystic’s thirst for pictorial, simultaneous
presentation and intuition of the verities apprehended by him, but is
in curious contradiction to his even excessive conceptions concerning
the utter separateness and difference from all things material of all
such spiritual realities.--And yet, here too, it is doubtless deeply
important ever to remember, and to act in accordance with, the great
truth that God Himself is apprehended by us only if there be action
of our own, and that, from elementary moral dispositions right up to
consummate sanctity, the whole man has ever to act and will more and
more manysidedly, fully, and persistently.

But the corresponding, indeed the anterior and more centrally
religious, truth here is, that all this range of our activity could
never begin, and, if it could, would lose itself _in vacuo_, unless
there already were Reality around it and within it, as the stimulus
and object for all this energizing,--a Reality which, as Prof. Ward
has told us with respect to Epistemology, must, for a certain dim but
most true experience of ours, be simply given, not sought and found.
And indeed the operations of Grace are ever more or less penetrating
and soliciting, though nowhere forcing, the free assent of the natural
soul: we should be unable to seek God unless He had already found
us and had thus, deep down within ourselves, caused us to seek and
find Him. And hence thus again the most indispensable, the truest
form of experience underlies reasoning, and is a kind of not directly
analyzable, but indirectly most operative, intuition or instinct of the
soul.

(4) And yet the Mystic, in one of his moods (the corresponding,
contradictory mood of a Pantheistic identification of his true self
with God shall be considered in our next chapter), finds his joy in
so exalting the difference of nature between himself and God, and the
incomprehensibility of God for every finite intelligence, as,--were
we to press his words,--to cut away all ground for any experience or
knowledge sufficient to justify him in even a guess as to what God is
like or is not like, and for any attempt at intercourse with, and at
becoming like unto, One who is so utterly unlike himself.


4. _Criticism of the fourth pair, mystical “Agnosticism.”_

Now this acutely paradoxical position, of an entire certainty as to
God’s complete difference from ourselves, has been maintained and
articulated, with a consistency and vividness beyond that of any
Mystic known to me, by that most stimulating, profound, tragically
non-mystical, religious ascetic and thinker, the Lutheran Dane, Sören
Kierkegaard (1813-1855). His early friend, but philosophical opponent,
Prof. Höffding, describes him as insisting that “the suffering incident
to the religious life is necessarily involved in the very nature of the
religious relation. For the relation of the soul to God is a relation
to a Being utterly different from man, a Being which cannot confront
man as his Superlative and Ideal, and which nevertheless is to rule
within him.” “What, wonder, then,” as Kierkegaard says, “if the Jew
held that the vision of God meant death, and if the Heathen believed
that to enter upon relations with God was the beginning of insanity?”
For the man who lives for God “is a fish out of water.”[338]--We have
here what, if an error, is yet possible only to profoundly religious
souls; indeed it would be easy to point out very similar passages in
St. Catherine and St. John of the Cross. Yet Höffding is clearly in
the right in maintaining that “Qualitative or Absolute difference
abolishes all possibility of any positive relation.… If religious zeal,
in its eagerness to push the Object of religion to the highest height,
establishes a yawning abyss between this Object and the life whose
ideal It is still to remain,--such zeal contradicts itself. For a God
who is not Ideal and Exemplar, is no God.”[339]

Berkeley raised similar objections against analogous positions of the
Pseudo-Dionysius, in his Alciphron in 1732.[340] Indeed the Belgian
Jesuit, Balthazar Corderius, has a very satisfactory note on this
matter in his edition, in 1634, of the Areopagite,[341] in which
he shows how all the negative propositions of Mystical Theology,
_e.g._ “God is not Being, not Life,” presuppose a certain affirmative
position, _e.g._ “God is Being and Life, in a manner infinitely more
sublime and perfect than we are able to comprehend”; and gives reasons
and authorities, from St. Jerome to St. Thomas inclusive, for holding
that some kind and degree of direct confused knowledge (I should
prefer, with modern writers, to call it experience) of God’s existence
and nature is possessed by the human soul, independently of its
reasoning from the data of sense.

St. Thomas’s admissions are especially striking, as he usually
elaborates a position which ignores, and would logically exclude,
such “confused knowledge.” In his _Exposition and Questions on the
Book of Boetius on the Trinity_, after arguments to show that we know
indeed _that_ God is, but not _what_ He is,--at most only what He is
not, he says: “We should recognize, however, that it is impossible,
with regard to anything, to know whether it exists, unless, in some
way or other, we know _what_ it is, either with a perfect or with a
confused knowledge.… Hence also with regard to God,--we could not
know whether He exists, unless we somehow knew _what_ He is, even
though in a confused manner.” And this knowledge of _what_ He is, is
interestingly, because unconsciously, admitted in one of the passages
directed to proving that we can but know _that_ He is. “In our earthly
state we cannot attain to a knowledge of Himself beyond the fact that
He exists. And yet, among those who know _that_ He is, the one knows
this more perfectly than the other.”[342] For it is plain that, even
if the knowledge of the existence of something were possible without
any knowledge of that thing’s nature, no difference or increase in
such knowledge of the thing’s bare existence would be possible. The
different degrees in the knowledge, which is here declared to be one
concerning the bare existence of God, can, as a matter of fact, exist
only in knowledge concerning His nature. I shall have to return to this
great question further on.

Here I would only point out how well Battista Vernazza has, in her
_Dialogo_, realized the importance of a modification in such acutely
dualistic statements as those occasionally met with in the _Vita_. For,
in the _Dialogo_, the utter qualitative difference between God and the
Soul, and the Soul and the Body, which find so striking an utterance
in one of Catherine’s moods, is ever carefully limited to the soul’s
sinful acts and habits, and to the body’s unspiritualized condition; so
that the soul, when generous and faithful to God’s grace, can and does
grow less and less unlike God, and the body can, in its turn, become
more and more an instrument and expression of the soul. A pity only
that Battista has continued Catherine’s occasional over-emphasis in the
parallel matter of the knowledge of God: since, even in the _Dialogo_,
we get statements which, if pressed, would imply that even the crudest,
indeed the most immoral conception of God is, objectively, no farther
removed from the reality than is the most spiritual idea that man can
attain of Him.

It would indeed be well if the Christian Mystics who, since about
500 A.D., are more and more dependent for their formulations upon
the Areopagite, had followed, in this matter, not his more usual
and more paradoxical, but his exceptional, thoroughly sober vein
of teaching,--that contained in the third chapter of his _Mystical
Theology_, where he finds degrees of worth and approximation among the
affirmative attributions, and degrees of unfitness and distance among
the negative ones. “Are not life and goodness more cognate to Him than
air and stone? And is He not further removed from debauchery and wrath,
than from ineffableness and incomprehensibility”?[343] But such a scale
of approximations would be utterly impossible did we not somehow, at
least dimly, experience or know _what_ He is.

We shall then have to amend the Mystic’s apparent Agnosticism on three
points. We shall have to drop any hard and fast distinction between
knowledge of God’s Existence and knowledge of His Nature, since both
necessarily more or less stand and fall together. We shall have to
replace the terms as to our utter ignorance as to what He is, by terms
expressive of an experience which, if not directly and independently
clear and analyzable to the reflex, critical reason, can yet be shown
to be profoundly real and indefinitely potent in the life of man’s
whole rational and volitional being. It is this dim, deep experience
which ever causes our reflex knowledge of God to appear no knowledge at
all. And we shall reject any absolute qualitative difference between
the soul’s deepest possibilities and ideals, and God; and shall, in
its stead, maintain an absolute difference between God and all our
downward inclinations, acts, and habits, and an indefinite difference,
in worth and dignity, between God and the very best that, with His
help, we can aim at and become. With regard to every truly existent
subject-matter, we can trace the indefinitely wider range and the more
delicate penetration possessed by our dim yet true direct contact and
experience, as contrasted with our reflex analysis concerning all
such contacts and experiences; and this surplusage is at its highest
in connection with God, Who is not simply a Thing alongside of other
things, but the Spirit, our spirit’s Origin, Sustainer, and End, “in
whom we live and move and have our being.”


III. MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL.


_Introductory: Exclusive and Inclusive Mysticism in Relation to
Optimism._

The four couples of weaknesses and corresponding strong points
characteristic of Mysticism that we have just considered, and the fact
that, in each case, they ever spring respectively from an attempt to
make Mysticism be the all of religion, and from a readiness to keep
it as but one of the elements more or less present in, and necessary
for, every degree and form of the full life of the human soul: make
one wish for two English terms, as useful as are the German names
“Mystik” and “Mystizismus,” for briefly indicating respectively “the
legitimate share of Feeling in the constitution of the religious life,
and the one-sidedness of a religion in which the Understanding and the
Will,” and indeed also the Memory and the Senses, with their respective
variously external occasions, vehicles, and objects, “do not come to
their rights,” as Prof. Rauwenhoff well defines the matter.[344] I
somehow shrink from the term “Mysticality” for his “Mystizismus”; and
must rest content with the three terms--of “Mysticism,” as covering
both the right and the wrong use of feeling in religion; and of “True”
or “Inclusive Mysticism,” and of “Pseudo-” or “Exclusive Mysticism,”
as denoting respectively the legitimate, and the (quantitatively or
qualitatively) mistaken, share of emotion in the religious life.

Now the four matters, which we have just considered, have allowed us
to reach an answer not all unlike that of Nicolas of Coes, Leibniz,
and Hegel,--one which, if it remained alone or quite final, would, in
face of the fulness of real life, strike us all, nowadays, as somewhat
superficial, because too Optimistic and Panlogistic in its trend. The
fifth set of difficulties and problems now to be faced will seem almost
to justify Schopenhauer at his gloomiest. Yet we must bear in mind that
our direct business here is not with the problem of Evil in general,
but only with the special helps and hindrances, afforded by Inclusive
and by Exclusive Mysticism respectively, towards apprehending the true
nature of Evil and turning even it into an occasion for a deeper good.
In this case the special helps and hindrances fall under three heads.


1. _Mysticism, too optimistic. Evil positive, but not supreme._

(1) First of all, I would strongly insist upon the following great
fact to which human life and history bear witness, if we but take and
test these latter on a large scale and with a patient persistency.
It is, that not the smoother, easier times and circumstances in the
lives of individuals and of peoples, but, on the contrary, the harder
and hardest trials of every conceivable kind, and the unshrinking,
full acceptance of these, as part of the price of conscience and of
its growing light, have ever been the occasions of the deepest trust
in and love of God to which man has attained. In Jewish History, the
Exile called forth a Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the profound ideal of
the Suffering Servant; the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes raised
up a Judas Maccabaeus; and the troubles under the Emperor Hadrian, a
Rabbi Akiba. And in Christian History, the persecutions from Nero to
Robespierre have each occasioned the formation of heroic lovers of
Love Crucified. And such great figures do not simply manage to live,
apart from all the turmoil, in some Mystic upper region of their own;
but they face and plunge into the very heart of the strife, and get
and give spiritual strength on occasion of this closest contact with
loneliness, outrage, pain, and death. And this fact can be traced
throughout history.

Not as though suffering automatically deepens and widens man into
a true spiritual personality,--of itself it does not even tend to
this; nor as though there were not souls grown hard or low, or
frivolous or bitter, under suffering,--to leave madness and suicide
unconsidered,--souls in which it would be difficult to find any
avoidable grave fault. But that, wherever there is the fullest,
deepest, interiority of human character and influence, _there_ can
ever be found profound trials and sufferings which have been thus
utilized and transfigured. It is doubtless Our Lord’s uniquely full
and clear proclamation of this mysterious efficacity of all suffering
nobly borne; above all it is the supreme exemplification and fecundity
of this deepest law of life, afforded and imparted by His own
self-immolation, that has given its special power to Christianity,
and, in so doing, has, more profoundly than ever before or elsewhere,
brought home to us a certain Teleology here also,--the deepest ever
discovered to man. For though we fail in our attempts at explaining
how or why, with an All-knowing, All-powerful, and All-loving God,
there can be Evil at all, we can but recognize the law, which is ever
being brought home to us, of a mysterious capacity for purification and
development of man’s spiritual character, on occasion and with the help
of trouble, pain, and death itself.

(2) Now all this, we must admit, is practised and noted, directly and
in detail, only by the Ascetical and the Outward-going elements in
Religion; whereas Mysticism, as such, is optimistic, not only as is
Christianity, with respect to the end, but, in practice, with regard
to the actual state of things already encircling it as well. For so
careful a selection and so rigorous an abstraction is practised by
Mysticism, as such, towards the welter of contingencies around it, that
the rough shocks, the bitter tonics, the expansive birth-pangs of the
spirit’s deeper life, in and by means of the flux of time and sense,
of the conflict with hostile fellow-creatures, and of the claimfulness
of the lower self, are known by it only in their result, not in their
process, or rather only as this process ebbs and fades away, in such
recollective moments, into the distance.

No wonder, then, that Mysticism, as such, has ever tended to deny
all positive character to Evil. We have already found how strongly
this is the case with the prince of Mystic philosophers, Plotinus.
But even St. Augustine, with his massive experience, and (in his
other mood) even excessive realization, of the destructive force of
Evil and of the corrupt inclinations of man’s heart, has one whole
large current of teaching expressive of the purely negative character
of Evil. The two currents, the hot and concrete, and the cold and
abstract one, appear alternately in the very _Confessions_, of 397
A.D. There, ten years after his conversion, he can write: “All things
that are corrupted, are deprived of good. But, if they are deprived
of all good, they will cease to exist.… In so far, then, as they
exist, they are good.… Evil is no substance.” Notwithstanding such
Neo-Platonist interpretations, he had found Evil a terribly powerful
force; the directly autobiographical chapters of this same great book
proclaim this truth with unsurpassable vividness,--he is here fully
Christian.[345] And in his unfinished work against the Pelagianizing
Monk Julianus, in 429 A.D., he even declares--characteristically,
whilst discussing the Origin of Sin: “Such and so great was Adam’s sin,
that it was able to turn (human) nature itself into this evil.” Indeed,
already in 418, he had maintained that “this wound” (of Original Sin)
“forces all that is born of that human race to be under the Devil, so
that the latter, so to speak, plucks the fruit from the fruit-tree of
his own planting.”[346]

Pseudo-Dionysius, writing about 500 A.D., has evidently no such
massive personal experience to oppose to the Neo-Platonic influence,
an influence which, in the writings of Proclus (who died 485 A.D.), is
now at its height. “Evil,” he says, “is neither in Demons nor in us,
as an existent (positive) evil, but (only) as a failure and dearth of
the perfection of our own proper goods.”[347] He says this and more of
the same kind, but nothing as to the dread power of Evil. St. Thomas
Aquinas (who died in 1271 A.D.) is, as we know, largely under the
influence of the Negative conception: thus “the stain of sin is not
something positive, existent in the soul.… It is like a shadow, which
is the privation of light.”[348]

Catherine, though otherwise much influenced by the Negative conception,
as _e.g._ in her definition of a soul possessed by the Evil Spirit
as one suffering from a “privation of love,” finds the stain of sin,
doubtless from her own experience, to be something distinctly positive,
with considerable power of resistance and propagation.[349]--Mother
Juliana of Norwich had, in 1373, also formulated both conceptions. “I
saw not Sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance, nor no part
of being”: Neo-Platonist theory. “Sin is so vile and so mickle for to
hate, that it may be likened to no pain.… All is good but Sin, and
naught is evil but Sin”: Christian experience.[350]

Eckhart had, still further back (he died in 1327 A.D.), insisted much
that “Evil is nothing but privation, or falling away from Being; not
an effect, but a defect”:[351] yet he also finds much work to do in
combating this somehow very powerful “defect.”--Not till we get to
Spinoza (who died in 1677) do we get the Negative conception pushed
home to its only logical conclusion: “By Reality and Perfection, I mean
the same thing.… All knowledge of Evil is inadequate knowledge.… If the
human mind had nothing but adequate ideas, it would not form any notion
of Evil.”[352]

(3) As regards the Christian Mystics, their negative conception
of evil, all but completely restricted as it was to cosmological
theory, did those Mystics themselves little or no harm; since their
tone of feeling and their volitional life, indeed a large part of
their very speculation, were determined, not by such Neo-Platonist
theories, but by the concrete experiences of Sin, Conscience, and
Grace, and by the great Christian historical manifestation of the
powers of all three.--It is clear too that our modern alternative:
“positive-negative,” is not simply identical with the scholastic
alternative: “substantial-accidental,” which latter alternative is
sometimes predominant in the minds of these ancient theorizers; and
that, once the question was formulated in the latter way, they were
profoundly right in refusing to hypostatize Evil, in denying that there
exists any distinct thing or being wholly bad.--Yet it is equally
clear how very Greek and how little Christian is such a preoccupation
(in face of the question of the nature of Evil) with the concepts
of Substance and Accident, rather than with that of Will; and how
strangely insufficient, in view of the tragic conflicts and ruins of
real life, is all, even sporadic, denial, of a certain obstructive
and destructive efficacy in the bad will, and of a mysterious, direct
perversity and formal, intentional malignity in that will at its worst.

(4) On these two points it is undeniable that Kant, (with all
his self-contradictions, insufficiencies, and positive errors on
other important matters), has adequately formulated the practical
dispositions and teachings of the fully awakened Christian
consciousness, and hence, pre-eminently, of the great Saints in the
past, although, in the matter of the perverse will, the Partial Mystics
have, even in their theory, (though usually only as part of the
doctrine of Original Sin), largely forestalled his analysis. “Nowhere
in this our world, nowhere even outside it, is anything thinkable as
good without any reservation, but the good will alone.” “That a corrupt
inclination to evil is rooted in man, does not require any formal
proof, in view of the clamorous examples furnished to all men by the
experience of human behaviour. If you would have such cases from the
so-called state of nature, where some philosophers have looked for the
chief home of man’s natural goodness, you need only compare, with such
an hypothesis, the unprovoked cruelties enacted in Tofoa, New Zealand
… and the ceaseless scenes of murder in the North-Western American
deserts, where no human being derives the slightest advantage from
them,--and you will quickly have more than sufficient evidence before
you to induce the abandonment of such a view. But if you consider that
human nature is better studied in a state of civilization, since there
its gifts have a better chance of development,--you will have to listen
to a long melancholy string of accusations: of secret falseness, even
among friends; of an inclination to hate him to whom we owe much; of
a cordiality which yet leaves the observation true that ‘there is
something in the misfortune of even our best friend which does not
altogether displease us’: so that you will quickly have enough of the
vices of culture, the most offensive of all, and will prefer to turn
away your look from human nature altogether, lest you fall yourself
into another vice,--that of hatred of mankind.”[353]

It is sad to think how completely this virile, poignant sense of the
dread realities of human life again disappeared from the teachings of
such post-Kantians as Hegel and Schleiermacher,--in other important
respects so much more satisfactory than Kant. As Mr. Tennant has well
said, in a stimulating book which, on this point at least, voices
the unsophisticated, fully awakened conscience and Christian sense
with refreshing directness, “for Jesus Christ and for the Christian
consciousness, sin means something infinitely deeper and more real than
what it can have meant for Spinoza or the followers of Hegel.”[354]
Here again we have now in Prof. Eucken, a philosopher who, free from
ultimate Pessimism, lets us hear once more those tones which are alone
adequate to the painful reality. “In great things and in small, there
exists an evil disposition beyond all simple selfishness: hatred and
envy, even where the hater’s self-interest is not touched; an antipathy
to things great and divine; a pleasure found in the disfigurement or
destruction of the Good.… Indeed the mysterious fact of Evil, as a
positive opposition to Good, has never ceased to occupy the deepest
minds.… The concept of moral guilt cannot be got rid of, try as we
may.”[355]

(5) And yet even with regard to this matter, Mysticism represents a
profound compensating truth and movement, which we cannot, without
grave detriment, lose out of the complete religious life. For in life
at large, and in human life and history in particular, it would be
sheer perversity to deny that there is much immediate, delightful,
noble Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; and these also have a right to
the soul’s careful, ruminating attention. And it is the Mystical
element that furnishes this rumination.--Again, “it is part of the
essential character of human consciousness, as a Synthesis and an
organizing Unity, that, as long as the life of that consciousness
lasts at all, not only contrast and tension, but also concentration
and equilibrium must manifest themselves. Taking life’s standard from
life itself, we cannot admit its decisive constituent to lie in tension
alone.”[356] And it is the Mystical mood that helps to establish this
equilibrium.--And finally, deep peace, an overflowing possession and
attainment, and a noble joy, are immensely, irreplaceably powerful
towards growth in personality and spiritual fruitfulness. Nothing,
then, would be more shortsighted than to try and keep the soul from a
deep, ample, recollective movement, from feeding upon and relishing,
from as it were stretching itself out and bathing in, spiritual air and
sunshine, in a rapt admiration, in a deep experience of the greatness,
the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of the World, of Life, of God.


2. _Mysticism and the Origin of Evil._

The second hindrance and help, afforded respectively by Exclusive and
by Inclusive Mysticism in the matter of Evil, concerns the question of
its Origin.

(1) Now it appears strange at first sight that, instead of first
directly realizing and picturing the undeniable, profoundly important
facts of man’s interior conflict, his continuous lapses from his own
deepest standard, and his need of a help not his own to become what
he cannot but wish to be, and of leaving the theory as to how man
came by this condition to the second place; the Mystics should so
largely,--witness Catherine--directly express only this theory, and
should face what is happening _hic et nunc_ all but exclusively under
the picture of the prehistoric beginnings of these happenings, in the
state of innocence and the lapse of the first man. For men of other
religious modalities have held this doctrine as firmly as the Mystics,
yet have mostly dwelt directly upon the central core of goodness and
the weakness and sinfulness to be found in man; whilst the Mystics
had even less scruple than other kinds of devout souls in embodying
experimental truths in concepts and symbols other than the common ones.

(2) I think that, here again, it was the Neo-Platonist literary
influence, so strong also on other points with the Mystics of the
past, and a psychological trend characteristic of the Mystical habit
of mind, which conjoined thus to concentrate the Mystics’ attention
upon the doctrines of Original Justice and of a First Lapse, and
to give to these doctrines the peculiar form and tone taken on by
them here. We have noted, for instance, in the case of Catherine
herself, how powerfully her thought and feeling, as to the first
human soul’s first lapse into sin, is influenced by the idea of each
human soul’s lapse into a body; and we have found this latter idea
to be, notwithstanding its echoes in the Deutero-Canonical Book of
Wisdom and in one non-doctrinal passage in St. Paul, not Christian
but Neo-Platonist. Yet it is this strongly anti-body idea that could
not fail to attract Mysticism, as such.--And the conception as to the
plenary righteousness of that first soul before its lapse, which she
gets from Christian theology, is similarly influenced, in her theorized
emotion and thought, by the Neo-Platonist idea of every soul having
already existed, perfectly spotless, previous to its incarnation:
a view which could not but immensely attract such a high-strung
temperament, with its immense requirement of something fixed and
picturable on which to rest. Thus here the ideal for each soul’s future
would have been already real in each soul’s past. In this past the soul
would have been, as it were, a mirror of a particular fixed size and
fixed intensity of lustre; its business here below consists in removing
the impurities adhering to this mirror’s surface, and in guarding it
against fresh stains.

(3) Now it is well known how it was St. Augustine, that mighty and
daring, yet at times ponderous, intellect, who, (so long a mental
captive of the Manichees and then so profoundly influenced by
Plotinus,) was impelled, by the experiences of his own disordered
earlier life and by his ardent African nature, to formulate by far the
most explicit and influential of the doctrines upon these difficult
matters. And if, with the aid of the Abbé Turmel’s admirable articles
on the subject, we can, with a fairly open mind, study his successive,
profoundly varying, speculations and conclusions concerning the Nature
and Origin of Sin,[357] we shall not fail to be deeply impressed with
the largely impassable maze of opposite extremes, contradictions and
difficulties of every kind, in which that adventurous mind involved
itself.--And to these difficulties immanent to the doctrine,--at
least, in the form it takes in St. Augustine’s hands,--has, of course,
to be added the serious moral danger that would at once result,
were we, by too emphatic or literal an insistence upon the true
guiltiness of Original sin, to weaken the chief axiom of all true
morality--that the concurrence of the personality, in a freely-willed
assent, is necessarily involved in the idea of sin and guilt.--And
now the ever-accumulating number and weight of even the most certain
facts and most moderate inductions of Anthropology and Ethnology are
abolishing all evidential grounds for holding a primitive high level
of human knowledge and innocence, and a single sudden plunge into a
fallen estate, as above, apparently against, all our physiological,
psychological, historical evidences and analogies, (which all point
to a gradual rise from lowly beginnings), and are reducing such a
conception to a pure postulate of Theology.

Yet Anthropology and Ethnology leave in undisturbed possession the
great truths of Faith that “man’s condition denotes a fall from the
Divine intention, a parody of God’s purpose in human history,” and that
“sin is exceedingly sinful for us in whom it is a deliberate grieving
of the Holy Spirit”; and they actually reinforce the profound verities
that “the realization of our better self is a stupendously difficult
task,” and as to “Man’s crying need of grace, and his capacity for
a gospel of Redemption.”[358] But they point, with a force great in
proportion to the highly various, cumulatively operative, immensely
interpretative character of the evidence,--to the conclusion that
“Sin,” as the Anglican Archdeacon Wilson strikingly puts it, “is …
the survival or misuse of habits and tendencies that were incidental
to an earlier stage of development.… Their sinfulness would thus lie
in their anachronism, in their resistance to the … Divine force that
makes for moral development and righteousness.” Certainly “the human
infant” appears to careful observers, as Mr. Tennant notes, “as simply
a non-moral animal,” with corresponding impulses and propensities.
According to this view “morality consists in the formation of the
non-moral material of nature into character …”; so that “if goodness
consists essentially in man’s steady moralization of the raw material
of morality, its opposite, sin, cannot consist in the material awaiting
moralization, but in the will’s failure to completely moralize it.”
“Evil” would thus be “not the result of a transition from the good, but
good and evil would” both alike “be voluntary developments from what
is ethically neutral.”[359] Dr. Wilson finds, accordingly, that “this
conflict of freedom and conscience is precisely what is related as
‘the Fall’ _sub specie historiae_.” Scripture “tells of the fall of a
creature from unconscious innocence to conscious guilt. But this fall
from innocence” would thus be, “in another sense, a rise to a higher
grade of being.”[360]

(4) It is, in any case, highly satisfactory for a Catholic to remember
that the acute form, given to the doctrine of Original Sin by St.
Augustine, has never been finally accepted by the Catholic Roman
Church; indeed, that the Tridentine Definition expressly declares that
Concupiscence does not, in strictness, possess the nature of Sin, but
arises naturally, on the withdrawal of the _donum superadditum_,--so
that Mr. Tennant can admit, in strictest accuracy, that “in this
respect, the Roman theology is more philosophical than that of
the Symbols of Protestant Christendom.”[361] It is true that the
insistence upon “Original Sin” possessing somehow “the true and proper
nature of Sin” remains a grave difficulty, even in this Tridentine
formulation of the doctrine; whilst the objections, already referred
to as accumulating against the theory in general, retain some of
their cogency against other parts of this decree.--Yet we have here
an impressive proclamation of the profoundest truths: the spiritual
greatness of God’s plan for us, the substantial goodness of the
material still ready to our hand for the execution of that plan, and
His necessary help ever ready from the first; the reality of our lapse,
away from all these, into sin, and of the effects of such lapse upon
the soul; the abiding conflict between sense and spirit, the old man
and the new, within each one of us; and the close solidarity of our
poor, upward-aspiring, downward-plunging race, in evil as well as in
good.

(5) And as to the Christian Mystics, their one particular danger
here,--that of a Static Conception of man’s spirit as somehow
constituted, from the first, a substance of a definite, final size and
dignity, which but demands the removal of disfiguring impurities, is
largely eliminated, even in theory, and all but completely overcome
in practice, by the doctrine and the practice of Pure Love. For
in “Charity” we get a directly dynamic, expansive conception and
experience: man’s spirit is, at first, potential rather than actual,
and has to be conquered and brought, as it were, to such and such
a size and close-knitness of organization, by much fight with, and
by the slow transformation of, the animal and selfish nature. Thus
Pure Love, Charity, Agape, has to fight it out, inch by inch, with
another, still positive force, impure love, concupiscence, Eros,
in all the latter’s multiform disguises. Here Purity has become
something intensely positive and of boundless capacities for growth;
as St. Thomas says, “Pure Love has no limit to its increase, for it
is a certain participation in the Infinite Love, which is the Holy
Spirit.”[362]--In this utterly real, deeply Christian way do these
Mystics overcome Neo-Platonist static abstractions, and simultaneously
regain, in their practical theory and emotional perception, the great
truth of the deep, subtle force of Evil, against which Pure Love has to
stand, in virile guard, as long as earth’s vigil lasts. And the longest
and most difficult of these conflicts is found,--here again in utterly
Christian fashion,--not in the sensual tendencies proceeding from the
body, but in the self-adoration, the solipsism of the spirit. We have
found this in Catherine: at her best she ever has something of the
large Stoic joy at being but a citizen in a divine Cosmopolis; yet but
Love and Humility, those profoundest of the Christian affections, have
indefinitely deepened the truth of the outlook, and the range of the
work to be done, in and for herself and others.

(6) Yet even apart from Pure Love, Mysticism can accurately be said to
apprehend an important truth when, along its static line of thought
and feeling, it sees each soul as, from the first, a substance of a
particular, final size. For each soul is doubtless intended, from the
first, to express a particular thought and wish of God, to form one,
never simply replaceable member in His Kingdom, to attain to a unique
kind and degree of personality: and though it can refuse to endorse and
carry out this plan, the plan remains within it, in the form of never
entirely suppressible longings. The Mystic, then, sees much here also.


3. _The warfare against Evil. Pseudo-Mysticism._

The third of the relations between Mysticism and the conception and
experience of Evil requires a further elucidation of an important
distinction, which we have already found at work all along, more or
less consciously, between the higher and the lower Mysticism, and their
respective, profoundly divergent, tempers, objects, and range.

(1) Prof. Münsterberg discriminates between these two Mysticisms with
a brilliant excessiveness, and ends by reserving the word “Mysticism”
for the rejected kind alone. “As soon as we speak of psychical
objects,--of ideas, feelings, and volitions,--as subject-matters of our
direct consciousness and experience, we have put before ourselves an
artificial product, a transformation, to which the categories of real
life no longer apply.” In this artificial product causal connections
have taken the place of final ends. But “History, Practical Life,
… Morality, Religion have nothing to do with these psychological
constructions; the categories of Psychology,” treated by Münsterberg
himself as a Natural, Determinist Science, “must not intrude into their
teleological domains. But if,” on the other hand, “the categories
belonging to Reality,” which is Spiritual and Libertarian, “are forced
on to the psychological system, a system which was framed” by our
mind “in the interest of causal explanation, we get a cheap mixture,
which satisfies neither the one aim nor the other. Just this is the
effect of Mysticism. It is the personal, emotional view applied,
not to the world of Reality, where it fits, but to the Physical and
Psychological worlds, which are constructed by the human logical will,
with a view to gaining an impersonal, unemotional causal system.…
The ideals of Ethics and Religion … have now been projected into the
atomistic structure” (of the Causal System), “and have thus become
dependent upon this system’s nature; they find their right of existence
limited to the regions where ignorance of Nature leaves blanks in the
Causal System, and have to tremble at every advance which Science
makes.” It is to this projection alone that Münsterberg would apply
the term “Mysticism,” which thus becomes exclusively “the doctrine
that the processes in the world of physical and psychical objects
are not always subject to natural laws, but are influenced, at times,
in a manner fundamentally inexplicable from the standpoint of the
causal conception of Nature.… Yet, the special interest of the Mystic
stands and falls here with his conviction that, in these extra-causal
combinations,” thus operative right within and at the level of this
causal system, “we have a” direct, demonstrable “manifestation of a
positive system of quite another kind, a System of Values, a system
dominated, not by Mechanism, but by Significance.”[363]

(2) Now we have been given here a doubtless excessively antithetic and
dualistic picture of what, in actual life, is a close-knit variety in
unity,--that interaction between, and anticipation of the whole in, the
parts, and that indication of the later stages in the earlier,--which
is so strikingly operative in the order and organization of the various
constituents and stages of the processes and growth of the human mind
and character, and which appears again in the Reality apprehended,
reproduced, and enriched by man’s powers.

Even in the humblest of our Sense-perceptions, there is already a
mind perceiving and a Mind perceived; and, in the most abstract
and artificial of our intellectual constructions, there is not
only a logical requirement, but also, underlying this requirement
as this cause’s deepest cause, an ever-growing if unarticulated
experience and sense that only by the closest contact with the most
impersonal-seeming, impersonally conceived forces of life and nature,
and by the deepest recollection within its own interior world of
mind and will, can man’s soul adequately develop and keep alive,
within itself, a solid degree and consciousness of Spirit, Free-will,
Personality, Eternity, and God. Thus, in proportion as he comes more
deeply to advance in the true occasions of his spirit’s growth, does
man still further emphasize and differentiate these two levels: the
shallower, spacial-temporal, mathematico-physical, quantitative and
determinist aspect of reality and level of apprehension; and the
deeper, alone at all adequate, experience of all the fuller degrees
of Reality and effectuations of the spirit’s life, with their
overlapping, interpenetrating Succession, (their Duration), and their
Libertarianism, Interiority, and Sense of the Infinite. He thus
emphasizes both levels, because the determinist level is found to be,
though never the source or direct cause, yet ever a necessary awakener
and purifier of the Libertarian level.

Strictly within the temporal-spacial, quantitative method and level,
indeed, we can nowhere find Teleology; but if we look back upon these
quantitative superficialities from the qualitative, durational and
personal, spiritual level and standpoint, (which alone constitute
our direct experience), we find that the quantitative, causal level
and method is everywhere inadequate to exhaust or rightly to picture
Reality, in exact proportion to this reality’s degree of fulness and of
worth. From the simplest Vegetable-Cell up to Orchids and Insectivorous
Plants; from these on to Protozoans and up, through Insects, Reptiles,
and Birds, to the most intelligent of Domestic Animals; from these on
to Man, the Savage, and up to the most cultured or saintly of human
personalities: we have everywhere, and increasingly, an inside, an
organism, a subject as well as object,--a series which is, probably
from the first, endowed with some kind of dim consciousness, and which
increasingly possessed of a more and more definite consciousness,
culminates in the full self-consciousness of the most fully human man.
And everywhere here, though in indefinitely increasing measure, it is
the individualizing and historical, the organic and soul-conceptions
and experiences which constitute the most characteristic and important
truths and reality about and in these beings. For the higher up we
get in this scale of Reality, the more does the Interior determine
and express itself in the Exterior, and the more does not only kind
differ from kind of being, but even the single individual from the
other individuals within each several kind. And yet nowhere, not even
in free-willing, most individualized, personal Man do we find the
quantitative, determinist envelope simply torn asunder and revealing
the qualitative, libertarian spirit perfectly naked and directly
testable by chronometer, measuring-rod, or crucible. The spirit is thus
ever like unto a gloved hand, which, let it move ever so spontaneously,
will ever, in the first instance, present the five senses with a glove
which, to their exclusive tests, appears as but dead and motionless
leather.

(3) Now we have already in Chapter IX studied the contrasting
attitudes of Catherine and her attendants towards one class of such
effects,--those attributed to the Divine Spirit,--and hence, in
principle, towards this whole question. Yet it is in the matter of
phenomena, taken to be directly Diabolic or Preternatural, that a
Pseudo-Mysticism has been specially fruitful in strangely materialistic
fantasies. As late as 1774 the _Institutiones Theologiae Mysticae_
of Dom Schram, O.S.B., a book which even yet enjoys considerable
authority, still solemnly described, as so many facts, cases of
Diabolical _Incubi_ and _Succubae_. Even in 1836-1842 the layman
Joseph Görres could still devote a full half of his widely influential
_Mystik_ to “Diabolical Mysticism,”--witchcraft, etc.; a large space
to “Natural Mysticism,”--divination, lycanthropy, vampires, etc.; and
a considerable part of the “Divine Mysticism,” to various directly
miraculous phenomenalisms. The Abbé Ribet could still, in his _La
Mystique Divine, distinguée de ses Contrefaçons Diaboliques_, of 1895,
give us a similarly uncritical mixture and transposition of tests
and levels. But the terrible ravages of the belief in witchcraft in
the later Middle Ages, and, only a few years back, the humiliating
fraud and craze concerning “Diana Vaughan,” are alone abundantly
sufficient to warn believers in the positive character of Evil away
from all, solidly avoidable, approaches to such dangerous forms of this
belief.[364]

(4) Yet the higher and highest Mystical attitude has never ceased
to find its fullest, most penetrating expression in the life and
teaching of devoted children of the Roman Church,--several of whom
have been proclaimed Doctors and Models by that Church herself. And by
a conjunction of four characteristics these great normative lives and
teachers still point the way, out of and beyond all false or sickly
Mysticism, on to the wholesome and the true.

(i) There is, first, the grand trust in and love of God’s beautiful,
wide world, and in and of the manifold truth and goodness present
throughout life,--realities which we have already found rightly to
be dwelt on, in certain recollective movements and moments, to the
momentary exclusion of their positively operative, yet ever weaker,
opposites. “Well I wote,” says Mother Juliana, “that heaven and earth,
and all that is made, is great, large, fair and good”; “the full-head
of joy is to behold God in all,” and “truly to enjoy in Our Lord, is a
full lovely thanking in His sight.”[365] This completely un-Manichaean
attitude,--so Christian when held as the ultimate among the divers,
sad and joyful, strenuous and contemplative moods of the soul,--is
as strongly present in Clement of Alexandria, in the Sts. Catherine
of Siena and of Genoa, in St. John of the Cross, and indeed in the
recollective moments of all the great Mystics.

(ii) There is, next, a strong insistence upon the soul having to
transcend all particular lights and impressions, in precise proportion
to their apparently extraordinary character, if it would become strong
and truly spiritual. “He that will rely on the letter of the divine
locution, or on the intellectual form of the vision, will necessarily
fall into delusion. ‘The letter killeth, the spirit quickeneth’; we
must therefore reject the literal sense, and abide in the obscurity
of faith.” “One desire only doth God allow in His presence, that of
perfectly observing His law and carrying the Cross of Christ.… That
soul, which has no other aim, will be a true ark containing the true
Manna, which is God.” “One act of the will, wrought in charity, is
more precious in the eyes of God, than that which all the visions
and revelations of heaven might effect.” “Let men cease to regard
these supernatural apprehensions … that they may be free.”[366] Here
the essence of the doctrine lies in the importance attached to this
transcendence, and not in the particular views of the Saint concerning
the character of this or that miraculous-seeming phenomenon to be
transcended.

(iii) And this essential doctrine retains all its cogency, even though
we hold the strict necessity of a contrary, alternating movement
of definite occupation with the Concrete, Contingent, Historical,
Institutional, in thought and action. For this occupation will be with
the normal, typical means, duties, and facts of human and religious
life; and, whilst fully conscious of the Supernatural working in and
with these seemingly but natural materials, will, with St. Augustine,
pray God to “grant men to perceive in little things the common-seeming
indications of things both small and great,” and, with him, will see a
greater miracle in the yearly transformation of the vine’s watery sap
into wine, and in the germination of any single seed, than even in that
of Cana.[367]

(iv) And then there is, upon the whole, a tendency to concentrate, at
these recollective stages, the soul’s attention upon Christ and God
alone. “I believe I understand,” says Mother Juliana, “the ministration
of holy Angels, as Clerks tell; but it was not shewed to me. For
Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all.
God alone took our nature, and none but He; Christ alone worked our
salvation, and none but He.”[368] And thus we get a wholesome check
upon the Neo-Platonist countless mediations, of which the reflex is
still to be found in the Areopagite. God indeed is alone held, with
all Catholic theologians, to be capable of penetrating to the soul’s
centre, and the fight against Evil is simplified to a watch and war
against Self, in the form of an ever-increasing engrossment in the
thought of God, and in the interests of His Kingdom. “Only a soul
in union with God,” says St. John of the Cross, “is capable of this
profound loving knowledge: for this knowledge is itself that union.…
The Devil has no power to simulate anything so great.” “Self-love,”
says Père Grou, “is the sole source of all the illusions of the
spiritual life.… Jesus Christ on one occasion said to St. Catherine
of Siena: ‘My daughter, think of Me, and I will think of thee’: a
short epitome of all perfection. ‘Wheresoever thou findest self,’ says
the _Imitation_, ‘drop that self’: the soul’s degree of fidelity to
this precept is the true measure of its advancement.”[369] The highly
authorized _Manuel de Théologie Mystique_ of the Abbé Lejeune, 1897,
gives but one-sixth of its three-hundred pages to the discussion of
all quasi-miraculous phenomena, puts them all apart from the substance
of Contemplation and of the Mystical Life, and dwells much upon
the manifold dangers of such, never essential, things. The French
Oratorian, Abbé L. Laberthonnière, represents, in the _Annales de
Philosophie Chrétienne_, a spirituality as full of a delicate Mysticism
as it is free from any attachment to extraordinary phenomena. The same
can be said of the Rev. George Tyrrell’s _Hard Sayings_ and _External
Religion_. And the Abbé Sandreau has furnished us with two books of the
most solid tradition and discrimination in all these matters.[370]

(5) And we should, in justice, remember that the Phenomenalist
Mysticism, objected to by Prof. Münsterberg and so sternly transcended
by St. John of the Cross, is precisely what is still hankered after,
and treated as of spiritual worth, by present-day Spiritualism. Indeed,
even Prof. James’s in many respects valuable _Varieties of Religious
Experience_ is seriously damaged by a cognate tendency to treat
Religion, or at least Mysticism, as an abnormal faculty for perceiving
phenomena inexplicable by physical and psychical science.

(6) And finally, with respect to the personality of Evil, we must not
forget that “there are drawings to evil as to good, which are not mere
self-temptations, … but which derive from other wills than our own;
strictly, it is only persons that can tempt us.”[371]




CHAPTER XIV

THE TWO FINAL PROBLEMS: MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD,
AND SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY, HUMAN AND DIVINE


INTRODUCTORY.

_Impossibility of completely abstracting from the theoretical form in
the study of the experimental matter._

We now come to the last two of our final difficulties and problems--the
supposed or real relations between Inclusive or Exclusive Mysticism
and Pantheism; and the question concerning the Immanence of God and
Spiritual Personality, Human and Divine.

(1) A preliminary difficulty in this, our deepest, task arises from
the fact that, whereas the evidences of a predominantly individual,
personal, directly experimental kind, furnished by every at all deeply
religious soul, have hitherto been all but completely overlooked
by trained historical investigators, in favour of the study of the
theological concepts and formulations accepted and transmitted by
such souls, now the opposite extreme is tending to predominate, as in
Prof. William James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902, or
in Prof. Weinel’s interesting study, _The Effects of the Spirit and
of the Spirits in the Sub-Apostolic Age_, 1899. For here, as Prof.
Bousset points out in connection with the latter book, we get an all
but complete overlooking of the fact that, even in the most individual
experience, there is always some intellectual framework or conception,
some more or less traditional form, which had previously found lodgment
in, and had been more or less accepted by, that soul; so that, though
the experience itself, where at all deep, is never the mere precipitate
of a conventionally accepted traditional intellectual form, it is
nevertheless, even when more or less in conflict with this form, never
completely independent of it.[372]--Yet though we cannot discriminate
in full detail, we can show certain peculiarities in the traditional
Jewish, Mohammedan, Christian Mysticism to be not intrinsic to the
Mystical apprehensions as such, but to come from the then prevalent
philosophies which deflected those apprehensions in those particular
ways.

(2) In view then of this inevitable inter-relation between the
experimental, personal matter and the theoretical, traditional form,
I shall first consider the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist conceptions
concerning the relations between the General and the Particular,
between God and Individual Things, as being the two, partly rival yet
largely similar, systems that, between them, have most profoundly
influenced the intellectual starting-point, analysis, and formulation
of those experiences; and shall try to show the special attraction and
danger of these conceptions for the mystically religious temperament.
I shall next discuss the conceptions as to the relations between
God and the individual personality,--the Noûs, the Spirit, and the
Soul,--which, still largely Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist, have even
more profoundly commended themselves to those Mystics, since these
conceptions so largely met some of those Mystics’ requirements, and
indeed remain still, in part, the best analysis procurable. I shall,
thirdly, face the question as to any intrinsic tendency to Pantheism in
Mysticism as such, and as to the significance and the possible utility
of any such tendency, keeping all fuller description of the right
check upon it for my last chapter. And finally, I shall consider what
degree and form of the Divine Immanence in the human soul, of direct
Experience or Knowledge of God on the part of man, and of “Personality”
in God, appear to result from the most careful analysis of the deepest
religious consciousness, and from the requirements of the Sciences and
of Life.


I. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE GENERAL AND THE PARTICULAR, GOD AND INDIVIDUAL
THINGS, ACCORDING TO ARISTOTLE, THE NEO-PLATONISTS, AND THE MEDIEVAL
STRICT REALISTS.


1. _Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus._

(1) With regard to the relations between the General and Particular,
we should note Aristotle’s final perplexities and contradictions,
arising from his failure to harmonize or to transcend, by means of
a new and self-consistent conception, the two currents, the Platonic
and the specifically Aristotelian, which make up his thought. For,
with him as with Plato, all Knowledge has to do with Reality: hence
Reality alone, in the highest, primary sense of the word, can form
the highest, primary object of Knowledge; Knowledge will be busy,
primarily, with the Essence, the Substance of things. But with him, as
against Plato, every substance is unique, whence it would follow that
all knowledge refers, at bottom, to the Individual,--individual beings
would form, not only the starting-point, but also the content and
object of knowledge.--Yet this is what Aristotle, once more at one with
Plato, stoutly denies: Science, even where it penetrates most deeply
into the Particular, is never directed to individual things as such,
but always to General Concepts; and this, not because of our human
incapacity completely to know the Individual, as such, but because the
General, in spite of the Particular being better known to us, is more
primitive and more knowable, as alone possessing that Immutability
which must characterize all objects of true knowledge.[373] The true
Essence of things consists only in what is thought in their Concept,
which concept is always some Universal; yet this Universal exists only
in Individual Beings, which are thus declared true Substances: here
are two contentions, the possibility of whose co-existence he fails
to explain. Indeed at one time it is the Form, at another it is the
Individual Being, composed of Form and Matter, which appears as real;
and Matter, again, appears both as the Indefinite General and as the
Cause of Individual Particularity.[374]

(2) Now Plato had indeed insisted upon ascending to even greater
abstraction, unity, and generality, as the sure process for attaining
to the truth of things; and had retained what is, for us, a strangely
unpersonal, abstract element, precisely in his highest concept, since
God here is hardly personal, but the Idea of Good, a Substance distinct
from all other things, yet not, on this account, an Individual. Yet
Plato’s profoundly aesthetic, social, ethical, above all religious,
consciousness forced him to the inconsistency of proclaiming that, as
the Sun is higher than the light and the eye, so the Good is higher
than (mere) Being and Knowledge; and this Supreme Idea of the Good
gives to things their Being, and to the understanding its power of
Cognition, and is the Cause of all Rightness and Beauty, the Source
of all Reality and Reason, and hence, not only a final, but also an
efficient Cause,--indeed _the_ Cause, pure and simple.[375] In the
_Philebus_ he tells us explicitly that the Good and the Divine Reason
are identical; and in the _Timaeus_ the Demiurge, the World-Former,
looks indeed to the Image of the World, in order to copy it: yet the
Demiurge is also himself this image which he copies.[376] We thus
still have a supreme Multiplicity in Unity as the characteristic of
the deepest Reality; and its chief attribute, Goodness, is not the
most abstract and aloof, but the most rich in qualities and the most
boundlessly self-communicative: “He was good, so he desired that all
things should be as like unto himself as possible.”[377] And Aristotle,
(although he places God altogether outside the visible world, and
attributes to Him there one sole action, the thinking of his own
thought, and one quasi-emotion, intellectual joy at this thinking),
still maintains, in this shrunken form, the identity of the Good and of
the Supreme Reason, Noûs, and a certain Multiplicity in Unity, and a
true self-consciousness, within Him.

(3) It is Plotinus who is the first expressly to put the Godhead,--in
strict obedience to the Abstractive scheme,--beyond all Multiplicity,
hence above the highest Reason itself, for reason ever contains at
least the duality of Subject thinking and of Object thought; above
Being, for all being has ever a multitude of determinations; and above
every part and the totality of All Things, for it is the cause of them
all. The Cause is here ever outside the effect, the Unity outside the
Multiplicity, what is thought outside of what thinks. The First is
thus purely transcendent,--with one characteristic exception: although
above Being, Energy, Thought, and Thinking, Beauty, Virtue, Life, It
is still the Good; and because of this, though utterly self-sufficing
and without action of any kind, It, “as it were,” overflows, and
this overflow produces a Second.[378] And only this Second is here
the Noûs, possessed of what Aristotle attributes to the First: it is
no sheer Unity, “all things are together there, yet are they there
discriminated”: it is contemplative Thinking of itself; it is pure and
perfect Action.[379]

(4) And Proclus who, through the Pseudo-Dionysius, is the chief
mediator between Plato and Plotinus on the one hand, and the Medieval
Mystics and Scholastics on the other, is, with his immense thirst for
Unity, necessarily absorbed by the question as to the Law according
to which all things are conjoined to a whole. And this Law is for him
the process of the Many out of the One, and their inclination back to
the One; for this process and inclination determine the connection
of all things, and the precise place occupied by each thing in that
connection. All things move in the circle of procession from their
cause, and of return to it; the simplest beings are the most perfect;
the most complex are the most imperfect.[380]


2. _The Anti-Proclian current, in the Areopagite’s view._

Now in the Pseudo-Dionysius we find an interesting oscillation between
genuine Neo-Platonism, which finds Beings perfect in proportion to the
fewness and universality of their attributes, although, with it, he
inconsistently holds Goodness,--the deepest but not the most general
attribute,--to be the most perfect of all; and Aristotelianism at its
richest, when it finds Beings perfect according to the multiplicity
and depth of their attributes. Dionysius himself becomes aware of the
dead-lock thence ensuing. “The Divine name of the Good is extended
to things being and to things not being,”--a statement forced upon
him by his keeping, with Plato and Plotinus, Goodness as the supreme
attribute, and yet driving home, more completely than they, their first
principle that Generality and Perfection rise and sink together. “The
Name of Being is extended to all things being” and stretches further
than Life. “The name of Life is extended to all things living” and
stretches further than Wisdom. “The Name of Wisdom is extended,” only,
“to all the intellectual, and rational, and sensible.”

But if so, “for what reason do we affirm,” (as he has been doing in
the previous sections), “that Life,” the less extended, “is superior
to (mere) Being,” the more extended? “and that Wisdom,” though less
extended, “is superior to mere Life,” the more extended? And he answers
in favour of depth and richness of attributes. “If any one assumed
the intellectual to be without being or life, the objection might hold
good. But if the Divine Minds,” the Angels, “both are above all other
beings, and live above all other living creatures, and think and know
above sensible perception and reasoning, and aspire beyond all other
existent and aspiring beings, to … the Beautiful and Good: then they
encircle the Good more closely.” For “the things that participate more
in the one and boundless-giving God, are more … divine, than those that
come behind them in gifts.”[381] And with abiding truth he says: “Those
who place attributes on That which is above every attribute, should
derive the affirmation from what is more cognate to It; but those who
abstract, with regard to That which is above every abstraction, should
derive the negation from what is further removed from It. Are not,
_e.g._, Life and Goodness more cognate to It than air and stone? And is
It not further removed from debauch and anger than from ineffableness
and incomprehensibility?”[382]

But more usually Dionysius shows little or no preference for any
particular attribution or denegation; all are taken to fall short so
infinitely as to eliminate any question as to degrees of failure. “The
Deity-Above-All … is neither Soul nor Mind, neither One nor Oneness,
neither Deity nor Goodness.”[383] God is thus purely transcendent.


3. _Continuators of the Proclian current._

The influence of the Areopagite was notoriously immense throughout
the Middle Ages,--indeed unchecked,--along its Proclian, Emanational,
Ultra-Unitive current,--among the Pantheists from the Christian,
Mohammedan and Jewish camps.

(1) Thus Scotus Eriugena (who died in about 877 A.D.) insists: “In
strict parlance, the Divine Nature Itself exists alone in all things,
and nothing exists which is not that Nature. The Lord and the Creature
are one and the same thing.” “It is its own Self that the Holy Trinity
loves, sees, moves within us.” One of his fundamental ideas is the
equivalence of the degrees of abstraction and those of existence; he
simply hypostatizes the logical table.[384] Eriugena was condemned.

(2) But the Pseudo-Aristotelian, really Proclian, _Liber de Causis_,
written by a Mohammedan in about 850 A.D., became, from its
translation into Latin in about 1180 A.D. onwards, an authority among
the orthodox Scholastics. It takes, as “an example of the (_true_)
doctrine as to Causes, Being, Living-Being, and Man. Here it is
necessary that the thing Being should exist first of all, and next
Living-Being, and last Man. Living-Being is the proximate, Being is
the remote cause of Man; hence Being is in a higher degree the cause
of Man than is Living-Being, since Being is the cause of Living-Being,
which latter again is the cause of Man.” … “Being, (of the kind)
which is before Eternity, is the first cause.… Being is more general
than Eternity.… Being of the kind which is with and after Eternity,
is the first of created things.… It is above Sense, and Soul, and
Intelligence.”[385]

(3) The Mohammedan Avicenna, who died in 1037 A.D., is mostly
Aristotelian in philosophy and Orthodox in religious intention, and,
translated into Latin, was much used by St. Thomas. Yet he has lapses
into pure Pantheism, such as: “The true Being that belongs to God,
is not His only, but is the Being of all things, and comes forth
abundantly from His Being. That which all things desire is Being:
Being is Goodness; the perfection of Being is the perfection of
Goodness.”[386]

(4) And the Spanish Jew, Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron), who died about 1070
A.D., is predominantly Proclian, but with a form of Pantheism which, in
parts, strikingly foreshadows Spinoza. His masterly _Fons Vitae_, as
translated into Latin, exercised a profound influence upon Duns Scotus.
“Below the first Maker there is nothing but what is both matter and
form.” “All things are resolvable into Matter and Form. If all things
were resolvable into a single root,” (that is, into Form alone), “there
would be no difference between that one root and the one Maker.” There
exists a universal Matter and a universal Form. The first, or universal
Matter, is a substance existing by itself, which sustains diversity,
and is one in number: it is capable of receiving all the different
kinds of forms. The universal Form is a substance which constitutes the
essence of all the different kinds of forms.… By means of the knowledge
of this universal Form, the knowledge of every (less general) form is
acquired,--is deduced from it and resolved into it.” “Being falls under
four categories, answering to: whether it is, what it is, what is its
quality, and why it is: but, of these, the first in order of dignity
is the category which inquires whether it is at all.”[387] We thus
get again the degree of worth strictly identical with the degree of
generality.


4. _Inconsistencies of Aquinas and Scotus._

(1) St. Thomas, the chief of the orthodox Scholastics, has embodied
the entire Dionysian writings in his own works, but labours
assiduously--and successfully, as far as his own statements are
concerned--to guard against the Pantheistic tendencies special to
strict Realism. Yet it is clear, from his frequent warnings and
difficult distinctions regarding the double sense of the proposition,
“God is sheer Being,” and from the ease with which we find Eckhart,
an entirely consistent Realist, lapse into the Pantheistic sense, how
immanent is the danger to any severe form of the system.[388] And he
fails to give us a thoroughly understandable and consistent account
as to the relations between the General and the Particular, between
Form and Matter, and between these two pairs of conceptions. Thus
“Materia signata,” matter, as bearing certain dimensions, “is the
principle of individuation”:[389] yet this _quantum_ is already an
individually determined quantity, and _this_ determination remains
unexplained. And certain forms exist separately, without matter, in
which case each single form is a separate species; as with the Angels
and, pre-eminently, with God.--Yet, as already Duns Scotus insisted,
Aquinas’ general principle seems to require the non-existence of pure
forms as distinct beings, and the partial materiality of all individual
beings.[390]

(2) And Duns Scotus teaches, in explicit return to Avicebron, that
every created substance consists of matter as well as of form, and that
there is but one, First Matter, which is identical in every particular
and derivative kind of matter. The world appears to him as a gigantic
tree, whose root is this indeterminate matter; whose branches are
the transitory substances; whose leaves the changeable accidents;
whose flowers, the rational souls; whose fruit are the Angels: and
which God has planted and which He tends. Here again the order of
Efficacity,--with the tell-tale exception of God,--is identical with
that of Generality.[391]


5. _Eckhart’s Pantheistic trend._

But it is Eckhart who consistently develops the Pantheistic trend of
a rigorous Intellectualism. The very competent and strongly Thomistic
Father Denifle shows how Eckhart strictly followed the general
scholastic doctrine, as enunciated by Avicenna: “In every creature
its Being is one thing, and is from another, its Essence is another
thing, and is not from another”; whereas in God, Being and Essence are
identical. And Denifle adds: “Eckhart will have been unable to answer
for himself the question as to what, in strictness, the ‘Esse’ is, in
distinction from the ‘Essentia’; indeed no one could have told him,
with precision.… Eckhart leaves intact the distinction between the
Essence of God and that of the creature; but, doubtless in part because
of this, he feels himself free,--in starting from an ambiguous text
of Boetius,--to break down the careful discriminations established by
St. Thomas, in view of this same text, between Universal Being, Common
to all things extant, and Divine Being, reserved by Aquinas for God
alone.”[392] “What things are nearer to each other, than anything that
_is_ and Being? There is nothing between them.” “Very Being,” the Being
of God, “is the actualizing Form of every form, everywhere.” “In one
word,” adds Denifle, “the Being of God constitutes the formal Being of
all things.”[393] The degrees of Generality and Abstract Thinkableness
are again also the degrees of Reality and Worth: “the Eternal Word
assumed to Itself, not this or that human being, but a human nature
which existed bare, unparticularized.” “Being and Knowableness are
identical.”

When speaking systematically Eckhart is strictly Plotinian: “God
and Godhead are as distinct as earth is from heaven.” “The Godhead
has left all things to God: It owns nought, wills nought, requires
nought, effects nought, produces nought.” “Thou shalt love the Godhead
as It truly is: a non-God, non-Spirit, non-Person … a sheer, pure,
clear One, severed from all duality: let us sink down into that One,
throughout eternity, from Nothing unto Nothing, so help us God.” “The
Godhead Itself remains unknown to Itself.” “It is God who energizes and
speaks one single thing,--His Son, the Holy Ghost, and all creatures.…
Where God speaks it, there it is all God; here, where man understands
it, it is God and creature.”[394] No wonder that the following are
among the propositions condemned by Pope John XXII in 1329: “God
produces me as His own Being, a Being identical, not merely similar”;
and, “I speak as falsely when I call God (the Godhead) good, as if I
call white, black.”[395]


6. _The logical goal of strict Realism._

This series of facts, which could be indefinitely extended, well
illustrates the persistence of “the fundamental doctrine common to all
forms of Realism,--of the species as an entity in the individuals,
common to all and _identical_ in each, an entity to which individual
differences adhere as accidents,” as Prof. Seth-Pattison accurately
defines the matter. “Yet when existence is in question, it is the
individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real individual
is not a compound of species and accidents, but is individual to the
inmost fibre of his being.” Not as though Nominalism were in the right.
For “each finite individual has its” special “place in the one real
universe, with all the parts of which it is inseparably connected. But
the universe is itself an individual or real whole, containing all
its parts within itself, and not a universal of the logical order,
containing its exemplifications under it.”[396] And, above all, minds,
spirits, persons,--however truly they may approximate more and more
to certain great types of rationality, virtue, and religion, which
types are thus increasingly expressive of God’s self-revealing purpose
and nature,--are ever, not merely numerically different, as between
one individual and the other, but, both in its potentialities and
especially in its spiritual actualization, no one soul can or does take
the place of any other.

And if we ask what there is in any strict Realism to attract the
Mystical sense, we shall find it, I think, in the insistence of
such Realism upon Unity, Universality, and Stability. Yet in so
far as Mysticism, in such a case Exclusive Mysticism, tends to oust
the Outgoing movement of the soul, it empties these forms of their
Multiple, Individual, and Energizing content. Inclusive Mysticism may
be truly said alone to attain to the true Mystic’s desires; for only
by the interaction of both movements, and of all the powers of the
soul, will the said soul escape the ever-increasing poverty of content
characteristic of the strict Realist’s pyramid of conceptions; a
poverty undoubtedly antagonistic to the secret aspiration of Mysticism,
which is essentially an apprehension, admiration, and love of the
infinite depths and riches of Reality--of this Reality no doubt present
everywhere, yet in indefinitely various, and mutually complementary and
stimulative forms and degrees. And the readiness with which Mysticism
expressed itself in the Nominalist Categories,--distinctly less
adequate to a healthy, Partial Mysticism than the more moderate forms
of Realism,--shows how little intrinsic was the link which seemed to
bind it to a Realism of the most rigorous kind.


II. RELATIONS BETWEEN GOD AND THE HUMAN SOUL.

In taking next the question as to the relations between God and the
Human Soul, we shall find our difficulties increased, because, here
especially, the Philosophers and even the Biblical Writers have,
with regard to religious experience, used expressions and furnished
stimulations of a generally complex and unclarified, intermittent,
and unharmonized kind; and especially because certain specifically
religious experiences and requirements have operated here with a unique
intensity, at one time in a Pantheistic, at another in a more or less
Deistic direction. The reader will specially note the points in the
following doctrines which helped on the conception that a certain
centre or highest part of the soul is God, or a part of God, Himself.


1. _Plato and Aristotle. “The Noûs.”_

(1) Plato teaches the pre-existence and the post-existence
(immortality) of the soul, as two interdependent truths. In his
earlier stage, _e.g._ the _Phaedrus_, he so little discriminates, in
his argument for immortality, between the individual soul and the
World-Soul, as to argue that “the Self-Moving” Soul generally “is the
beginning of motion, and this motion,” (specially here in connection
with the human soul), “can neither be destroyed nor begotten, since,
in that case, the heavens and all generation would collapse.” Yet
individual souls are not, according to him, emanations of the
World-Soul; but, as the particular ideas stand beside the Supreme Idea,
so do the particular souls stand beside the Soul of the Whole, in a
distinct peculiarity of their own.[397]--And again, since the soul
has lapsed from a purer, its appropriate, life into the body, and has
thus no original, intrinsic relation to this body, the activity of the
senses, indeed in strictness even that of the emotions, cannot form
part of its essential nature. Only the highest part of the soul, the
Reason, _Noûs_, which, as “sun-like, God-like,” can apprehend the sun,
God, is one and simple, as are all the ideas, immortal; whereas the
soul’s lower part consists of two elements,--the nobler, the irascible,
and the ignobler, the concupiscible passions. But how the unity of the
soul’s life can co-exist with this psychical tritomy, is a question
no doubt never formulated even to himself by Plato: we certainly have
only three beings bound together, not one being active in different
directions.[398]

(2) Aristotle, if more sober in his general doctrine, brings some
special obscurities and contradictions. For whilst the pre-existence
of the soul, taken as a whole, is formally denied, and indeed its very
origin is linked to that of the body, its rational part, the Noûs,
comes into the physical organism from outside of the matter altogether,
and an impersonal pre-existence is distinctly predicated of it,--in
strict conformity with his doctrine that the Supreme Noûs does not
directly act upon, or produce things in, the world.[399]


2. _St. Paul. The “Spirit.”_

But it is St. Paul who, in his Mystical outbursts and in the systematic
parts of his doctrine, as against the simply hortatory level of
his teaching, gives us the earliest, one of the deepest, and to
this hour by far the most influential, among the at all detailed
experiences and schemes, accepted by and operative among Christians,
as to the relations of the human soul to God. And here again, and
with characteristic intensity, certain overlapping double meanings
and conceptions, and some vivid descriptions of experiences readily
suggestive of the divinity of the soul’s highest part, repeatedly
appear.

(1) In the systematic passages we not only find the terms _Psyche_,
“Soul,” for the vital force of the body; and _Noûs_, (“Mind,”)
“Heart,” and “Conscience,” for various aspects and functions of
man’s rational and volitional nature: but a special insistence upon
_Pneuma_, “Spirit,” mostly in a quite special sense of the word.
Thus in 1 Cor. ii, 14, 15, we get an absolute contrast between the
psychic or sarkic, the simply natural man, and the Pneumatic, the
Spiritual one, all capacity for understanding the Spirit of God being
denied to the former. The Spiritual thus appears as itself already
the Divine, and the Spirit as the exclusive, characteristic property
of God, something which is foreign to man, apart from his Christian
renovation and elevation to a higher form of existence. Only with the
entrance of faith and its consequences into the mind and will of man,
does this transcendent Spirit become an immanent principle: “through
His Spirit dwelling in you.”[400]--Hence, in the more systematic
Pauline Anthropology, _Pneuma_ cannot be taken as belonging to man’s
original endowment. Certainly in 1 Cor. ii, 11, the term “the spirit
of a man” appears simply because the whole passage is dominated by a
comparison between the Divine and the human consciousness, which allows
simultaneously of the use of the conversely incorrect term, “the mind
of God,”--here, v. 16, and in Rom. xi, 34. And the term “the spirit
of the world,” 1 Cor. ii, 12, is used in contrast with “the Spirit of
God,” and as loosely as the term “the God of this world,” is applied,
in 2 Cor. iv, 4, to Satan.--Only some four passages are difficult to
interpret thus: _e.g._ “Every defilement of flesh and of spirit” (2
Cor. vii, 1); for how can God, Spirit, be defiled? Yet we can “forget
that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,” 1 Cor. vi, 19; and its
defilement can “grieve the Holy Spirit” (Eph. iv, 30).[401]

And note how parallel to his conception of this immanence of the
transcendent Spirit is St. Paul’s conception, based upon his personal,
mystical experience, of the indwelling of Christ in the regenerate
human soul. Saul had indeed been won to Jesus Christ, not by the
history of Jesus’ earthly life, but by the direct manifestation of
the heavenly Spirit-Christ, on the way to Damascus: whence he teaches
that only those who know Him as Spirit, can truly “be in Christ,”--an
expression formed on the model of “to be in the Spirit,” as in Mark
xii, 36, and Apoc. 1, 10.

(2) And then these terms take on, in specifically Pauline Mystical
passages, a suggestion of a local extension and environment, and
express, like the corresponding formulae “in God,” “in the Spirit,” the
conception of an abiding within as it were an element,--that of the
exalted Christ and His Divine glory. Or Christ is within us, as the
Spirit also is said to be, so that the regenerate personality, by its
closeness of intercourse with the personality of Christ, can become
one single Spirit with Him, 1 Cor. vi, 17. “As the air is the element
in which man moves, and yet again the element of life which is present
within the man: so the Pneuma-Christ is for St. Paul both the Ocean
of the Divine Being, into which the Christian, since his reception
of the Spirit, is plunged,” and in which he disports himself, “and a
stream which, derived from that Ocean, is specially introduced within
his individual life.”[402] Catherine’s profound indebtedness to this
Mystical Pauline doctrine has already been studied; here we are but
considering this doctrine in so far as suggestive, to the Mystics,
of the identity between the true self and God,--an identity readily
reached, if we press such passages as “Christ, our life”; “to live is
Christ”; “I live, not I, but Christ liveth in me.”[403]


3. _Plotinus._

Some two centuries later, Plotinus brings his profound influence to
bear in the direction of such identification. For as the First, the
One, which, as we saw, possesses, for him, no Self-consciousness,
Life, or Being, produces the Second, the Noûs, which, possessed of
all these attributes, exercises them directly in self-contemplation
alone; and yet this Second is so closely like that First as to be
“light from light”: so does the Second produce the Third, the Human
Psyche, which, though “a thing by itself,” is a “godlike (divine)
thing,” since it possesses “a more divine part, the part which is
neighbour to what is above, the Noûs, with which and from which Noûs
the Psyche exists.”--The Psyche is “an image of the Noûs”: “as outward
speech expresses inward thought, so is the Psyche a concept of the
Noûs,--a certain energy of the Noûs, as the Noûs itself is an energy
of the First Cause.” “As with fire, where we distinguish the heat that
abides within the fire and the heat that is emitted by it … so must we
conceive the Psyche not as wholly flowing forth from, but as in part
abiding in, in part proceeding from the Noûs.”[404]

And towards the end of the great Ninth Book of the Sixth Ennead, he
tells how in Ecstasy “the soul sees the Source of Life … the Ground of
Goodness, the Root of the Soul.… For we are not cut off from or outside
of It … but we breathe and consist in It: since It does not give and
then retire, but ever lifts and bears us, so long as It is what It is.”
“We must stand alone in It and must become It alone, after stripping
off all the rest that hangs about us.… There we can behold both Him and
our own selves,--ourselves, full of intellectual light, or rather as
Pure Light Itself, having become God, or rather as being simply He …
abiding altogether unmoved, having become as it were Stability Itself.”
“When man has moved out of himself away to God, like the image to its
Prototype, he has reached his journey’s end.” “And this is the life of
the Gods and of divine and blessed men … a flight of the alone to the
Alone.”[405]


4. _Eckhart’s position. Ruysbroek._

(1) Eckhart gives us both Plotinian positions--the God-likeness and
the downright Divinity of the soul. “The Spark (_das Fünkelein_)
of the Soul … is a light impressed upon its uppermost part, and an
image of the Divine Nature, which is ever at war with all that is not
divine. It is not one of the several powers of the soul.… Its name
is Synteresis,”--_i.e._ conscience. “The nine powers of the soul are
all servants of that man of the soul, and help him on to the soul’s
Source.”[406]--But in one of the condemned propositions he says: “There
is something in the soul which is Increate and Uncreatable; if the
whole soul were such, it would be (entirely) Increate and Uncreatable.
And this is the Intellect,”--standing here exactly for Plotinus’s
Noûs.[407]

(2) Ruysbroek (who died in 1381) combines a considerable fundamental
sobriety with much of St. Paul’s daring and many echoes of Plotinus.
“The unity of our spirit with God is of two kinds,--essential and
actual. According to its essence, our spirit receives, in its
innermost highest part, the visit of Christ, without means and without
intermission; for the life which we are in God, in our Eternal Image,
and that which we have and are in ourselves, according to the essence
of our being … are without distinction.--But this essential unity of
our spirit with God has no consistency in itself, but abides in God and
flows out from and depends on Him.” The actual unity of our spirit with
God, caused by Grace, confers upon us not His Image, but His Likeness,
“and though we cannot lose the Image of God, nor our natural unity with
Him,--if we lose His Likeness, His Grace, Christ, who, in this case,
comes to us with mediations and intermissions, we shall be damned.”[408]


5. _St. Teresa’s mediating view._

St. Teresa’s teachings contain interesting faint echoes of the old
perplexities and daring doctrines concerning the nature of the Spirit;
but articulate a strikingly persistent conviction that the soul holds
God Himself as distinct from His graces, possessing thus some direct
experience of this His presence. “I cannot understand what the mind
is, nor how it differs from the soul or the spirit either: all three
seem to me to be but one, though the soul sometimes leaps forth out
of itself, like a fire which has become a flame: the flame ascends
high above the fire, but it is still the same flame of the same fire.”
“Something subtle and swift seems to issue from the soul, to ascend
to its highest part and to go whither Our Lord will … it seems a
flight. This little bird of the spirit seems to have escaped out of
the prison of the body.” Indeed “the soul is then not in itself … it
seems to me to have its dwelling higher than even the highest part of
itself.”[409]--“In the beginning I did not know that God is present in
all things.… Unlearned men used to tell me that He was present only by
His grace. I could not believe that.… A most learned Dominican told me
He was present Himself … this was a great comfort to me.” “To look upon
Our Lord as being in the innermost parts of the soul … is a much more
profitable method, than that of looking upon Him as external to us.”
“The living God was in my soul.” And even, “hitherto” up to 1555, “my
life was my own; my life, since then, is the life which God lived in
me.”[410]


6. _Immanence, not Pantheism._

St. Teresa’s teaching as to God’s own presence in the soul points
plainly, I think, to the truth insisted on by the Catholic theologian
Schwab, in his admirable monograph on Gerson. “Neither speculation nor
feeling are satisfied with a Pure Transcendence of God; and hence the
whole effort of true Mysticism is directed, whilst not abolishing His
Transcendence, to embrace and experience God, His living presence,
in the innermost soul,--that is, to insist, in some way or other,
upon the Immanence of God. Reject all such endeavours as Pantheistic,
insist sharply upon the specific eternal difference between God and
the Creature: and the Speculative, Mystical depths fade away, with
all their fascination.”[411] Not in finding Pantheism already here,
with the imminent risk of falling into a cold Deism, but in a rigorous
insistence, with all the great Inclusive Mystics, upon the spiritual
and moral effects, as the tests of the reality and worth of such
experiences, and, with the Ascetical and Historical souls, upon also
the other movement--an outgoing in some kind of contact with, and
labour at, the contingencies and particularities of life and mind--will
the true safeguard for this element of the soul’s life be found.[412]


III. MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM: THEIR DIFFERENCES AND POINTS OF LIKENESS.

But does not Mysticism, not only find God in the soul, but the soul
to be God? Is it not, as such, already Pantheism? Or, if not, what is
their difference?


1. _Plotinus and Spinoza compared._

Now Dr. Edward Caird, in his fine book, _The Evolution of Theology in
the Greek Philosophers_, 1904, tells us that “Mysticism is religion in
its most concentrated and exclusive form; it is that attitude of mind
in which all other relations are swallowed up in the relation of the
soul to God”; and that “Plotinus is the Mystic _par excellence_.”[413]
And he then proceeds to contrast Plotinus, the typical Mystic, with
Spinoza, the true Pantheist.

“Whether” or not “Spinoza, in his negation of the limits of the finite,
still leaves it open to himself to admit a reality in finite things
which is _not_ negated,” and “to conceive of the absolute substance
as manifesting itself in attributes and modes”: “it is very clear
that he does so conceive it, and that, for all those finite things
which he treats as negative and illusory in themselves, he finds in
God a ground of reality … which can be as little destroyed as the
divine substance itself.” “God, _Deus sive Natura_, is conceived as
the immanent principle of the universe, or perhaps rather the universe
is conceived as immanent in God.”--Thus to him “the movement by which
he dissolves the finite in the infinite, and the movement by which he
finds the finite again in the infinite, are equally essential. If for
him the world is nothing apart from God, God is nothing apart from His
realization in the world.” This is true Pantheism.[414]

But in Plotinus the _via negativa_ involves a negation of the finite
and determinate in all its forms; hence here it is impossible to find
the finite again in the infinite. The Absolute One is here not immanent
but transcendent.[415] “While the lower always has need of the higher,
the higher is regarded as having no need” for any purpose “of the
lower”; and “the Highest has no need of anything but Itself.” “Such
a process cannot be reversed”: “in ascending, Plotinus has drawn the
ladder after him, and left himself no possibility of descending again.
The movement, in which he is guided by definite and explicit thought,
is always upwards; while, in describing the movement downwards, he
has to take refuge in metaphors and analogies,” for the purpose of
indicating a purely self-occupied activity which only accidentally
produces an external effect, _e.g._, “the One as it were overflows, and
produces another than itself.”[416] “Thus we have the strange paradox
that the Being who is absolute, is yet conceived as in a sense external
to the relative and finite, and that He leaves the relative and finite
in a kind of unreal independence.” “On the one side, we have a life
which is nothing apart from God, and which, nevertheless, can never be
united to him, except as it loses itself altogether; and, on the other
side, an Absolute, which yet is not immanent in the life it originates,
but abides in transcendent isolation from it.… It is this contradiction
which … makes the writings of Plotinus the supreme expression of
Mysticism.”[417]

Now I think, with this admirable critic, that we cannot but take
Spinoza as the classical representative of that parallelistic
Pantheism to which most of our contemporary systems of psycho-physical
parallelism belong. As Prof. Troeltsch well puts it, “we have here a
complete parallelism between every single event in the physical world,
which event is already entirely explicable from its own antecedents
within that physical world, and every event of a psychical kind,
which, nevertheless, is itself also entirely explicable from its own
psychical antecedents alone.” And “this parallelism again is but two
sides of the one World-Substance, Which is neither Nature nor Spirit,
and Whose law is neither natural nor spiritual law, but Which is Being
in general and Law in general.” In this one World-Substance, with its
parallel self-manifestations as extension and as thought, Spinoza
finds the ultimate truth of Religion, as against the Indeterminist,
Anthropomorphic elements of all the popular religions,--errors which
have sprung, the Anthropomorphic from man’s natural inclination to
interpret Ultimate Reality, with its complete neutrality towards
the distinctions of Psychical and Physical, by the Psychic side, as
the one nearest to our own selves; and the Indeterminist from the
attribution of that indetermination to the World-Substance which, even
in Psychology, is already a simple illusion and analytical blunder.

“It is in the combination,” concludes Professor Troeltsch, “of such a
recognition of the strict determination of all natural causation, and
of such a rejection of materialism (with its denial of the independence
of the psychic world), that rests the immense power of Pantheism at
the present time.”[418] On the other hand, the supposed Pantheistic
positions of the later Lessing, of Herder, Goethe and many another
predominantly aesthetic thinker, must, although far richer and more
nearly adequate conceptions of full reality, be assigned, _qua_
Pantheism, a secondary place, as inconsistent, because already largely
Teleological, indeed Theistic Philosophies.


2. _Complete Pantheism non-religious; why approached by Mysticism._

Now the former, the full Pantheism, must, I think, be declared, with
Rauwenhoff, to be only in name a religious position at all. “In its
essence it is simply a complete Monism, a recognition of the _Pan_ in
its unity and indivisibility, and hence a simple view of the world, not
a religious conception.”[419]--Yet deeply religious souls can be more
or less, indeed profoundly, influenced by such a Monism, so that we can
get Mystics with an outlook considerably more Spinozist than Plotinian.
There can, _e.g._, be no doubt as to both the deeply religious temper
and the strongly Pantheistic conceptions of Eckhart in the Middle Ages,
and of Schleiermacher in modern times; and indeed Spinoza himself is,
apart from all questions as to the logical implications and results
of his intellectual system, and as to the justice of his attacks upon
the historical religions, a soul of massive religious intuition and
aspiration.

But further: Mystically tempered souls,--and the typical and
complete religious soul will ever possess a mystical element in its
composition,--have three special _attraits_ which necessarily bring
them into an at least apparent proximity to Pantheism.

(1) For one thing Mysticism, like Pantheism, has a great, indeed (if
left unchecked by the out-going-movement) an excessive, thirst for
Unity, for a Unity less and less possessed of Multiplicity; and the
transition from holding the Pure Transcendence of this Unity to a
conviction of its Exclusive Immanence becomes easy and insignificant,
in proportion to the emptiness of content increasingly characterizing
this Oneness.

(2) Then again, like Pantheists, Mystics dwell much upon the strict
call to abandon all self-centredness, upon the death to self, the loss
of self; and in proportion as they dwell upon this self to be thus
rejected, and as they enlarge the range of this petty self, do they
approach each other more and more.

(3) And lastly, there is a peculiarity about the Mystical habit of
mind, which inevitably approximates it to the Pantheistic mode of
thought, and which, if not continuously taken by the Mystic soul
itself as an inevitable, but most demonstrable, inadequacy, will
react upon the substance of this soul’s thought in a truly Pantheistic
sense. This peculiarity results from the Mystic’s ever-present double
tendency of absorbing himself, away from the Successive and Temporal,
in the Simultaneity and Eternity of God, conceiving thus all reality
as partaking, in proportion to its depth and greater likeness to
Him, in this _Totum Simul_ character of its ultimate Author and
End; and of clinging to such vivid picturings of this reality as
are within his, this Mystic’s reach. Now such a Simultaneity can be
pictorially represented to the mind only by the Spacial imagery of
co-existent Extensions,--say of air, water, light, or fire: and these
representations, if dwelt on as at all adequate, will necessarily
suggest a Determinism of a Mathematico-Physical, Extensional type,
_i.e._ one, and the dominant, side of Spinozistic Pantheism.--It is
here, I think, that we get the double cause for the Pantheistic-seeming
trend of almost all the Mystical imagery. For even the marked
Emanationism of much in Plotinus, and of still more in Proclus,--the
latter still showing through many a phrase in Dionysius,--appears in
their images as operating upon a fixed Extensional foundation: and
indeed these very overflowings, owing to the self-centredness and
emptiness of content of their Source, the One, and to their accidental
yet automatic character, help still further to give to the whole
outlook a strikingly materialistic, mechanical, in so far Pantheistic,
character.


3. _Points on which Mysticism has usefully approximated to Pantheism._

And yet we must not overlook the profound, irreplaceable services that
are rendered by Mysticism,--provided always it remains but one of two
great movements of the living soul,--even on the points in which it
thus approximates to Pantheism. These services, I think, are three.

(1) The first of these services has been interestingly illustrated by
Prof. A. S. Pringle Pattison, from the case of Dr. James Martineau’s
writings, and the largely unmediated co-existence there of two
different modes of conceiving God. “The first mode represents God
simply as another, higher Person; the second represents Him as
the soul of souls. The former, Deistic and Hebraic, rests upon an
inferential knowledge of God, derived either from the experience of
His resistance to our will through the forces of Nature, or from that
of His restraint upon us in the voice of Conscience,--God, in both
cases, being regarded as completely separated from the human soul, and
His existence and character apprehended and demonstrated by a process
of reasoning.--The second mode is distinctly and intensely Christian,
and consists in the apprehension of God as the Infinite including
all finite existences, as the immanent Absolute who progressively
manifests His character in the Ideals of Truth, Beauty, Righteousness,
and Love.” And Professor Pattison points out, with Professor Upton,
that it was Dr. Martineau’s almost morbid dread of Pantheism which was
responsible for the inadequate expression given to this Mystical, or
“Speculative” element in his religious philosophy. For only if we do
not resist such Mysticism, do we gain and retain a vivid experience of
how “Consciousness of imperfection and the pursuit of perfection are
alike possible to man only through the universal life of thought and
goodness in which he shares, and which, at once an indwelling presence
and an unattainable ideal, draws him on and always on.” “Personality
is” thus “not ‘unitary’ in Martineau’s sense, as occupying one side
of a relation, and unable to be also on the other. The very capacity
of knowledge and morality implies that the person … is capable of
regarding himself and all other beings from what Martineau well names
‘the station of the Father of Spirits.’”[420]

I would, however, guard here against any exclusion of a seeking
or finding of God in Nature and in Conscience: only the contrary
exclusion of the finding of God within the soul, and the insistence
upon a complete separation of Him from that soul, are inacceptable in
the “Hebraic” mood. For a coming and a going, a movement inwards and
outwards, checks and counter-checks, friction, contrast, battle and
storm, are necessary conditions and ingredients of the soul’s growth in
its sense of appurtenance to Spirit and to Peace.

(2) A further service rendered by this Pantheistic-seeming
Mysticism,--though always only so long as it remains not the only or
last word of Religion,--is that it alone discovers the truly spiritual
function and fruitfulness of Deterministic Science. For only if Man
deeply requires a profound desubjectivizing, a great shifting of the
centre of his interest, away from the petty, claimful, animal self,
with its “I against all the world,” to a great kingdom of souls, in
which Man gains his larger, spiritual, unique personality, with its
“I as part of, and for all the world,” by accepting to be but one
amongst thousands of similar constituents in a system expressive of the
thoughts of God; and only if Mathematico-Physical Science is specially
fitted to provide such a bath, and hence is so taken, with all its
apparently ruinous Determinism and seeming Godlessness: is such Science
really safe from apologetic emasculation; or from running, a mere
unrelated dilettantism, alongside of the deepest interests of the soul;
or from, in its turn, crushing or at least hampering the deepest, the
spiritual life of man. Hence all the greater Partial Mystics have got
a something about them which indicates that they have indeed passed
through fire and water, that their poor selfishness has been purified
in a bath of painfully-bracing spiritual air and light, through which
they have emerged into a larger, fuller life. And Nicolas of Coes,
Pascal, Malebranche are but three men out of many whose Mysticism and
whose Mathematico-Physical Science thus interstimulated each other and
jointly deepened their souls.

We shall find, further on, that this purificatory power of such Science
has been distinctly heightened for us now. Yet, both then and now,
there could and can be such purification only for those who realize
and practise religion as sufficiently ultimate and wide and deep to
englobe, (as one of religion’s necessary stimulants), an unweakened,
utterly alien-seeming Determinism in the middle regions of the
soul’s experience and outlook. Such an englobement can most justly
be declared to be Christianity driven fully home. For thus is Man
purified and saved,--if he already possesses the dominant religious
motive and conviction,--by a close contact with Matter; and the Cross
is plunged into the very centre of his soul’s life, operating there a
sure division between the perishing animal Individual and the abiding
spiritual Personality: the deathless Incarnational and Redemptive
religion becomes thus truly operative there.

(3) And the last service, rendered by such Mysticism, is to keep
alive in the soul the profoundly important consciousness of the
prerequisites, elements and affinities of a Universally Human kind,
which are necessary to, and present in, all Religion, however
definitely Concrete, Historical and Institutional it may have become.
Such special, characteristic Revelations, Doctrines and Institutions,
as we find them in all the great Historical Religions, and in their
full normative substance and form in Christianity and Catholicism, can
indeed alone completely develop, preserve and spread Religion in its
depth and truth; yet they ever presuppose a general, usually dim but
most real, religious sense and experience, indeed a real presence and
operation of the Infinite and of God in all men.

It is, then, not an indifferentist blindness to the profound
differences, in their degree of truth, between the religions of
the world, nor an insufficient realization of man’s strict need of
historical and institutional lights and aids for the development and
direction of that general religious sense and experience, which make
the mind revolt from sayings such as those we have already quoted from
the strongly Protestant Prof. Wilhelm Hermann, and to which we can
add the following. “Everywhere, outside of Christianity, Mysticism
will arise, as the very flower of the religious development. But
the Christian must declare such Mystical experience of God to be a
delusion.” For “what is truly Christian is _ipso facto_ not Mystical.”
“We are Christians because, in the Humanity of Jesus, we have struck
upon a fact which is of incomparably richer content, than are the
feelings that arise within our own selves.” Indeed, “I should have
failed to recognize the hand of God even in what my own dead father
did for me, had not, by means of my Christian education, God appeared
to me, in the Historic Christ.”[421]--As if it were possible to
consider Plato and Plotinus, in those religious intuitions and feelings
of theirs which helped to win an Augustine from crass Manichaeism
to a deep Spiritualism, and which continue to breathe and burn as
part-elements in countless sayings of Christian philosophers and
saints, to have been simply deluded, or mere idle subjectivists! As if
we could apprehend even Christ, without some most real, however dim and
general, sense of religion and presence of God within us to which He
could appeal! And as if Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Maccabaean Martyrs,
and many a devoted soul within Mohammedanism or in Brahmanic India,
could not and did not apprehend something of God’s providence in their
earthly father’s love towards them!

No wonder that, after all this, Hermann can,--as against Richard Rothe
who, in spite of more than one fantastic if not fanatical aberration,
had, on some of the deepest religious matters, a rarely penetrating
perception,--write in a thoroughly patronizing manner concerning
Catholic Mysticism. For this Mysticism necessarily appears to him not
as, at its best, the most massive and profound development of one type
of the ultimate religion,--a type in which one necessary element of all
balanced religious life is at the fullest expansion compatible with a
still sufficient amount and healthiness of the other necessary elements
of such a life,--but only as “a form of religion which has brought out
and rendered visible such a content of interior life as is capable of
being produced within the limits of Catholic piety.”[422] The true,
pure Protestant possesses, according to Hermann, apparently much less,
in reality much more,--the Categorical Imperative of Conscience and the
Jesus of History, as the double one-and-all of his, the only spiritual
religion.--Yet if Christianity is indeed the religion of the Divine
Founder, Who declared that he that is not against Him is for Him; or
of Paul, who could appeal to the heathen Athenians and to all men for
the truth and experience that in God “we live and move and have our
being”; or of the great Fourth Gospel, which tells us that Christ,
the True Light, enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world, a
light which to this hour cannot, for the great majority, be through
historic knowledge of the Historic Christ at all; or of Clement of
Alexandria and of Justin Martyr, who loved to find deep apprehensions
and operations of God scattered about among the Heathen; or of Aquinas,
who, in the wake of the Areopagite and others, so warmly dwells upon
how Grace does not destroy, but presupposes and perfects Nature: then
such an exclusive amalgam of Moralism and History, though doubtless a
most honest and intelligible reaction against opposite excesses, is
a sad impoverishment of Christianity, in its essential, world-wide,
Catholic character.

Indeed, to be fair, there have never been wanting richer and more
balanced Protestant thinkers strongly to emphasize this profound
many-sidedness and universality of Christianity: so, at present,
in Germany, Profs. Eucken, Troeltsch, Class, Siebeck and others;
and, in England, Prof. A. S. P. Pattison and Mr. J. R. Illingworth.
In all these cases there is ever a strong sympathy with Mysticism
properly understood, as the surest safeguard against such distressing
contractions as is this of Hermann, and that of Albrecht Ritschl before
him.


4._ Christianity excludes complete and final Pantheism._

And yet, as we have repeatedly found, Christianity has, in its
fundamental Revelation and Experience, ever implied and affirmed such a
conception of Unity, of Self-Surrender, and of the Divine Action, as to
render any Pantheistic interpretation of these things ever incomplete
and transitional.

(1) The Unity here is nowhere, even ultimately, the sheer Oneness
of a simply identical Substance, but a Unity deriving its very
close-knitness from its perfect organization of not simply identical
elements or relations.

The Self-Surrender here is not a simply final resolution, of
laboriously constituted centres of human spiritual consciousness and
personality, back into a morally indifferent All, but a means and
passage, for the soul, from a spiritually worthless self-entrenchment
within a merely psycho-physical apartness and lust to live, on to a
spiritual devotedness, an incorporation, as one necessary subject, into
the Kingdom of souls,--the abiding, living expression of the abiding,
living God.

And, above all, God’s Action is not a mechanico-physical, determinist,
simultaneous Extension, nor even an automatic, accidental, unconscious
Emanation, but, as already Plato divined,--an intuition lost again by
Aristotle, and, in his logic, denied by Plotinus,--a voluntary outgoing
and self-communication of the supreme self-conscious Spirit, God. For
Plato tells us that “the reason why Nature and this Universe of things
was framed by Him Who framed it, is that God is good … and desired
that all things should be as like Himself as it was possible for them
to be.”[423] Yet this pregnant apprehension never attains here to its
full significance, because the Divine Intelligence is conceived only as
manifesting itself in relation to something given from without,--the
pre-existing, chaotic Matter. And for Aristotle God does not love this
Givenness; for “the first Mover moves” (all things) only “as desired”
by them: He Himself desires, loves, wills nothing whatsoever, and
thinks and knows nothing but His own self alone.[424] And in Plotinus
this same transcendence is still further emphasized, for the Absolute
One here transcends even all thought and self-consciousness.

(2) It is in Christianity, after noble preludings in Judaism, that we
get the full deliberate proclamation, in the great Life and Teaching,
of the profound fact,--the Self-Manifestation of the Loving God, the
Spirit-God moving out to the spirit-man, and spirit-man only thus
capable of a return movement to the Spirit-God. As Schelling said, “God
can only give Himself to His creatures as He gives a self to them,”
and, with it, the capacity of participating in His life. We thus get
a relation begun and rendered possible by God’s utterly prevenient,
pure, _ecstatic_ love of Man, a relation which, in its essence
spiritual, personal and libertarian, leaves behind it, as but vain
travesties of such ultimate Realities, all Emanational or Parallelistic
Pantheism, useful though these latter systems are as symbols of the
Mathematico-Physical level and kind of reality and apprehension.
Yet this spiritual relation is here, unlike Plotinus’s more or less
Emanational conception of it, not indeed simply invertible, as Spinoza
would have it, (for Man is ontologically dependent upon God, whereas
God is not thus dependent upon Man), but nevertheless largely one of
true mutuality. And this mutuality of the relation is not simply a
positive enactment of God, but is expressive, in its degree and mode,
of God’s intrinsic moral nature. For God is here the Source as well
as the Object of all love; hence He Himself possesses the supreme
equivalent for this our noblest emotion, and is moved to free acts of
outgoing, in the creation and preservation, the revelation to, and
the redemption of finite spirits, as so many successive, mutually
supplementary, and increasingly fuller expressions and objects of this
His nature. “God is Love”; “God so loved the world, as to give His
only-begotten Son”; “Let us love God, for God hath first loved us”; “if
any man will do the will of God, he shall know of the doctrine if it be
from God”: God’s Infinity is here, not the negation of the relatively
independent life of His creatures, but the very reason and source of
their freedom.[425]

In the concluding chapter I hope to give a sketch of the actual
operation of the true correctives to any excessive, Plotinian or
Spinozistic, tendencies in the Mystical trend, especially when
utilizing Mathematico-Physical Science at the soul’s middle level; and
of History at the ultimate reaches of the soul’s life.


IV. THE DIVINE IMMANENCE; SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY.


1. _Panentheism._

As to our fourth question, the Divine Immanence and Personality,
our last quotations from St. Teresa give us, I think, our true
starting-point. For it is evident that, between affirming the simple
Divinity of the innermost centre of the soul, and declaring that the
soul ever experiences only the Grace of God, _i.e._ certain created
effects, sent by Him from the far-away seat of His own full presence,
there is room for a middle position which, whilst ever holding the
definite creatureliness of the soul, in all its reaches, puts God
Himself into the soul and the soul into God, in degrees and with
results which vary indeed indefinitely according to its good-will
and its call, yet which all involve and constitute a presence ever
profoundly real, ever operative before and beyond all the soul’s own
operations. These latter operations are, indeed, even possible only
through all this Divine anticipation, origination, preservation,
stimulation, and, at bottom,--in so far as man is enabled and required
by God to reach a certain real self-constitution,--through a mysterious
Self-Limitation of God’s own Action,--a Divine Self-Restraint.

There can be little doubt that such a _Panentheism_ is all that
many a daring, in strictness Pantheistic, saying of the Christian,
perhaps also of the Jewish and Mohammedan, Mystics aimed at. Only the
soul’s ineradicable capacity, need and desire for its Divine Lodger
and Sustainer would constitute, in this conception, the intrinsic
characteristic of human nature; and it is rather the too close
identification, in feeling and emotional expression, of the desire
and the Desired, of the hunger and the Food, and the too exclusive
realization of the deep truth that this desire and hunger do not cause,
but are themselves preceded and caused by, their Object,--it is the
over-vivid perception of this real dynamism, rather than any _a priori_
theory of static substances and identities--which, certainly in many
cases, has produced the appearance of Pantheism.

And again it is certain that we have to beware of taking the apparent
irruption or ingrafting,--in the case of the operations of Grace,--of
an entirely heterogeneous Force and Reality into what seems the already
completely closed circle of our natural functions and aspirations,
as the complete and ultimate truth of the situation. However utterly
different that Force may feel to all else that we are aware of within
ourselves, however entirely unmeditated may seem its manifestations:
it is clear that we should be unable to recognize even this Its
difference, to welcome or resist It, above all to find It a response to
our deepest cravings, unless we had some natural true affinity to It,
and some dim but most real experience of It from the first. Only with
such a general religiosity and vague sense, from a certain contact,
of the Infinite, is the recognition of definite, historical Religious
Facts and Figures as true, significant, binding upon my will and
conscience, explicable at all.


2. _Aquinas on our direct semi-consciousness of God’s indwelling._

St. Thomas, along one line of doctrine, has some excellent teachings
about all this group of questions. For though he tells us that “the
names which we give to God and creatures, are predicated of God”
only “according to a certain relation of the creature to God, as its
Principle and Cause, in which latter the perfections of all things
pre-exist in an excellent manner”: yet he explicitly admits, in one
place, that we necessarily have some real, immediate experience of the
Nature of God, for that “it is impossible, with regard to anything,
to know whether it exists,”--and he has admitted that natural reason
can attain to a knowledge of God’s bare existence,--“unless we somehow
know what is its nature,” at least “with a confused knowledge”; whence
“also with regard to God, we could not know whether He exists, unless
we somehow knew, even though confusedly, what He is.”[426]--God, though
transcendent, is also truly immanent in the human soul: “God is in all
things, as the agent is present in that wherein it acts. Created Being
is as true an effect of God’s Being, as to burn is the true effect of
fire. God is above all things,--by the excellence of His nature, and
yet He is intimately present within all things, as the cause of the
Being of all.”--And man has a natural exigency of the face-to-face
Vision of God, hence of the Order of Grace, however entirely its
attainment may be beyond his natural powers: “There is in man a natural
longing to know the cause, when he sees an effect: whence if the
intellect of the rational creature could not attain to the First Cause
of things,”--here in the highest form, that of the Beatific vision of
God--“the longing of its nature would remain void and vain.”[427]

But it is the great Mystical Saints and writers who continuously have,
in the very forefront of their consciousness and assumptions, not a
simply moral and aspirational, but an Ontological and Pre-established
relation between the soul and God; and not a simply discursive
apprehension, but a direct though dim Experience of the Infinite
and of God. And these positions really underlie even their most
complete-seeming negations, as we have already seen in the case of the
Areopagite.


3. _Gradual recognition of the function of subconsciousness._

Indeed, we can safely affirm that the last four centuries, and even
the last four decades, have more and more confirmed the reality and
indirect demonstrableness of such a presence and sense of the Infinite;
ever more or less obscurely, but none the less profoundly, operative
in the innermost normal consciousness of mankind: a presence and sense
which, though they can be starved and verbally denied, cannot be
completely suppressed; and which, though they do not, if unendorsed,
constitute even the most elementary faith, far less a developed
Historical or Mystical Religion, are simply necessary prerequisites to
all these latter stimulations and consolidations.

(1) As we have already found, it is only since Leibniz that we
know, systematically, how great is the range of every man’s Obscure
Presentations, his dim Experience as against his Clear or distinct
Presentations, his explicit Knowledge; and how the Clear depends even
more upon the Dim, than the Dim upon the Clear. And further discoveries
and proofs in this direction are no older than 1888.[428]

(2) Again, it is the growing experience of the difficulties and
complexities of Psychology, History, Epistemology, and of the apparent
unescapableness and yet pain of man’s mere anthropomorphisms, that
makes the persistence of his search for, and sense of, Objective Truth
and Reality, and the keenness of his suffering when he appears to
himself as imprisoned in mere subjectivity, deeply impressive. For the
more man feels, and suffers from feeling himself purely subjective,
the more is it clear that he is not merely subjective: he could never
be conscious of the fact, if he were. “Suppose that all your objects
in life were realized … would this be a great joy and happiness
to you?” John Stuart Mill asked himself; and “an irrepressible
self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No.’”[429] Whether in bad
health just then or not, Mill was here touching the very depths of
the characteristically human sense. In all such cases only a certain
profound apprehension of Abiding Reality, the Infinite, adequately
explains the keen, operative sense of contrast and disappointment.

(3) And further, we have before us, with a fulness and delicate
discrimination undreamed of in other ages, the immense variety,
within a certain general psychological unity, of the great and small
Historical Religions, past and present, of the world. Facing all this
mass of evidence, Prof. Troeltsch can ask, more confidently than
ever: “Are not our religious requirements, requirements of Something
that one must have somehow first experienced in order to require It?
Are they not founded upon some kind of Experience as to the Object,
Which Itself first awakens the thought of an ultimate infinite meaning
attaching to existence, and Which, in the conflict with selfishness,
sensuality and self-will, draws the nobler part of the human will,
with ever new force, to Itself?” “All deep and energetic religion is
in a certain state of tension towards Culture, for the simple reason
that it is seeking something else and something higher.”[430] And
Prof. C. P. Tiele, so massively learned in all the great religions,
concludes: “‘Religion,’ says Feuerbach, ‘proceeds from man’s wishes’ …;
according to others, it is the outcome of man’s dissatisfaction with
the external world.… But why should man torment himself with wishes
which he never sees fulfilled around him, and which the rationalistic
philosopher declares to be illusions? Why? surely, because he cannot
help it.… The Infinite, very Being as opposed to continual becoming
and perishing,--or call It what you will,--_that_ is the Principle
which gives him constant unrest, because It dwells within him.” And
against Prof. Max Müller,--who had, however, on this point, arrived at
a position very like Tiele’s own,--he impressively insists that “the
origin of religion consists,” not in a “perception of the Infinite,”
but “in the fact that Man _has_ the Infinite within him.”--I would
only contend further that the instinct of the Infinite awakens
simultaneously with our sense-perceptions and categories of thinking,
and passes, together with them and with the deeper, more volitional
experiences, through every degree and stage of obscurity and relative
clearness. “Whatever name we give it,--instinct; innate, original,
or unconscious form of thought; or form of conception,--it is the
specifically human element in man.”[431] But if all this be true, then
the Mystics are amongst the great benefactors of our race: for it is
especially this presence of the Infinite in Man, and man’s universal
subjection to an operative consciousness of it, which are the deepest
cause and the constant object of the adoring awe of all truly spiritual
Mystics, in all times and places.




CHAPTER XV

SUMMING UP OF THE WHOLE BOOK. BACK THROUGH ASCETICISM, SOCIAL RELIGION,
AND THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT OF MIND, TO THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION.


I now propose to conclude, by getting, through three successively
easier matters, back to the starting-point of this whole book,
and, in doing so, to sum up and delimitate, more and more clearly,
the practical lessons learnt during its long course. These three
last matters and points of observation shall be Asceticism,
Institutionalism, and Mental Activity and Discipline, or the Scientific
Habit--all three in their relation to the Mystical Element of Religion.


I. ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISM.

Now in the matter of Asceticism, we can again conveniently consider
three points.


1. _Ordinary Asceticism practised by Mystics._

There is, first, the (generally severe) Asceticism which is ever
connected with at least some one phase, an early one, of every genuine
Mystic’s history, yet which does not differ essentially from the direct
training in self-conquest to which practically all pre-Protestant, and
most of the old Protestant earnest Christians considered themselves
obliged.

(1) Now it is deeply interesting to note how marked has been, off
and on throughout the last century and now again quite recently,
the renewal of comprehension and respect for the general principle
of Asceticism, in quarters certainly free from all preliminary bias
in favour of Medieval Christianity. Schopenhauer wrote in 1843:
“Not only the religions of the East but also genuine Christianity
shows, throughout its systems, that fundamental characteristic of
Asceticism which my philosophy elucidates.… Precisely in its doctrines
of renunciation, self-denial, complete chastity, in a word, of
general mortification of the will, lie the deepest truth, the high
value, the sublime character of Christianity. It thus belongs to the
old, true, and lofty ideal of mankind, in opposition to the false,
shallow, and ruinous optimism of Greek Paganism, Judaism and Islam.”
“Protestantism, by eliminating Asceticism and its central point, the
meritoriousness of celibacy, has, by this alone, already abandoned the
innermost kernel of Christianity.… For Christianity is the doctrine
of the deep guilt of the human race … and of the heart’s thirst after
redemption from it, a redemption which can be acquired only through the
abnegation of self,--that is, through a complete conversion of human
nature.”[432]--And the optimistically tempered American Unitarian,
the deeply versed Psychologist, Prof. William James, tells us in
1902: “In its spiritual meaning, Asceticism stands for nothing less
than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy.” “The Metaphysical
mystery, that he who feeds on death, that feeds on men, possesses life
supereminently, and meets best the secret demands of the Universe,
is the truth of which Asceticism has been the faithful champion. The
folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has, yet, its
indestructible, vital meaning.… Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub
and sponge-cake in comparison.”[433]

(2) Indeed, the only thing at all special to Mysticism, in its attitude
towards this general principle and practice of Asceticism, is that
it ever practises Asceticism as a means towards, or at least as the
make-weight and safeguard of, Contemplation, which latter is as
essentially Synthetic, and, in so far, peaceful and delightful, as the
former is Analytic, polemical and painful; whereas non-Mystical souls
will practise Asceticism directly with a view to greater aloofness
from sin, and greater readiness and strength to perform the various
calls of duty. And hence, if we but grant the legitimacy of the general
principle of ordinary Asceticism, we shall find the Mystical form of
this Asceticism to be the more easily comprehensible variety of that
principle. For the Mystic’s practice, as concerns this point, is more
varied and inclusive than that of others, since he does not even tend
to make the whole of his inner life into a system of checks and of
tension. The expansive, reconciling movement operates in him most
strongly also, and, where of the right kind, this expansive movement
helps, even more than the restrictive one, to purify, humble, and
deepen his heart and soul.


2. _God’s Transcendence a source of suffering._

There is, however, a second, essentially different source and kind of
suffering in some sorts and degrees of Mysticism, and indeed in other
_attraits_ of the spiritual life, which is deeply interesting, because
based upon a profound Metaphysical apprehension. Although, at bottom,
the opposite extreme to Pantheism, it readily expresses itself, for
reasons that will presently appear, in terms that have a curiously
Pantheistic colour.

(1) St. John of the Cross writes in 1578: “It is a principle of
philosophy, that all means must … have a certain resemblance to the
end, such as shall be sufficient for the object in view. If therefore
the understanding is to be united to God, … it must make use of
those means which can effect that union, that is, means which are
most like unto God.… But there is no essential likeness or communion
between creatures and Him, the distance between His divine nature and
their nature is infinite. No creature therefore … nothing that the
imagination may conceive or the understanding comprehend … in this life
… can be a proximate means of union with God,” for “it is all most
unlike God, and most disproportionate to Him.” “The understanding …
must be pure and empty of all sensible objects, all clear intellectual
perceptions, resting on faith: for faith is the sole proximate and
proportionate means of the soul’s union with God.”[434]

Now it is certain, as we have already found, that the awakened human
soul ever possesses a dim but real experience of the Infinite, and
that, in proportion as it is called to the Mystical way, this sense
will be deepened into various degrees of the Prayer of Quiet and of
Union, and that here, more plainly than elsewhere, will appear the
universal necessity of the soul’s own response, by acts and the habit
of Faith, to all and every experience which otherwise remains but
so much unused material for the soul’s advance. And it is equally
certain that St. John of the Cross is one of the greatest of such
contemplatives, and that neither his intuition and actual practice,
nor even his sayings, (so long as any one saying belonging to one
trend is set off against another belonging to the other trend),
contravenes the Christian and Catholic positions.--Yet it cannot be
denied that, were we to press his “negative way” into becoming the only
one; and especially were we to take, without discount, such a virtual
repudiation, as is furnished by any insistence upon the above words,
of any essential, objective difference in value between our various
apprehensions of Him and approaches to Him: the whole system and
_rationale_ of External, Sacramental and Historical Religion, indeed of
the Incarnation, in any degree and form, would have to go, as so many
stumbling-blocks to the soul’s advance. For the whole principle of all
such Religion implies the profound importance of the Here and the Now,
the Contingent and the Finite, and of the Immanence of God, in various
degrees and ways, within them.

Indications of this incompatibility, as little systematically realized
here as in the Areopagite, are afforded by various remarks of his,
belonging in reality to another trend. Thus, immediately before his
denial of any essential likeness or communion between any creature and
God, he says: “It is true that all creatures bear a certain relation to
God and are tokens of His being, some more, some less, according to the
greater perfection of their nature.” And of Our Lord’s sacred Humanity
he says: “What a perfect living image was Our Saviour upon earth: yet
those who had no faith, though they were constantly about Him, and saw
His wonderful works, were not benefited by His presence.”[435] But even
here the immense importance, indeed downright necessity for Faith,
of such external and historical stimuli, objects and materials,--in
the latter instance all this at its very deepest,--remains
unemphasized, through his engrossment in the necessity of Faith for the
fructification of all these things.

In other places this Faith appears as though working so outside of all
things imageable, as to have to turn rapidly away from all picturings,
as, at best, only momentary starting-points for the advanced soul.
“Let the faithful soul take care that, whilst contemplating an
image, the senses be not absorbed in it, whether it be material or
in the imagination, and whether the devotion it excites be spiritual
or sensible. Let him … venerate the image as the Church commands
and lift up his mind at once from the material image to those whom
it represents. He who shall do this, will never be deluded.”[436]
Here, again, along the line of argument absorbing the saint in this
book, there is no fully logical ground left for the Incarnational,
Historical, Sacramental scheme of the Infinite immanent in the finite,
and of spirit stimulated in contact with matter, with everywhere the
need of the condescensions of God and of our ascensions by means of
careful attention to them.

Sören Kierkegaard, that deep solitary Dane, with so much about him
like to Pascal the Frenchman, and Hurrell Froude the Englishman, and
who, though Lutheran in all his bringing up, was so deeply attracted
by Catholic Asceticism, has, in recent times (he died in 1855), pushed
the doctrine of the qualitative, absolute difference between God and
all that we ourselves can think, feel, will or be, to lengths beyond
even the transcendental element,--we must admit this to be the greatly
preponderant one,--in the great Spaniard’s formal teaching. And it
is especially in this non-Mystical Ascetic that we get an impressive
picture of the peculiar kind of suffering and asceticism, which results
from such a conviction to a profoundly sensitive, absorbedly religious
soul; and here too we can, I think, discover the precise excess and
one-sidedness involved in this whole tendency. Professor Höffding,
in his most interesting monograph on his friend, tells us how “for
Kierkegaard, … the will gets monopolized by religious Ethics from the
very first; there is no time for Contemplation or Mysticism.” “To tear
the will away,” Kierkegaard himself says, “from all finite aims and
conditions … requires a painful effort and this effort’s ceaseless
repetition. And if, in addition to this, the soul has, in spite of all
its striving, to be as though it simply were not, it becomes clear
that the religious life signifies a dedication to suffering and to
self-destruction. What wonder, then, that, for the Jew, death was the
price of seeing God; or that, for the Gentile, the soul’s entering
into closer relations with the Deity meant the beginning of madness?”
For “the soul’s relation to God is a relation to a Being absolutely
different from Man, who cannot confront him as his Superlative or
Ideal, and who, nevertheless, is to rule in his inmost soul. Hence a
necessary division, ever productive of new pains, is operative within
man, as long as he perseveres in this spiritual endeavour.… A finite
being, he is to live in the Infinite and Absolute: he is there like a
fish upon dry land.”[437]

Now Prof. Höffding applies a double, most cogent criticism to this
position.--The one is religious, and has already been quoted. “A
God Who is not Ideal and Pattern is no God. Hence the contention
that the Nature of the Godhead is, of necessity, qualitatively
different from that of Man, has ever occasioned ethical and religious
misgivings.”--And the other is psychological. “Tension can indeed be
necessary for the truth and the force of life. But tension, taken
by itself, cannot furnish the true measure of life. For the general
nature of consciousness is a synthesis, a comprehensive unity: not only
contrast, but also concentration, must make itself felt, as long as the
life of consciousness endures.”[438]

It is deeply interesting to note how Catherine, and at bottom St. John
of the Cross and the Exclusive Mystics generally, escape, through
their practice and in some of their most emphatic teachings, from
Kierkegaard’s excess, no doubt in part precisely because they _are_
Mystics, since the exclusive Mystic’s contemplative habit is, at
bottom, a Synthetic one. Yet we should realize the deep truth which
underlies the very exaggerations of this one-sidedly Analytic and
Ascetical view. For if God is the deepest ideal, the ultimate driving
force and the true congenital element and environment of Man, such as
Man cannot but secretly wish to will deliberately, and which, at his
best, Man truly wills to hold and serve: yet God remains ever simply
incompatible with that part of each man’s condition and volition which
does not correspond to the best and deepest which that Man himself sees
or could see to be the better, _hic et nunc_; and, again, He is ever,
even as compared with any man’s potential best, infinitely more and
nobler, and, though here not in simple contradiction, yet at a degree
of perfection which enables Him, the Supreme Spirit, to penetrate, as
Immanent Sustainer or Stimulator, and to confront, as Transcendent
Ideal and End, the little human spirit, so great in precisely this its
keen sense of experienced contrast.

Catherine exhibits well this double relation, of true contradiction,
and of contrast, both based upon a certain genuine affinity between
the human soul and God. On one side of herself she is indeed a
veritable fish out of water; but, on the other side of her, she is a
fish happily disporting itself in its very element, in the boundless
ocean of God. On the one side, snapping after air, in that seemingly
over-rarified atmosphere in which the animal man, the mere selfish
individual, cannot live; on the other side, expanding her soul’s
lungs and drinking in light, life, and love, in that same truly rich
atmosphere, which, Itself Spirit, feeds and sustains her growing
spiritual personality. And the _Dialogo_, in spite of its frequently
painful abstractness and empty unity, has, upon the whole, a profound
hold upon this great doctrine.

Yet it is in Catherine’s own culminating intuition,--of the soul’s
free choice of Purgatory, as a joyful relief from the piercing pain of
what otherwise would last for ever,--the vividly perceived contrast
between God’s purity and her soul’s impurity, that we get, in the
closest combination, indeed mutual causation, this double sense of
Man’s nearness to and distance from, of his likeness and unlikeness to
God. For only if man is, in the deepest instincts of his soul, truly
related to God, and is capable of feeling, (indeed he ever actually,
though mostly dimly, experiences,) God’s presence and this, man’s
own, in great part but potential, affinity to Him: can suffering be
conceived to arise from the keen realization of the contrast between
God and man’s own actual condition at any one moment; and can any
expectation, indeed a swift vivid instinct, arise within man’s soul
that the painful, directly contradictory, discrepancy can and will,
gradually though never simply automatically, be removed. And though,
even eventually, the creature cannot, doubtless, ever become simply
God, yet it can attain, in an indefinitely higher degree, to that
affinity and union of will with God, which, in its highest reaches and
moments, it already now substantially possesses; and hence to that
full creaturely self-constitution and joy in which, utterly trusting,
giving itself to, and willing God, it will, through and in Him, form
an abidingly specific, unique constituent and link of His invisible
kingdom of souls, on and on.


3. _Discipline of fleeing and of facing the Multiple and Contingent._

But there is a third attitude, peculiar (because of its preponderance)
to the Mystics as such, an attitude in a manner intermediate between
that of ordinary Asceticism, and that of the Suffering just described.
The implications and effects of, and the correctives for, this third
attitude will occupy us up to the end of this book. I refer to the
careful turning-away from all Multiplicity and Contingency, from
the Visible and Successive, from all that does or can distract and
dissipate, which is so essential and prevailing a feature in all
Mysticism, which indeed, in Exclusive Mysticism, is frankly made into
the one sole movement towards, and measure of, the soul’s perfection.

(1) It is true that to this tendency, when and in so far as it has
come so deeply to permeate the habits of a soul as to form a kind of
second nature, the name Asceticism cannot, in strictness, be any more
applied; since now the pain will lie, not in this turning away from all
that dust and friction, but, on the contrary, in any forcing of the
soul back into that turmoil. And doubtless many, perhaps most, souls
with a pronouncedly mystical _attrait_, are particularly sensitive to
all, even partial and momentary, conflict. Yet we can nevertheless
appropriately discuss the matter under the general heading of
Asceticism, since, as a rule, much practice and sacrifice go to build
up this habit; since, in every case, this Abstractive Habit shares
with Ordinary Asceticism a pronounced hostility to many influences and
forces ever actually operative within and around the undisciplined
natural man; and since, above all, the very complements and correctives
for this Abstractiveness will have to come from a further, deeper and
wider Asceticism, to be described presently.

(2) As to Ordinary Asceticism and this Abstractiveness, the former
fights the world and the self directly, and then only in so far as they
are discovered to be positively evil or definitely to hinder positive
good; it is directly attracted by the clash and friction involved in
such fighting; and it has no special desire for even a transitory
intense unification of the soul’s life: whereas the Abstractiveness
turns away from, and rises above, the world and the phenomenal self;
their very existence, their contingency, the struggles alive within
them, and their (as it seems) inevitably disturbing effect upon the
soul,--are all felt as purely dissatisfying; and an innermost longing
for a perfect and continuous unification and overflowing harmony of its
inner life here possess the spirit.

(3) Now we have just seen how a movement of integration, of
synthesizing all the soul’s piecemeal, inter-jostling acquisitions,
of restful healing of its wounds and rents, of sinking back, (from
the glare and glitter of clear, and then ever fragmentary perception,
and from the hurry, strain and rapidly ensuing distraction involved
in all lengthy external action), into a peaceful, dim rumination and
unification, is absolutely necessary, though in very various degrees
and forms, for all in any way complete and mature souls.--And we have,
further back, realized that a certain, obscure but profoundly powerful,
direct instinct and impression of God in the soul is doubtless at work
here, and, indeed, throughout all the deeper and nobler movements of
our wondrously various inner life. But what concerns us here, is the
question whether the _complete_ action of the soul, (if man would
grow in accordance with his ineradicable nature, environment, and
specific grace and call), does not as truly involve a corresponding
counter-movement to this intensely unitive and intuitive movement
which, with most men, and in most moments of even the minority of men,
forms but an indirectly willed condition and spontaneous background of
the soul.

(4) We have been finding, further, that all the Contingencies,
Multiplicities and Mediations which, one and all, tend to appear to the
Mystic as so many resistances and distractions, can roughly be grouped
under two ultimate heads. These intruders are fellow-souls, or groups
of fellow-souls,--some social organism, the Family, Society, the State,
the Church, who provoke, in numberless degrees and ways, individual
affection, devotion, distraction, jealousy, as from person towards
person. Or else the intruders are Things and Mechanical Laws, and these
usually leave the Mystic indifferent or irritate or distract him; but
they can become for him great opportunities of rest, and occasions for
self-discipline.

Yet this distinction between Persons and Things, (although vital for
the true apprehension of all deeper, above all of the deepest Reality,
and for the delicate discrimination between what are but the means and
what are the ends in a truly spiritual life), does not prevent various
gradations within, and continuous interaction between, each of these
two great groups. For in proportion as, in the Personal group, the
Individual appears as but parcel and expression of one of the social
organisms, does the impression of determinist Law, of an impersonal
Thing or blind Force, begin to mix with, and gradually to prevail
over, that of Personality. And in proportion as, in the Impersonal
group, Science comes to include all careful and methodical study,
according to the most appropriate methods, of any and every kind of
truth and reality; and as it moves away from the conceptions of purely
quantitative matter, and of the merely numerically different, entirely
interchangeable, physical happenings, (all so many mere automatic
illustrations of mechanical Law), on, through the lowly organisms of
plant-life, and the ever higher interiority and richer consciousness of
animal life, up to Man, with his ever qualitative Mind, and his ever
non-interchangeable, ever “effortful,” achievements and elaborations
of types of beauty, truth and goodness in Human History,--does Science
itself come back, in its very method and subject-matter, ever more
nearly, to the great personal starting-point, standard and ultimate
motive of all our specifically human activity and worth.

(5) Indeed, the two great continuous facts of man’s life, first that
he thinks, feels, wills, and acts, in and with the help or hindrance
of that profoundly material Thing, his physical body, and on occasion
of, and with regard to, the materials furnished by the stimulations and
impressions of his senses; and again, that these latter awaken within
him those, in themselves, highly abstract and Thing-like categories of
his mind which penetrate and give form to these materials; are enough
to show how close is the pressure, and how continuous the effect, of
Things upon the slow upbuilding of Personality.

(6) Fair approximations to these two kinds of Things, with their quite
irreplaceable specific functions within the economy of the human mental
life,--the intensely concrete and particular Sense-Impressions, and
the intensely abstract and general Mental Categories,--reappear within
the economy of Characteristic Religion, in its Sacraments and its
Doctrine. And conversely, there exists, _in rerum natura_, no Science
worth having which is not, ultimately, the resultant of, and which does
not require and call forth, on and on, certain special qualities, and
combinations of qualities, of the truly ethical, spiritual Personality.
Courage, patience, perseverance, candour, simplicity, self-oblivion,
continuous generosity towards others and willing correction of even
one’s own most cherished views,--these things and their like are
not the quantitative determinations of Matter, but the qualitative
characteristics of Mind.

(7) I shall now, therefore, successively take Mysticism in its attitude
towards these two great groups of claimants upon its attention,
the Personal and the Impersonal, even though any strictly separate
discussion of elements which, in practice, ever appear together, cannot
but have some artificiality. And an apparent further complication will
be caused by our having, in each case, to contrast what Mysticism would
do, if it became Exclusive, with what it must be restricted to doing,
if it is to remain Inclusive, _i.e._ if it is to be but one element
in the constitution of that multiplicity in unity, the deep spiritual
Personality. The larger Asceticism will thus turn out to be a wider and
deeper means towards perfection than even genuine Mysticism itself,
since this Asceticism will have to include both this Mysticism and the
counter movement within the one single, disciplined and purified life
of the soul.


II. SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM.


_Introductory: the ruinousness of Exclusive Mysticism._

Prof. Harnack says in his _Dogmengeschichte_: “An old fairy tale tells
of a man who lived in ignorance, dirt and wretchedness; and whom God
invited, on a certain day, to wish whatsoever he might fancy, and it
should be given him. And the man began to wish things, and ever more
things, and ever higher things, and all these things were given him.
At last he became presumptuous, and desired to become as the great God
Himself: when lo, instantly he was sitting there again, in his dirt and
misery. Now the history of Religion,--especially amongst the Greeks
and Orientals,--closely resembles this fairy tale. For they began by
wishing for themselves certain sensible goods, and then political,
aesthetic, moral and intellectual goods: and they were given them all.
And then they became Christians and desired perfect knowledge and a
super-moral life: they even wished to become, already here below, as
God Himself, in insight, beatitude and life. And behold, they fell,
not at once indeed, but with a fall that could not be arrested, down
to the lowest level, back into ignorance, dirt and barbarism.… Like
unto their near spiritual relations, the Neo-Platonists, they were at
first over-stimulated, and soon became jaded, and hence required ever
stronger stimulants. And in the end, all these exquisite aspirations
and enjoyments turned into their opposite extreme.”[439]

However much may want discounting or supplementing here, there is,
surely, a formidable amount of truth in this picture. And, if so, is
Mysticism, at least in its Dionysian type, not deeply to blame? And
where is the safeguard against such terrible abuses?

Now Prof. Harnack has himself shown us elsewhere that there is a sense
in which Monasticism should be considered eternal, even among and for
Protestants. “Monasticism,” he says plaintively, in his account of the
first three centuries of Protestantism, “even as it is conceivable
and necessary among Evangelical Christians, disappeared altogether.
And yet every community requires persons, who live _exclusively_ for
its purposes; hence the Church too requires volunteers who shall
renounce ‘the world’ and shall dedicate themselves entirely to the
service of their neighbour.”[440]--And again, scholars of such breadth
of knowledge and independence of judgement as Professor Tiele and
his school, insist strongly upon the necessity of Ecclesiastical
Institutions and Doctrines. The day of belief in the normality,
indeed in the possibility for mankind in general, of a would-be quite
individual, entirely spiritual, quite “pure” religion, is certainly
over and gone, presumably for good and all, amongst all competent
workers.--Nor, once more, can the general Mystical sense of the
unsatisfying character of all things finite, and of the Immanence of
the Infinite in our poor lives, be, in itself, to blame: for we have
found these experiences to mingle with, and to characterize, all the
noblest, most fully human acts and personalities.--But, if so, what
are the peculiarities in the religion of those times and races, which
helped to produce the result pictured in the _Dogmengeschichte?_

Now here, to get a fairly final answer, we must throw together
the question of the ordinary Christian Asceticism and that of the
Abstraction peculiar to the Mystics; and we must ask whether the
general emotive-volitional attitude towards Man and Life,--the
theory and practice as to Transcendence and Immanence, Detachment
and Attachment, which, from about 500 A.D. to, say, 1450 _A.D._,
predominantly preceded, accompanied, and both expanded and deflected
the specific ally Christian and normally human experience in Eastern
Christendom, were not (however natural, indeed inevitable, and in
part useful for those times and races), the chief of the causes
which turned so much of the good of Mysticism into downright harm. At
bottom this is once more the question as to the one-sided character of
Neo-Platonism,--its incapacity to find any descending movement of the
Divine into Human life.


1. _True relation of the soul to its fellows. God’s “jealousy.”_

Let us take first the relation of the single human soul to its
fellow-souls.

(1) Now Kierkegaard tells us: “the Absolute is cruel, for it demands
_all_, whilst the Relative ever continues to demand _some_ attention
from us.”[441] And the Reverend George Tyrrell, in his stimulating
paper, _Poet and Mystic_, shows us that, as regards the relations
between man’s love for man and man’s love for God, there are two
conceptions and answers in reply to the question as to the precise
sense in which God is “a jealous God,” and demands to be loved alone.
In the first, easier, more popular conception, He is practically
thought of as the First of Creatures, competing with the rest for Man’s
love, and is here placed alongside of them. Hence the inference that
whatever love they win from us by reason of their inherent goodness,
is taken from Him: He is not loved perfectly, till He is loved alone.
But in the second, more difficult and rarer conception, God is placed,
not alongside of creatures but behind them, as the light which shines
through a crystal and lends it whatever lustre it may have. He is
loved here, not apart from, but through and in them. Hence if only
the affection be of the right kind as to mode and object, the more
the better. The love of Him is the “form,” the principle of order and
harmony; our natural affections are the “matter” harmonized and set in
order; it is the soul, they are the body, of that one Divine Love whose
adequate object is God in, and not apart from, His creatures.[442] Thus
we have already found that even the immensely abstractive and austere
St. John of the Cross tells us: “No one desires to be loved except
for his goodness; and when we love in this way, our love is pleasing
unto God and in great liberty; and if there be attachment in it, there
is greater attachment to God.” And this doctrine he continuously,
deliberately practises, half-a-century after his Profession, for he
writes to his penitent, Donna Juana de Pedrazas in 1589: “All that is
wanting now, is that I should forget you; but consider how that is to
be forgotten which is ever present to the soul.”[443]

But Father Tyrrell rightly observes: “To square this view with the
general ascetic tradition of the faithful at large is exceedingly
difficult.”[444] Yet I cannot help thinking that a somewhat different
reconciliation, than the one attempted by him,[445] really meets all
the substantial requirements of the case.

(2) I take it, then, that an all-important double law or twin fact, or
rather a single law and fact whose unity is composed of two elements,
is, to some extent, present throughout all characteristically human
life, although its full and balanced realization, even in theory
and still more in practice, is ever, necessarily, a more or less
unfulfilled ideal: viz. that not only there exist certain objects,
acts, and affections that are simply wrong, and others that are simply
right or perfect, either for all men or for some men: but that there
exist simply no acts and affections which, however right, however
obligatory, however essential to the perfection of us all or of some
of us, that do not require, on our own part, a certain alternation
of interior reserve and detachment away from, and of familiarity and
attachment to, them and their objects. This general law applies as
truly to Contemplation as it does to Marriage.

And next, the element of detachment which has to penetrate and purify
simply all attachments,--even the attachment to detachment itself,--is
the more difficult, the less obvious, the more profoundly spiritual
and human element and movement, although only on condition that ever
some amount of the other, of the outgoing element and movement, and
of attachment, remains. For here, as everywhere, there is no good and
operative yeast except with and in flour; there can be no purification
and unity without a material and a multiplicity to purify and to unite.

And again, given the very limited power of attention and articulation
possessed by individual man, and the importance to the human community
of having impressive embodiments and examples of this, in various
degrees and ways, universally ever all-but-forgotten, universally
difficult, universally necessary, universally ennobling renunciation:
we get the reason and justification for the setting apart of men
specially drawn and devoted to a maximum, or to the most difficult
kinds, of this renunciation. As the practically universal instinct,
or rudimentary capacity, for Art, Science, and Philanthropy finds its
full expression in artists, scientists, philanthropists, whose specific
glory and ever necessary corrective it is that they but articulate
clearly, embody massively and, as it were, precipitate what is dimly
and intermittingly present, as it were in solution, throughout the
consciousness and requirements of Mankind; and neither the inarticulate
instinct, diffused among all, would completely suffice for any one of
the majority, without the full articulation by a few, nor the full
articulation by this minority could thrive, even for this minority
itself, were it not environed by, and did it not voice, that dumb
yearning of the race at large: so, and far more, does the general
religiosity and sense of the Infinite, and even its ever-present
element and requirement of Transcendence and Detachment, seek and call
forth some typical, wholesomely provocative incorporation,--yet, here,
with an even subtler and stronger interdependence, between the general
demand and the particular supply.

And note that, if the minority will thus represent a maximum of
“form,” with a minimum of “matter,” and the majority a maximum of
“matter,” with a minimum of “form”: yet some form as well as some
matter must be held by each; and the ideal to which, by their mutual
supplementations, antagonisms, and corrections, they will have more
and more to approximate our corporate humanity will be a maximum of
“matter,” permeated and spiritualized by a maximum of “form.” If it
is easy for the soul to let itself be invaded and choked by the wrong
kind of “matter,” or even simply by an excess of the right kind, so
that it will be unable to stamp the “matter” with spiritual “form”; the
opposite extreme also, where the spiritual forces have not left to them
a sufficiency of material to penetrate or of life-giving friction to
overcome, is ever a most real abuse.


2. _Ordinary Ascesis corrected by Social Christianity._

Now it is very certain that Ordinary Asceticism and Social Christianity
are, in their conjunction, far less open to this latter danger than is
the Mystical and Contemplative Detachment. For the former combination
possesses the priceless conception of the soul’s personality being
constituted in and through the organism of the religious society,--the
visible and invisible Church. This Society is no mere congeries of
severally self-sufficing units, each exclusively and directly dependent
upon God alone; but, as in St. Paul’s grand figure of the body, an
organism, giving their place and dignity to each several organ, each
different, each necessary, and each influencing and influenced by all
the others. We have here, as it were, a great living Cloth of Gold,
with, not only the woof going from God to Man and from Man to God,
but also the warp going from Man to Man,--the greatest to the least,
and the least back to the greatest. And thus here the primary and
full Bride of Christ never is, nor can be, any individual soul, but
only this complete organism of all faithful souls throughout time and
space; and the single soul is such a Bride only in so far as it forms
an operative constituent of this larger whole.--And hence the soul of a
Mystical habit will escape the danger of emptiness and inflation if it
keeps up some,--as much indeed as it can, without permanent distraction
or real violation of its special helps and call,--of that outgoing,
social, co-operative action and spirit, which, in the more ordinary
Christian life, has to form the all but exclusive occupation of the
soul, and which here, indeed, runs the risk of degenerating into mere
feverish, distracted “activity.”

I take the right scheme for this complex matter to have been all but
completely outlined by Plato, in the first plan of his _Republic_, and
indeed to have been largely derived by Christian thinkers from this
source; and the excessive and one-sided conception to have been largely
determined by his later additions and changes in that great book,
especially as these have been all but exclusively enforced, and still
further exaggerated, by Plotinus and Proclus. As Erwin Rhode finely
says of this later teaching of Plato: “It was at the zenith of his
life and thinking that Plato completed his ideal picture of the State,
according to the requirements of his wisdom. Over the broad foundation
of a population discriminated according to classes, (a foundation
which, in its totality and organization, was to embody the virtue of
justice in a form visible even from afar, and which formerly had seemed
to him to fulfil the whole function of the perfect State), there now
soars, pointing up into the super-mundane ether, a highest crown and
pinnacle, to which all the lower serves but as a substructure to render
possible this life in the highest air. A small handful of citizens,
the Philosophers, form this final point of the pyramid of the State.
In this State, ordered throughout according to the ends of ethics,
these Philosophers will, it is true, take part in the Government, not
joyously, but for duty’s sake; as soon, however, as duty permits,
they will eagerly return to that super-mundane contemplation, which
is the end and true content of their life’s activity. Indeed, in
reality, the Ideal State is now built up, step by step, for the ‘one
ultimate’ purpose of preparing an abode for these Contemplatives, of
training them in their vocation, the highest extant, and of providing
a means for the insertion of Dialectic, as a special form of life and
the highest aim of human endeavour, into the general organism of the
earthly, civilized life. ‘The so-called virtues’ all here sink into the
shade before the highest force of the soul, the mystic Contemplation
of the Eternal.… To bring his own life to ripeness for its own
redemption, _that_ is now the perfect sage’s true, his immediate duty.
If, nevertheless, he has still to bethink himself of acting upon and of
moulding the world the virtues will spontaneously present themselves to
him: for he now possesses Virtue itself; it has become his essential
condition.”[446]

It is truly impressive to find here, in its most perfect and most
influential form, that ruinously untrue doctrine of the separation of
any one set of men from the mass of their fellows, and of Contemplation
from interest in other souls, taking the place, (in the same great
mind, in the same great book), of the beautifully humble, rich, and
true view of a constant, necessary interchange of gifts and duties
between the various constituents of a highly articulated organism, a
whole which is indefinitely greater than, and is alone the full means,
end and measure of, all its several, even its noblest, parts.--Yet the
Christian, indeed every at all specifically religious, reader, will
have strongly felt that the second scheme possesses, nevertheless, at
least one point of advantage over the earlier one. For it alone brings
out clearly that element of Transcendence, that sense and thirst of the
Infinite, which we have agreed upon as the deepest characteristic of
man. And if this point be thus true and important, then another,--the
making of Contemplation into a special vocation,--can hardly be
altogether incorrect.

But if this is our judgment, how are we to harmonize these two points
of Plato’s later scheme with the general positions of the earlier
one. Or, rather, how are we to actuate and to synthesize our complex
present-day requirements and duties, Christian and yet also Modern,
Transcendental and yet Immanental too? For if we have any delicately
vivid sense of, and sympathy with, the original, very simple, intensely
transcendental, form and emphasis of the Christian teaching, and any
substantial share in the present complex sense of obligation to various
laws and conceptions immanent in different this-world organizations and
systems: we shall readily feel how indefinitely more difficult and deep
the question has become since Plato’s, and indeed since the Schoolmen’s
time.


3. _Preliminary Pessimism and ultimate Optimism of Christianity._

Now I think it is Prof. Ernst Troeltsch who has most fully explicitated
the precise centre of this difficulty, which, in its acuteness, is a
distinctly modern one, and the direction in which alone the problem’s
true solution should be sought.

(1) “The chief problem of Christian Ethics,” he says, “is busy,” not
with the relation between certain subjective means and dispositions,
but “with the relation between certain objective ends, which have, in
some way, to be thought together by the same mind as so many several
objects, and to be brought by it and within it to the greatest possible
unity. And the difficulty here lies in the fact, that the sublunar
among these ends are none the less moral ends, bearing the full
specific character of moral values,--that they are ends-in-themselves,
and necessary for their own sakes, even at the cost of man’s natural
happiness; and yet that they operate in the visible world, and adhere
to historical formations which proceed from man’s natural constitution,
and dominate his earthly horizon; whilst the Super-worldly End cannot
share its rule with any other end. Yet the special characteristic
of modern civilization resides precisely in such a simultaneous
insistence upon the Inner-worldly Ends, as possessing the nature of
ends-in-themselves, and upon the Religious, Super-worldly End: it is
indeed from just this combination that this civilization derives its
peculiar richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful, interior
tension and its difficult problems.”

(2) The true solution of the difficulty surely is that “Ethical life is
not, in its beginnings, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amidst
a number of moral ends, whose unification is not his starting-point
but his problem. And this multiplicity can be still further defined
as the polarity of two poles, inherent in man’s nature, of which the
two chief types proceed respectively from the religious and from
the inner-worldly self-determination of the soul,--the polarity of
Religious, and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be dispensed
with without moral damage, yet which cannot be brought completely under
a common formula. On this polarity depends the richness, but also the
difficulty, of our life, since the sublunar ends remain, to a large
extent, conditioned by the necessities and prerequisites of their own
special subject-matters, and since only on condition of being thus
recognized as ends in themselves, can they attain to their morally
educative power.”[447]

(3) Or, to put the same matter from the point of view of definitely
Christian experience and conviction: “The formula, for the specific
nature of Christianity, can only be a complex conception,--the special
Christian form,” articulation and correction, “of the fundamental
thoughts concerning God, World, Man and Redemption which,” with
indefinite variations of fulness and worth, “are found existing
together in all the religions. And the tension present in this
multiplicity of elements thus brought together is of an importance
equal to that of the multiplicity itself; indeed in this tension
resides the main driving-force of Religion. Christianity” in particular
“embraces a polarity within itself, and its formula must be dualistic;
it resembles, not a circle with one centre, but an ellipse with two
focuses. For Christianity is,” unchangeably, “an Ethics of Redemption,
with a conception of the world both optimistic and pessimistic, both
transcendental and immanental, and an apprehension both of a severe
antagonism and of a close interior union between the world and God. It
is, in principle, a Dualism, and yet a Dualism which is ever in process
of abolition by Faith and Action. It is a purely Religious Ethic, which
concentrates man’s soul, with abrupt exclusiveness, upon the values of
the interior life; and yet, again, it is a Humane Ethic, busy with the
moulding and transforming of nature, and through love bringing about
an eventual reconciliation with it. At one time the one, at another
time the other, of these poles is prominent: but neither of them may be
completely absent, if the Christian outlook is to be maintained.--And
yet the original germ of the whole vast growth and movement ever
remains an intensely, abruptly Transcendent Ethic, and can never simply
pass over into a purely Immanental Ethic. The Gospel ever remains,
with all possible clearness and keenness, a Promise of Redemption,
leading us, away from the world, from nature and from sin, from earthly
sorrow and earthly error, on and on to God; and which cannot allow
the last word to be spoken in this life. Great as are its incentives
to Reconciliation, it is never entirely resolvable into them. And the
importance of that classical beginning ever consists in continuously
calling back the human heart, away from all Culture and Immanence, to
that which lies above both.”[448]

(4) We thus get at last a conception which really covers, I think,
all the chief elements of this complex matter. But the reader will
have noted that it does so by treating the whole problem as one of
Spiritual Dynamics, and not of Intellectual Statics. For the conception
holds and requires the existence and cultivation of three kinds of
action and movement in the soul. There are, first, the various centres
of human energy and duty of a primarily This-world character, each
of which possesses its own kind and degree of autonomy, laws, and
obligations. There is, next, the attempt at organizing an increasing
interaction between, and at harmonizing, (whilst never emasculating
or eliminating), these various, severally characteristic, systems of
life and production into an ever larger ultimate unity. And, lastly,
there is as strong a turning away from all this occupation with the
Contingent and Finite, to the sense and apprehension of the Infinite
and Abiding. And this dynamic system is so rich, even in the amount of
it which can claim the practice of the majority of souls, as to require
definite alternations in the occupations of such souls, ranging thus,
in more or less rhythmic succession, from earth to Heaven and from
Heaven back again to earth.

(5) And so great and so inexhaustible is this living system, even by
mankind at large, that it has to be more or less parcelled out amongst
various groups of men, each group possessing its own predominant
_attrait_,--either to work out one of those immanental interests, say
Art, Natural Science, Politics; or to fructify one or more of these
relatively independent interests, by crossing it with one or more of
the others; or to attempt to embrace the whole of these intra-mundane
interests in one preliminary final system; or to turn away from this
whole system and its contents to the Transcendent and Infinite; or
finally to strive to combine, as far as possible, this latter Fleeing
to the Infinite with all that former Seeking of the Finite.--We shall
thus get specialists within one single domain; and more many-sided
workers who fertilize one Science by another; and philosophers of
Science or of History, or of both, who strive to reach the _rationale_
of all knowledge of the Finite and Contingent; and Ascetics and
Contemplatives who, respectively, call forth and dwell upon the sense
and presence of the Infinite and Abiding, underlying and accompanying
all the definite apprehensions of things contingent; and finally, the
minds and wills that feel called to attempt as complete a development
and organization as possible of all these movements.


4. _Subdivision of spiritual labour: its necessity and its dangers._

And yet all the subdivision of labour we have just required can avoid
doing harm, directly or indirectly, (by leading to Materialism,
Rationalism, or Fanaticism, to one or other of the frequent but ever
mischievous “Atomisms”), only on condition that it is felt and worked
_as_ such a subdivision. In other words, every soul must retain and
cultivate some sense of, and respect for, the other chief human
activities not primarily its own. For, as a matter of fact, even the
least rich or developed individual requires and practises a certain
amount, in an inchoate form, of each and all of these energizings; and
he can, fruitfully for himself and others, exercise a maximum amount
of any one of them, only if he does not altogether and deliberately
neglect and exclude the others; and, above all, if, in imagination and
in actual practice, he habitually turns to his fellow-men, of the other
types and centres, to supplement, and to be supplemented by, them.

It will be found, I think, that the quite undeniable abuses that have
been special to the Ascetic and Contemplative methods and states,
have all primarily sprung from that most plausible error that, if
these energizings are, in a sense, the highest in and for man, then
they can, at least in man’s ideal action and condition, dispense with
other and lower energizings and objects altogether. Yet both for man’s
practice here and even for his ideal state in the hereafter, this is
not so. There is no such thing,--either in human experience or in the
human ideal, when both are adequately analyzed and formulated,--as
discursive reasoning, without intuitive reason; or clear analysis and
sense of contrast, without dim synthesis and a deep consciousness of
similarity or continuity; or detachment of the will from evil, without
attachment of the higher feelings to things good; or the apprehension
and requirements of Multiplicity, without those of Unity; or the vivid
experience of Contingency, Mutation, and the Worthlessly Subjective,
without the, if obscure yet most powerful, instinct of the Infinite
and Abiding, of the true Objective and Valuable Subjective. Thus, for
humanity at large entirely, and for each human individual more or less,
each member of these couples requires, and is occasioned by, the other,
and _vice versa_.

The maxims that follow from this great fact are as plain in reason,
and as immensely fruitful in practice, as they are difficult, though
ever freshly interesting, to carry out, at all consistently, even in
theory and still more in act. For the object of a wise living will now
consist in introducing an ever greater unity into the multiplicity of
our lives,--up to the point where this unity’s constituents would,
like the opposing metals in an electric battery, become too much alike
still to produce a fruitful interaction, and where the unity would,
thus and otherwise, become empty and mechanical; and an ever greater
multiplicity into the unity,--up to the point where that multiplicity
would, seriously and permanently, break up or weaken true recollection;
and in more and more expanding this whole individual organism, by its
insertion, as a constituent part, into larger groups and systems of
interests. The Family, the Nation, Human Society, the Church,--these
are the chief of the larger organizations into which the inchoate,
largely only potential, organism of the individual man is at first
simply passively born, yet which, if he would grow, (not in spite of
them, a hopeless task, but by them), he will have deliberately to
endorse and will, as though they were his own creations.


5. _Mystics and Spiritual Direction._

It is interesting to note the special characteristics attaching to the
one social relation emphasized by the medieval and modern varieties of
Western Catholic Mysticism; and the effect which a larger development
of the other chief forces and modalities of the Catholic spiritual life
necessarily has upon this relation. I am thinking of the part played
by the Director, the soul’s leader and adviser, in the lives of these
Mystics,--a part which differs, in three respects, from that of the
ordinary Confessor in the life of the more active or “mixed” type of
Catholic.

(1) For one thing, there is here a striking variety and range, in the
ecclesiastical and social position of the persons thus providentially
given and deliberately chosen. The early German Franciscan Preacher,
Berthold of Regensburg, owes his initiation into the Interior Life to
his Franciscan Novice-Master, the Partial Mystic, David of Augsburg,
whose writings still give forth for us their steady light and genial
warmth; the French widowed noblewoman and Religious Foundress, St.
Jane Frances de Chantal, is helped on her course to high contemplation
by the Secular Priest and Bishop, St. Francis de Sales; the French
Jesuit, Jean Nicolas Grou, is initiated, after twenty-four years’
life and training in his Order, by the Visitation Nun, Soeur Pélagie,
into that more Mystical spirituality, which constitutes the special
characteristic of his chief spiritual books; the great Spaniard, St.
Teresa herself, tells us how “a saintly nobleman … a married layman,
who had spent nearly forty years in prayer, seems to me to have been,
by the pains he took, the beginning of salvation to my soul”--“his
power was great”; and the English Anchorite, Mother Juliana of Norwich,
“a simple, unlettered creature,” seems to have found no special leader
on to her rarely deep, wide, and tender teachings, but to have been
led and stimulated, beyond and after her first general Benedictine
training, by God’s Providence alone, working through the few and quite
ordinary surroundings and influences of her Anchorage at Norwich.[449]
It would be difficult to find anything to improve in this noble liberty
of these great children of God; nor would a larger influence of the
other modalities necessarily restrict this ample range.

(2) Again, the souls of this type seem, for the most part, to realize
more fully and continuously than those of the ordinary, simply active
and ascetical kind, that the “blind obedience” towards such leaders, so
often praised in their disciples and penitents, is, where wholesome
and strengthening, essentially a simple, tenacious adherence, during
the inevitable times of darkness and perplexity, to the encouragements
given by the guide to persevere along the course and towards the truths
which this soul itself saw clearly, often through the instrumentality
of this leader, when it was in light and capable of a peaceful,
deliberate decision. For however much the light may have been given it
through this human mediation, (and the most numerous, and generally
the most important, of our lights, have been acquired thus through
the spoken, written, or acted instrumentality of fellow-souls),--yet
the light was seen, and had (in the first instance), to be seen, by
the disciple’s own spiritual eye; and it is but to help it in keeping
faithful to this light (which, in the first and last instance, is God’s
light and its own) that the leader stands by and helps. But, given
this important condition, there remains the simple, experimental fact
that, not only can and do others often see our spiritual whereabouts
and God’s _attrait_ for us more clearly than we do ourselves, but such
unselfseeking transmission and such humbly simple reception of light
between man and man adds a moral and spiritual security and beauty to
the illumination, (all other conditions being equal and appropriate),
not to be found otherwise. It is interesting to note the courageous,
balanced, and certainly quite unprejudiced, testimony borne to these
important points, by so widely read, and yet upon the whole strongly
Protestant, a pair of scholars, as Miss Alice Gardner and her very
distinguished brother, Professor Percy Gardner.[450]

(3) And finally, the souls of this type have, (at least for the two
purposes of the suscitation of actual insight, and for bearing witness
to this, now past, experience during the soul’s periods of gloom),
often tended,--in Western Christendom and during Medieval and still
more in Modern times,--to exalt the office and power of the Director,
in the life of the soul of the Mystical type, very markedly beyond the
functions, rights and duties of the ordinary Confessor in the spiritual
life of the ordinary Catholic.

Indeed they and their interpreters have, in those times and places,
often insisted upon the guarantee of safety thus afforded, and upon the
necessity of such formal and systematic mediation, with an absoluteness
and vehemence impossible to conciliate with any full and balanced,
especially with any at all orthodox, reading of Church History. For
this feature is as marked in the condemned book of Molinos and of most
of the other Quietists, as it is in such thoroughly approved Partial
Mysticism as that of Père Lallemant and Père Grou: hence it alone
cannot, surely, render a soul completely safe against excesses and
delusions. And this feature was markedly in abeyance, often indeed,
for aught we know, completely wanting, at least in any frequent and
methodic form, in the numerous cases of the Egyptian and other Fathers
of the Desert: hence it cannot be strictly essential to all genuine
Contemplation in all times and places.

(4) The dominant and quite certain fact here seems to be that, in
proportion as the Abstractive movement of the soul is taken as
self-sufficient, and a Contemplative life is attempted as something
substantially independent of any concrete, social, and devotional helps
and duties, the soul gets into a state of danger, which no amount
of predominance of the Director can really render safe; whereas, in
proportion as the soul takes care to practise, in its own special
degree and manner, the outgoing movement towards Multiplicity and
Contingency, (particular attention to particular religious facts and
particular service of particular persons), does such right, quite
ordinary-seeming, active subordination to, and incorporation within,
the great sacred organisms of the Family, Society, and the Church,
or of any wise and helpful subdivision of these, furnish material,
purgation and check for the other movement, and render superfluous any
great or universal predominance of Direction. St. Teresa is, here also,
wonderfully many-sided and balanced. Just as she comes to regret having
ever turned aside from Christ’s Sacred Humanity, so too she possesses,
indeed she never loses, the sense of the profoundly social character of
Christianity: she dies as she had lived, full of an explicit and deep
love for the Kingdom of God and the Church.


6. _Mysticism predominantly Individualistic._

Yet it is clear that the strong point of the Mystics, as such, does not
lie in the direction of the great social spirituality which finds God
in our neighbour and in the great human organizations, through and in
which, after all, man in great part becomes and is truly man. They are,
as such, Individualistic; the relation between God and the individual
soul here ever tends to appear as constituted by these two forces
alone. A fresh proof, if one were still wanting, that Mysticism is but
one of the elements of Religion,--for Religion requires both the Social
and the Individual, the Corporate and the Lonely movement and life.

It is truly inspiring to note how emphatic is the concurrence of
all the deepest and most circumspect contemporary Psychology,
Epistemology, Ethics, and History and Philosophy of the Sciences and
of Religion, in these general conclusions, which find, within the slow
and many-sided growth and upbuilding of the spiritual personality, a
true and necessary place and function for all the great and permanent
capabilities, aspirations and energizings of the human soul. Thus no
system of religion can be complete and deeply fruitful which does not
embrace, (in every possible kind of healthy development, proportion
and combination), the several souls and the several types of souls
who, between them, will afford a maximum of clear apprehension and
precise reasoning, _and_ of dim experience and intuitive reason; of
particular attention to the Contingent (Historical Events and Persons,
and Institutional Acts and Means) _and_ of General Recollection and
Contemplation and Hungering after the Infinite; and of reproductive
Admiration and Loving Intellection, _and_ of quasi-creative, truly
productive Action upon and within Nature and other souls, attaining, by
such Action, most nearly to the supreme attribute, the Pure Energizing
of God.

Thus Pseudo-Dionysius and St. John of the Cross will, even in their
most Negative doctrines, remain right and necessary in all stages of
the Church’s life,--on condition, however, of being taken as but one
of two great movements, of which the other, the Positive movement,
must also ever receive careful attention: since only between them is
attained that all-important oscillation of the religious pendulum,
that interaction between the soul’s meal and the soul’s yeast, that
furnishing of friction for force to overcome, and of force to overcome
the friction, that material for the soul to mould, and in moulding
which to develop itself, that alternate expiration and inspiration,
upon which the soul’s mysterious death-in-life and life-in-death so
continuously depends.


III. THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM.


_Introductory. Difficulty yet Necessity of finding a True Place and
Function for Science in the Spiritual Life._

Now it is certain that such an oscillatory movement, such a
give-and-take, such a larger Asceticism, built up out of the alternate
engrossment in and abstraction from variously, yet in each case
really, attractive levels, functions and objects of human life and
experience, is still comparatively easy, as long as we restrict it
to two out of the three great groups of energizings which are ever,
at least potentially, present in the soul, and which ever inevitably
help to make or mar, to develop or to stunt, the totality of the
soul’s life, and hence also of the strictly spiritual life. The
Historical-Institutional, and the Mystical-Volitional groups and
forces, the High-Church and the Low-Church trend, the Memory- and
the Will-energies, do indeed coalesce, in times of peace, with the
Reason-energy, though, even then, with some difficulty. But in times
of war,--on occasion of any special or excessive action on the part of
this third group, the Critical-Speculative, the Broad-Church trend,
and the energizing of the Understanding,--they readily combine against
every degree of the latter. It is as though the fundamental vowels A
and U could not but combine to oust the fundamental vowel I; or as if
the primary colours Red and Blue _must_ join to crush out the primary
colour Yellow.

Indeed, it is undoubtedly just this matter of the full and continuous
recognition of, and allocation of a special function to, this third
element within the same great spiritual organism which englobes the
other two, which is now the great central difficulty and pressing
problem of more or less every degree and kind of religious life. For
the admission of this third element appears frequently to be ruinous to
the other two; yet the other two, when kept away from it, seem to lose
their vigour and persuasive power.--And yet it is, I think, exactly
at this crucial point that the conception of the spiritual life as
essentially a Dynamism, a slow constitution of an ever fuller, deeper,
more close-knit unity in, and by means of, the soul’s ineradicable
trinity of forces, shows all its fruitfulness, if we but work down to a
sufficiently large apprehension of the capacities and requirements of
human nature, moved and aided by divine grace, and to a very precise
delimitation of the special object and function of Mysticism.


1. _Science and Religion: each autonomous at its own level; and, thus,
each helpful to the other._

Erwin Rhode has well described Plato’s attitude towards Science
and Mysticism respectively, and towards the question of their
inter-relation. “The flight from the things of this World is, for
Plato, already in itself an acquisition of those of the Beyond, and
an assimilation to the Divine. For this poor world, that solicits our
senses, the philosopher has, at bottom, nothing but negation. Incapable
as it is of furnishing a material that can be truly known, the whole
domain of the Transitory and Becoming has no intrinsic significance
for Science as understood by him. The perception of things which are
ever merely relative, and which simultaneously manifest contradictory
qualities, has its sole use in stimulating and inviting the soul to
press on to the Absolute.”[451]

Here we should frankly admit that the soul’s hunger for the Infinite
is, as the great Athenian so deeply realized, the very mainspring of
Religion; and yet we must maintain that it is precisely this single
bound away, instead of the ever-repeated double movement of a coming
and a going, which not only helped to suppress, or at least gravely
to stunt, the growth of the sciences of external observation and
experiment, but (and this is the special point,--the demonstrable
other side of the medal,) also, in its degree, prevented religion from
attaining to its true depth, by thus cutting off, as far as Plato’s
conviction prevailed, the very material, stimulation, and in part the
instruments, for the soul’s outgoing, spiritualizing work, together
with this work’s profound reflex effect upon the worker, as a unique
occasion for the growth and self-detachment of the soul.

Now the necessity for such a first stage and movement, which, as far
as possible both immanental and phenomenalist, shall be applied and
restricted to the special methods, direct objects, and precise range
of each particular Science, and the importance of the safeguarding of
this scientific liberty, are now clearly perceived, by the leading men
of Religion, Philosophy, Psychology and Physics, in connection with
the maintenance and acquisition of sincere and fruitful Science.--It
is also increasingly seen that, even short of Religion, a second,
an interpretative, an at least Philosophical stage and movement is
necessary for the full explicitation of Science’s own assumptions and
affinities. And the keeping of these two movements clearly distinct or
even strongly contrasted, is felt, by some far-sighted Theologians,
to be a help towards securing, not only a candid attitude of Science
towards its own subject matters, but also a right independence of
Philosophy and Theology towards the other Sciences. Thus Cardinal
Newman has brought out, with startling force, the necessarily
non-moral, non-religious character of Physico-Mathematical Science,
taken simply within its direct subject-matter and method. “Physical
science never travels beyond the examination of cause and effect.
Its object is to resolve the complexity of phenomena into simple
elements and principles; but when it has reached those first elements,
principles and laws, its mission is at an end; it keeps within that
material system with which it began, and never ventures beyond the
‘flammantia moenia mundi.’ The physicist as such will never ask himself
by what influence, external to the universe, the universe is sustained;
simply because he is a physicist. If, indeed, he be a religious man,
he will, of course, have a very different view of the subject; … and
this, not because physical science says anything different, but simply
because it says nothing at all on the subject, nor can do by the very
undertaking with which it set out.” Or, as he elsewhere sympathetically
sums up Bacon’s method of proceeding: “The inquiry into physical causes
passes over for the moment the existence of God. In other words,
physical science is, in a certain sense, atheistic, for the very reason
that it is not theology.”[452]


2. _Science builds up a preliminary world that has to be corrected by
Philosophy and Religion, at and for their deeper levels._

The additional experience and analysis of the last half-century
apparently forces us, however, to maintain not only that
Physico-Mathematical Science, and all knowledge brought strictly to
the type of that Science, does not itself pronounce on the Ultimate
Questions; but that this Science, as such, actually presents us with a
picture of reality which, at the deeper level even of Epistemology and
of the more ultimate Psychology, and still more at that of Religion,
requires to be taken as more or less artificial, and as demanding, not
simply completion, but, except for its own special purposes, correction
as well. Thus we have seen how M. Bergson finds Clock-Time to be an
artificial, compound concept, which seriously travesties Duration, the
reality actually experienced by us; and Space appears as in even a
worse predicament. M. Emil Boutroux in France, Dottore Igino Petrone
in Italy, Profs. Eucken and Troeltsch in Germany, Profs. James Ward
and Pringle Pattison in Great Britain, and Profs. William James, Hugo
Münsterberg and Josiah Royce in America are, in spite of differences
on other points, united in insistence upon, or have even worked out
in much detail, such a distinction between the first stage and level
of Determinist, Atomistic, Inorganic Nature and our concepts of it,
and the second stage and level of Libertarian, Synthetic, and Organic
Spiritual Reality, and our experience of it. And the penetrating
labours of Profs. Windelband, Rickert, and others, towards building up
a veritable _Organon_ of the Historical Sciences, are bringing into
the clearest relief these two several degrees of Reality and types
of Knowledge, the Historical being the indefinitely deeper and more
adequate, and the one which ultimately englobes the other.[453]

A profoundly significant current in modern philosophy will thus be
brought, in part at least, to articulate expression and application.
This current is well described by Prof. Volkelt. “German philosophy
since Kant reveals, in manifold forms and under various disguises, the
attempt to recognize, in Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics, such
kinds of Certainty, such domains of Being, such human Volitions and
Values, as lie beyond reason, constitute a something that it cannot
grasp, and are rooted in some other kind of foundation. In variously
struggling, indeed stammering utterances, expression is given to the
assurance that not everything in the world is resolvable into Logic
and Thought, but that mighty resisting remainders are extant, which
perhaps even constitute the most important thing in the world.… Such a
longing after such a Reality can be traced in Hamann, Jacobi, Herder,
in Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the youthful Schleiermacher, and Jean
Paul. Indeed, even in Hegel, the adorer of Reason, the movement of
Negation, which is the very soul of his philosophy, is, at bottom,
nothing but the Irrational,” the Super-Rational, “element violently
pressed into the form of Reason; and again the single Thing, the This,
the Here and the Now, are felt by him as … a something beyond Reason.
And has not the Irrational found expression in Kant, in his doctrines
of the unconditional Liberty of the Will and of Radical Evil? In the
later Schelling and his spiritual relatives the Irrational has found
far more explicit recognition; whilst Schopenhauer brings the point
to its fullest expression. Yet even Nietzsche still possesses such an
element, in his doctrine of the ‘Over-Man.’”[454] And in England we
find this same element, in various degrees and in two chief divergent
forms, in the Cambridge Platonists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas
Hill Green on the one hand; and in Bishop Butler and Cardinal Newman on
the other hand.

We can thus point to much clear recognition, or at least to a
considerable influence, of the profound truth that Science and Wisdom
can each prosper and help and supplement the other, only if each
possesses a certain real autonomy, a power fully to become and to
remain itself, and, in various degrees and ways, to stimulate, check
and thwart the other. And this truth ever presupposes, what human
experience, in the long run, proves to be a fact,--that the different
kinds, spheres, and levels of man’s apprehension, and of the total
reality thus apprehended by him, are already immanently planned each
for the other, within a great, largely dormant system of the world.
Thus Man can and should call this congenital inter-relatedness into
ever more vigorous and more fruitful play; whereas, if it were not
already present deep within the very nature of things, no amount of
human effort or ingenuity could ever evoke or insert it. Prof. Volkelt
has, as we have seen, illustrated this great fact very strikingly,
with regard to the relation extant between the apparently sheer
contingencies of human History and the requirements of Philosophy, of
normative thought and ideal truth. Yet a similar inter-connection can
be traced elsewhere, between any other two or more levels and spheres
of wholesome and permanent human apprehension and action, in their
relation to various degrees and kinds of reality, as this environs man
or inheres in him.


3. _Necessity of the “Thing-element” in Religion._

But let us note that the recognition, of an at all emphatic, systematic
kind, of such inter-relatedness is, so far, almost limited to the
moods and persons preoccupied with the right claims of Science or of
Philosophy upon each other or upon the remainder of Life; and is, as
yet, all but wanting, when Life is approached from the side of the
specifically Religious requirements and of the Spiritual consolidation
of man’s soul. Yet here especially, at by far the most important point
of the whole matter, the unique place and significance of Science can
now be very clearly grasped.

Indeed it is deeply interesting to note how largely the fundamental
characteristics of Catholicism really meet, or rather how they strictly
require, some such vivid conception and vigorous use of the Determinist
Thing and of its level for the full constitution of our true depth,
our Spiritual Personality itself. If we take, _e.g._, the criticisms
addressed, by so earnest and acute a mind as the intensely Protestant
Emile Sulze, to the whole Thing-Element and -Concept, as these are at
work in the Catholic practice and position, we shall find his sense of
the difference between Thing and Spirit to be as enviably keen, and his
idea of the end and ultimate measure of Religion to be as sound and
deep, as his conception of the means towards developing Religion and
the Spirit is curiously inadequate.

(1) “Personality,” says Sulze, “is, for Religion and Morality, the
supreme Good, of which the source is in God, and the end, the fruit,
and the manifestation is in Man.”[455] This I take to be profoundly
true, especially if we insist upon Perfect Personality being Supreme
and Perfect Spirit; and, again, upon our imperfect personality
and spirit as possessed of certain profound affinities to, and as
penetrable and actually moved by, that Perfect Spirit.

(2) “The value of Personality nowhere finds a full recognition in
Catholicism; Catholicism indeed is Pantheism.” Now this harsh judgment
is based upon two sets of allegations, which, though treated by Sulze
as of the same nature, are, I would submit, essentially different, and
this because of their definitely different places and functions in the
Catholic system.

“The Impersonal Godhead, the bond which unites the three Persons,
stands above the Persons. Hence those who took religion seriously had
to lose themselves, pantheistically, in the abyss of the Divinity.
And in Christ the Person was even looked upon as the product of
two Natures, the Divine and the Human, hence of two Impersonal
Forces.”[456] Here two peculiarities in the early Conciliar Definitions
are emphasized, which were doubtless as helpful, indeed necessary,
for the apprehension of the great abiding truths thus conveyed to the
Graeco-Roman mind, as they are now in need of reinterpretation in the
light of our greater sensitiveness to the difference, in character and
in value, which obtains between the concept of Spirit and Personality
and that of Substances and Things.

But Sulze continues, without any change in the kind or degree of his
criticism: “Impersonal miraculous means, created by the Hierarchy, are
put by it in the place of the sanctifying mutual intercourse of the
children of God.” “Christianity, torn away from the religious and moral
life, became thus a special, technical apparatus, without any religious
or spiritual worth. Ecclesiastical Christianity has become a Pantheism,
Materialism, indeed Atheism.”[457] We have so continuously ourselves
insisted upon the profound danger, and frequently operative abuse, of
any and all complete apartness between any one means, function, or
_attrait_ of the spiritual life and the others, that we can, without
any unfairness, restrict ourselves here to the attack upon the general
acceptation of Impersonal means as helps towards the constitution of
Personality. Now Sulze’s principle here,--that only directly personal
means can help to achieve the end of Personality,--is most undoubtedly
false, unless Mathematico-Physical Science is also to be ruled out
of life, as necessarily destructive of, or at least as necessarily
non-conductive to, Personality.

(3) Indeed Sulze himself tells us, most truly, that, “for Religion
also, Science is a bath of purification”; and that “Doctrine and the
Sacraments are aids, in the hands of Christ and of the Community,
towards representing the riches of their interior life and offering
these to believing hearts.”[458] This latter pronouncement is, however,
still clearly insufficient. For if there is a double truth which,
at the end of well-nigh five centuries, ought to have burnt itself
indelibly into the mind and conscience of us all, it is, surely,
the following. On the one hand, Man, unless he develops a vigorous
alternating counter-movement, ever grows like to the instruments of
his labour and self-development, and hence, whilst busy with Things,
(whether these be Natural Happenings and their Sciences, or Religious
Institutions and Doctrines), he inclines to become, quite unawares,
limited and assimilated to them,--himself thus a Thing among Things,
instead of, through such various Things, winning an ever fuller
apprehension of and growth in Spiritual Personality. Yet, on the
other hand, without such a movement of close contact with the Thing,
(both the intensely concrete, the Here and Now Contingency, and the
profoundly Abstract, the stringent Universal Law) and without the
pleasure and pain derived from the accompanying sense of contraction
and of expansion, of contrast, conflict, supplementation and
renovation,--there is no fullest discipline or most solid growth of the
true spiritual Personality.

(4) Thus Science, as Sulze himself clearly sees, not merely aids us
to represent and to communicate our personality acquired elsewhere,
but the shock, friction, contrast, the slow, continuous discipline,
far more, beyond doubt, than any positive content furnished by such
science, can and should constitute an essential part of the soul’s
spiritual fertilization. And similarly, if we move on into the directly
religious life, the Sacramental contacts and Doctrinal systems (the
former so intensely concrete, the latter often so abstract,) are
not simply means towards representing and transmitting spirituality
acquired elsewhere: but they are amongst the means, and, in some form
and degree, the necessary, indeed actually universal means, towards
the awakening and developing and fulfilling of this our spiritual
personality.


4. _Three possible relations between Thing and Thought, Determinism and
Spirit._

It remains no doubt profoundly true that, with the awakening of the
Mystical sense, will come a more or less acute consciousness of an at
least superficial and preliminary, difference between this sense, with
its specific habits and informations, and those means and forms, in
part so contingent and external, in part so intensely abstract and yet
so precise. But it is equally certain that such a soul, and at such a
stage, even as it continues to require, in some respects more than
ever, for its general balanced development, some of the irreplaceable
discipline and manly, bracing humiliation of the close external
observation and severe abstract generalization of Science: so also
does it continue to require, for the deepening of the spirit and for
the growth of creatureliness, the contact with religious Things,--the
profoundly concrete Sacraments and the intensely abstract Doctrines of
the religious community.

(1) In one of Trendelenburg’s most penetrating essays, he shows us
how, between blind Force and conscious Thought,--if we presuppose
any tendency towards unity to exist between them,--there can be but
three possible relations. “Either Force stands before Thought, so that
Thought is not the primitive reality, but the result and accident of
blind Force; or Thought stands before Force, so that blind Force is not
itself the primitive reality, but the effluence of Thought; or finally,
Thought and Force are, at bottom, only one and the same thing, and
differ only in our mind’s conception of them.” And only one of these
three positions can, by any possibility, be the true one: hence their
internecine conflict.[459]

(2) Now Religion, in its normal, central stream, stands most
undoubtedly for Thought before Force, the second, the Theistic view.
And yet it would be profoundly impoverishing for our outlook and
practice, and would but prepare a dangerous reaction in ourselves or
others, were we ever to ignore the immense influence, in the history,
not only of philosophical speculation, but even of religious feeling
and aspiration, not indeed of the first, the Materialist, view, (which
owes all its strength to non-religious causes or to a rebound against
religious excesses), but of the third, the Pantheistic, Monistic, view,
whose classical exponent Spinoza will probably remain unto all time.

(3) If we examine into what constitutes the religious plausibility and
power of this view, we shall find, I think, that it proceeds, above
all, from the fact that, only too often, the second, the Theistic view
and practice, leaves almost or quite out of sight the purification
and slow constitution of the Individual into a Person, by means of
the Thing-element, the apparently blind Determinism of Natural Law
and Natural Happenings. Yet nothing can be more certain than that we
must admit and place this undeniable, increasingly obtrusive, element
and power _somewhere_ in our lives: if we will not own it as a means,
it will grip us as our end. The unpurified, all but merely natural,
animal, lustful and selfish individual man, is far too like to the
brutes and plants, indeed even to the inorganic substances that so
palpably surround him, for it not to be a fantastic thought to such
thinkers as Spinoza, (and indeed it would be an excessive effort to
himself,) to believe that he is likely, taken simply in this condition,
to outlast, and is capable of dominating, the huge framework of the
visible world, into which his whole bodily and psychical mechanism
is placed, and to which it is bound by a thousand ties and closest
similarities: his little selfish thinkings cannot but seem mere bubbles
on a boundless expanse of mere matter; all creation cannot, surely,
originate in, depend from, and move up to, a Mind and Spirit in any way
like unto this trivial ingenuity.

(4) It is true, of course, that Spinoza ended,--as far as the logic
of his system went,--by “purifying” away not only this animal
Individualism, but Spiritual Personality as well, and this because he
takes Mathematico-Physical concepts to be as directly applicable and as
adequate to Ultimate Reality as are the Ethico-Spiritual categories.
We have then to admit that even so rich and rare, so deeply religious
a spirit as Spinoza could insist upon purification by the “preliminary
Pantheism,” and yet could remain, in theory, the eager exponent of
an ultimate Pantheism. Like the Greeks, he not only passes through
a middle distance, a range of experience which appears dominated
by austere Fate and blind Fortune, but finds Fate even in ultimate
Reality. Whilst, however, the Greeks often thought of Fate as superior
even to the Gods, Spinoza finds Ultimate Reality to be neither Nature
nor Spirit, but simply Being in General, with a Law which is neither
Natural nor Spiritual Law, but Law in general. This General Being and
General Law then bifurcate, with the most rigorous determinism and
complete impartiality, step by step, into parallel and ever co-present
manifestations of Nature and of Spirit, and of their respective laws,
which, though different, are also each strictly determined within their
own series.[460]

(5) But Spinoza’s error here undoubtedly lies in his _de facto_
violent bending (in spite of this theoretical Parallelism) of all
Knowledge, Reality, and Life, under the sole Mathematico-Physical
categories and method; and in the insistence upon attaining to ultimate
Truth by one single bound and with complete adequacy and clearness.
And the greatness here consists in the keen and massive sense of three
profound truths. He never forgets that Mathematico-Physical Science
is rigidly determinist, and that it stands for a certain important
truth and penetrates to a certain depth of reality. He never ceases
to feel how impure, selfish, petty is the natural man, and how pure,
disinterested, noble, can and should be the spiritual personality. And
he never lets go the sense that, somehow, that science must be able to
help towards this purification.

(6) Now these three truths must be preserved, whilst the
Mathematico-Physical one-sidedness and the “one-step” error must
be carefully eliminated. And indeed it is plain that only by such
elimination can those truths operate within a fully congenial
system. For only thus, with a dissimilarity between the Ultimate,
Libertarian, Spiritual Reality, and the Intermediate, Determinist,
Physico-Mathematical Range, can we explain and maintain the pain, not
only of the selfish but also of the true self, in face the Mere Thing;
and only thus is all such pain and trouble worth having, since only
thus it leads to the fuller development and the solid constitution of
an abiding, interior, mental and volitional Personality.


5. _Purification of the Personality by the impersonal._

Prof. H. J. Holtzmann has got an eloquent page concerning the kind of
Dualism which is more than ever desirable for souls, if they would
achieve a full and virile personality in this our day. “It would appear
to be the wiser course for us to recognize the incompatibility between
merely natural existence and truly personal life, just as it is, in
its whole acute non-reconciliation; to insert this conflict into our
complete outlook on to Life in its full breadth and depth, and to find
the harmonization in God the Infinite, in whom alone such parallels can
meet, and not deliberately to blind our right eye or our left, in order
to force that outlook into one single aspect,--a degree of unification
which, when achieved in this violent manner, would mean for us, at the
same time, a point of absolute inertia, of eternal stagnation.” And
he then shows how it is precisely the interaction within our minds,
feelings, and volitions, of, on the one hand, the boundless world
of nature, with its majestic impersonality, and on the other hand,
the inexhaustible, indefinitely deeper realm of personal life, as it
appears within the stream of human history, which is best adapted
to give us some fuller glimpses of the greatness of God and of the
specific character of religion.[461]

The religious imagination, mind, heart, and will,--that is to say,
the complete, fully normal human being at his deepest,--has thus been
more and more forced, by an increasingly articulated experience of
the forces and requirements of actual life, to hold and to practise,
with ever-renewed attempts at their most perfect inter-stimulation and
mutual supplementation, a profoundly costing, yet immensely fruitful,
trinity in unity of convictions on this point.

In every time, place, and race, man will continue to be or to become
religious, in proportion to his efficacious faith in, and love of,
the overflowing reality and worth of the great direct objects of
religion,--God and the soul, and their inter-relation in and through
the Kingdom of God, the Church, and its Divine-Human Head,--the whole
constituting God’s condescension towards and immanence in man, and
man’s response and orientation towards the transcendent God.

And again, in every age, place, and race, man will be or will become
deeply religious, in proportion to the keenness with which he realizes
the immense need of spiritual growth and purification for his, at best,
but inchoate personality.

But,--and this third point we must admit, in the precise extension and
application given to it here, to be characteristically modern,--man
will, (if he belongs to our time and to our Western races, and is
determined fully to utilize our special circumstances, lights and
trials, as so many means towards his own spiritualization), have
carefully to keep in living touch with that secondary and preliminary
reality, the Thing-world, the Impersonal Element, Physical Science and
Determinist Law. He will have to pass and repass beneath these Caudine
forks; to plunge and to replunge into and through this fiery torrent;
and, almost a merely animal individual at the beginning and on this
side of such docile bendings and such courageous plungings, he will,
(if he combines them with, and effects them through, those two other,
abiding and ultimate, directly religious convictions), straighten
himself up again to greater heights, and will come forth from the
torrent each time a somewhat purer and more developed spiritual person
than he was before such contraction and purgation.


6. _This position new for Science, not for Religion._

Yet even this third point has, if we will but look to its substantial
significance and religious function, been equivalently held and
practised ever since the Twice-Born life, the deeper religion, has been
lived at all.

(1) The Ascetic’s self-thwarting, and the Mystic’s self-oblivion and
seeking after Pure Love, what are they but the expressions of the very
same necessities and motives which we would wish to see fully operative
here? For we are not, of course, here thinking of anything simply
intellectual, and fit only for the educated few. Any poor laundry-girl,
who carefully studies and carries out the laws of successful washing,
who moves, in alternation, away from this concentration on the Thing,
to recollection and increasingly affective prayer and rudimentary
contemplation, and who seeks the fuller growth of her spirit and of
its union with God, in this coming and going, to and from the Visible
and Contingent, to and from the Spiritual and Infinite, and in what
these several levels have of contrast and of conflict; or any lowly
farm-labourer or blacksmith or miner, who would proceed similarly with
his external determinist mechanical work, and with his deeply internal
requirements and spiritual growth and consolidation: would all be
carrying out precisely what is here intended.

(2) As a matter of fact, the source of such novelty, as may be
found here, is not on the side of religion, but on that of science.
For the conception of Nature of the ancient Greek Physicists, and
indeed that of Aristotle, required to be profoundly de-humanized,
de-sentimentalized: a rigorous mathematical Determinism and soulless
Mechanism became the right and necessary ideal of Physical Science.
But, long before the elaboration of this concept of the ruthless Thing,
and of its blind Force, Our Lord had, by His Life and Teaching, brought
to man, with abidingly unforgettable, divine depth and vividness, the
sense of Spirit and Personality, with its liberty and interiority, its
far-looking wisdom and its regenerating, creative power of love. And
for some thirteen centuries after this supreme spiritual revelation
and discovery, that old anthropomorphic and anthropocentric conception
of the Physical Universe continued, well-nigh unchanged, even among
the earlier and middle schoolmen, and was readily harmonized with
that Spiritual world. Yet they were harmonized, upon the whole, by a
juxtaposition which, in proportion as the conception of Nature became
Determinist and Mechanical, has turned out more and more untenable;
and which, like all simple juxtapositions, could not, as such, have
any spiritually educative force. But Spiritual Reality has now,--for
those who have become thoroughly awake to the great changes operated,
for good and all, in man’s conception of the Physical Universe during
now three centuries,--to be found under, behind, across these Physical
Phenomena and Laws, which both check and beckon on the mind and soul of
man, in quest of their ultimate mainstay and motivation.

(3) And let us note how much some such discipline and asceticism is
required by the whole Christian temper and tradition, and the weakening
of some older forms of it.

During the first three generations Christians were profoundly sobered
by the keen expectation of Our Lord’s proximate Second Coming, and
of the end of the entire earthly order of things, to which all their
natural affections spontaneously clung; and again and again, up to
well-nigh the Crusading Age, this poignant and yet exultant expectation
seized upon the hearts of Christians. And then, especially from St.
Augustine’s teaching onwards, an all-pervading, frequently very severe,
conviction as to the profound effects of Original Sin, a pessimistic
turning away from the future of this sublunar world, as leading up
to the great Apostacy, and a concentration upon Man’s prehistoric
beginnings, as incomparably eclipsing all that mankind would ever
achieve here below, came and largely took the place, as the sobering,
detaching element in Christianity, of the vivid expectation of the
Parousia which had characterized the earlier Christian times.

Clearly, the Parousia and the Original Sin conception have ceased to
exercise their old, poignantly detaching power upon us. Yet we much
require some such special channel and instrument for the preservation
and acquisition of the absolutely essential temper of Detachment
and Other-Worldiness. I think that this instrument and channel of
purification and detachment--if we have that thirst for the More and
the Other than all things visible can give to our souls, (a thirst
which the religious sense alone can supply and without which we are
religiously but half-awake)--is offered to us now by Science, in the
sense and for the reasons already described.


7. _Three kinds of occupation with Science._

Let the reader note that thus, and, I submit, thus only, we can and
do enlist the religious passion itself on the side of disinterested,
rightly autonomous science. For thus the harmony between the different
aspects and levels of life is not, (except for our general faith in
its already present latent reality, and in its capacity for ultimate
full realization and manifestation), the static starting-point or
automatically persisting fact in man’s life; but it is, on the
contrary, his ever difficult, never completely realized goal,--a goal
which can be reached only by an even greater transformation within the
worker than within the materials worked upon by him,--a transformation
in great part effected by the enlargement and purification, incidental
to the inclusion of that large range of Determinist Thing-laws and
experiences within the Spirit’s Libertarian, Personal life.

It is plain that there are three kinds and degrees of occupation with
Things and Science, and with their special level of truth and reality;
and that in proportion as their practice within, and in aid of, the
spiritual life is difficult, in the same proportion, (given the soul’s
adequacy to this particular amount of differentiation and pressure)--is
this practice purifying. And though but few souls will be called to
any appreciable amount of activity within the third degree, all souls
can be proved, I think, to require a considerable amount of the first
two kinds, whilst mankind at large most undoubtedly demands careful,
thorough work of all three sorts.

The first kind is that of the man with a hobby. His directly religious
acts and his toilsome bread-winning will thus get relieved and
alternated by, say, a little Botany or a little Numismatics, or by any
other “safe” science, taken in a “safe” dose, in an easy, _dilettante_
fashion, for purposes of such recreation. This kind is already in
fairly general operation, and is clearly useful in its degree and way,
but it has, of course, no purificatory force at all.

The second kind is that of the man whose profession is some kind
of science which has, by now, achieved a more or less secure place
alongside of, or even within, religious doctrines and feelings,--such
as Astronomy or Greek Archaeology. Here the purification will be in
proportion to the loyal thoroughness with which he fully maintains,
indeed develops, the special characteristics and autonomy both of
these Sciences, as the foreground, part-material and stimulation, and
of Religion, as the groundwork, background and ultimate interpreter
and moulder of his complete and organized life; and with which he
makes each contribute to the development of the other and of the
entire personality, its apprehensions and its work. This second kind
is still comparatively rare, doubtless, in great part, because of the
considerable cost and the lifelong practice and training involved in
what readily looks like a deliberate complicating and endangering of
things, otherwise, each severally, simple and safe.

And the third kind is that of him whose systematic mental activity
is devoted to some science or research, which is still in process of
winning full and peaceful recognition by official Theology,--say,
Biological Evolution or Biblical Criticism. Here the purification will,
for a soul capable of such a strain, be at its fullest, provided such a
soul is deeply moved by, and keeps devotedly faithful to, the love of
God and of man, of humble labour and of self-renouncing purification,
and, within this great ideal and determination, maintains and
ameliorates with care the methods, categories and tests special both to
these sciences and investigations, and to their ultimate interpretation
and utilization in the philosophy and life of religion. For here there
will, as yet, be no possibility of so shunting the scientific activity
on to one side, or of limiting it to a carefully pegged-out region,
as to let Religion and Science energize as forces of the same kind
and same level, the same clearness and same finality; but the Science
will here have to be passed through, as the surface-level, on the way
to Religion as underlying all. What would otherwise readily tend to
become, as it were, a mental Geography, would thus here give way to
what might be pictured as a spiritual Geology.


8. _Historical Science, Religion’s present, but not ultimate, problem._

The reader will have noted that, for each of these three stages, I have
taken an Historico-Cultural as well as a Mathematico-Physical Science,
though I am well aware of the profound difference between them, both as
to their prerequisites and method, and their aim and depth. And, again,
I know well that, for the present, the chief intellectual difficulty
of Religion, or at least the main conflict or friction between the
Sciences and Theology, seems to proceed, not from Physical Science but
from Historical Criticism, especially as applied to the New Testament,
so that, on this ground also, I ought, apparently, to keep these two
types of Science separate.--Yet it is clear, I think, that, however
distinct, indeed different, should be the methods of these two sorts of
Science, they are in so far alike, if taken as a means of purification
for the soul bent upon its own deepening, that both require a slow,
orderly, disinterested procedure, capable of fruitfulness only by
the recurring sacrifice of endless petty self-seekings and obstinate
fancies, and this in face of that natural eagerness and absoluteness
of mind which strong religious emotions will, unless they too be
disciplined and purified, only tend to increase and stereotype.

The matters brought up by Historical Criticism for the study and
readjustment of Theology, and for utilization by Religion, are indeed
numerous and in part difficult. Yet the still more general and
fundamental alternatives lie not here, but with the questions as to the
nature and range of Science taken in its narrower sense,--as concerned
with Quantity, Mechanism, and Determinism alone.

If Science of this Thing-type be all that, in any manner or degree, we
can apprehend in conformity with reality or can live by fruitfully:
then History and Religion of every kind must be capable of a strict
assimilation to it, or they must go. But if such Science constitute
only one kind, and, though the clearest and most easily transferable,
yet the least deep, and the least adequate to the ultimate and
spiritual reality, among the chief levels of apprehension and of life
which can be truly experienced and fruitfully lived by man; and if the
Historical and Spiritual level can be shown to find room for, indeed to
require, the Natural and Mechanical level, whilst this latter, taken
as ultimate, cannot accommodate, but is forced to crush or to deny,
the former: then a refusal to accept more than can be expressed and
analyzed by such Physico-Mathematical Science would be an uprooting and
a discrowning of the fuller life, and would ignore the complete human
personality, from one of whose wants the entire impulse to such Science
took its rise.

As a matter of fact, we find the following three alternatives.

Level all down to Mathematico-Physical Science, and you deny the
specific constituents of Spirituality, and you render impossible the
growth of the Person out of, and at the expense of, the Individual.
Proclaim the Person and its Religion, as though they were static
substances adequately present from the first, and ignore, evade or
thwart that Thing-level and method as far as ever you can, and you
will, in so far, keep back the all but simply animal Individual from
attaining to his full spiritual Personality. But let grace wake up,
in such an Individual, the sense of the specific characteristics of
Spirituality and the thirst to become a full and ever fuller Person,
and this in contact and conflict with, as well as in recollective
abstraction from, the apparently chance contingencies of History and
Criticism, and the seemingly fatalistic mechanisms of Physics and
Mathematics: and you will be able, by humility, generosity, and an
ever-renewed alternation of such outgoing, dispersive efforts and of
such incoming recollection and affective prayer, gradually to push out
and to fill in the outlines of your better nature, and to reorganize it
all according to the Spirit and to Grace, becoming thus a deep man, a
true personality.

Once again: take the intermediate, the Thing-level as final, and you
yourself sink down more and more into a casual Thing, a soulless Law;
Materialism, or, at best, some kind of Pantheism, must become your
practice and your creed.--Take the anterior, the Individual-level as
final, and you will remain something all but stationary, and if not
merely a Thing yet not fully a Person; and if brought face to face
with many an Agnostic or Pantheist of the nobler sort, who is in
process of purification from such childish self-centredness by means
of the persistently frank and vivid apprehension of the Mechanical,
Determinist, Thing-and-Fate level of experience and degree of truth,
you will, even if you have acquired certain fragmentary convictions and
practices of religion, appear strangely less, instead of more, than
your adversary, to any one capable of equitably comparing that Agnostic
and yourself--you who, if Faith be right, ought surely to be not less
but more of a personality than that non-believing soul.

But take the last, the Spiritual, Personal level as alone ultimate,
and yet as necessarily requiring, to be truly reached and maintained,
that the little, selfish, predominantly animal-minded, human being
should ever pass and repass from this, his Individualistic plane
and attitude, through the Thing-and-Fate region, out and on to the
“shining table-land, whereof our God Himself is sun and moon”: and
you will, in time, gain a depth and an expansion, a persuasive force,
an harmoniousness and intelligibleness with which, everything else
being equal, the Pantheistic or Agnostic self-renunciation cannot
truly compare. For, in these circumstances, the latter type will, at
best, but prophesy and prepare the consummation actually reached by
the integrational, dynamic religiousness, the Individual transformed
more and more into Spirit and Person, by the help of the Thing and of
Determinist Law. Freedom, Interiority, Intelligence, Will, Grace, and
Love, the profoundest Personality, a reality out of all proportion
more worthy and more ultimate than the most utterly unbounded universe
of a simply material kind could ever be, thus appear here, in full
contradiction of Pantheism, as ultimate and abiding; and yet all
that is great and legitimate in Pantheism has been retained, as an
intermediate element and stage, of a deeply purifying kind.


9. _Return to Saints John of the Cross and Catherine of Genoa._

And thus we come back to the old, sublime wisdom of St. John of the
Cross, in all that it has of continuous thirst after the soul’s
purification and expansion, and of a longing to lose itself, its
every pettiness and egoistic separateness, in an abstract, universal,
quasi-impersonal disposition and reality, such as God here seems
to require and to offer as the means to Himself. Only that now we
have been furnished, by the ever-clearer self-differentiation of
Mathematico-Physical Science, with a zone of pure, sheer Thing, mere
soulless Law, a zone capable of absorbing all those elements from out
of our thought and feeling which, if left freely to mingle with the
deeper level of the growing Spiritual Personality, would give to this
an unmistakably Pantheistic tinge and trend. Hence, now the soul will
have, in one of its two latter movements, to give a close attention to
contingent facts and happenings and to abstract laws, possessed of no
direct religious significance or interpretableness which, precisely
because of this, will, if practised as part of the larger whole of
the purificatory, spiritual upbuilding of the soul, in no way weaken,
but stimulate and furnish materials for the other movement, the one
specially propounded by the great Spaniard, in which the soul turns
away, from all this particularity, to a general recollection and
contemplative prayer.

And we are thus, perhaps, in even closer touch with Catherine’s
central idea,--the soul’s voluntary plunge into a painful yet joyous
purgation, into a state, and as it were an element, which purges away,
(since the soul itself freely accepts the process), all that deflects,
stunts, or weakens the realization of the soul’s deepest longings,--the
hard self-centredness, petty self-mirrorings, and jealous claimfulness,
above all. For though, in Catherine’s conception, this at first both
painful and joyful, and then more and more, and at last entirely,
joyful, ocean of light and fire is directly God and His effects upon
the increasingly responsive and unresisting soul: yet the apparent
Thing-quality here, the seemingly ruthless Determinism of Law, in
which the little individual is lost for good and all, and which only
the spiritual personality can survive, are impressively prominent
throughout this great scheme. And though we cannot, of course, take the
element and zone of the sheer Thing and of Determinist Law as God, or
as directly expressive of His nature, yet we can and must hold it, (in
what it is in itself, in what it is as a construction of our minds,
and in its purificatory function and influence upon our unpurified but
purifiable souls), to come from God and to lead to Him. And thus here
also we escape any touch of ultimate Pantheism, without falling into
any cold Deism or shallow Optimism. For just because we retain, at the
shallower level, the ruthlessly impersonal element, can we, by freely
willed, repeated passing through such fatalistic-seeming law, become,
from individuals, persons; from semi-things, spirits,--spirits more and
more penetrated by and apprehensive of the Spirit, God, the source and
sustainer of all this growth and reality.

And yet, let us remember once more, the foreground and preliminary
stage to even the sublimest of such lives will never, here below at
least, be abidingly transcended, or completely harmonized with the
groundwork and ultimate stage, by the human personality. Indeed our
whole contention has been that, with every conceivable variation of
degree, of kind, and of mutual relation, these two stages, and some
sort of friction between them, are necessary, throughout this life,
for the full development, the self-discipline, and the adequate
consolidation, at the expense of the childish, sophistic individual, of
the true spiritual Personality.




IV. FINAL SUMMARY AND RETURN TO THE STARTING-POINT OF THE WHOLE
INQUIRY: THE NECESSITY, AND YET THE ALMOST INEVITABLE MUTUAL HOSTILITY,
OF THE THREE GREAT FORCES OF THE SOUL AND OF THE THREE CORRESPONDING
ELEMENTS OF RELIGION.


Our introductory position as to the three great forces of the soul,
with the corresponding three great elements of religion, appears, then,
to have stood the test of our detailed investigation. For each of these
forces and corresponding elements has turned out to be necessary to
religion, and yet to become destructive of itself and of religion in
general where this soul-force and religious element is allowed gravely
to cripple, or all but to exclude, the other forces and elements, and
their vigorous and normal action and influence.


1. _Each of these three forces and elements is indeed necessary, but
ruinously destructive where it more or less ousts the other two._

(1) The psychic force or faculty by which we remember and picture
things and scenes; the law of our being which requires that
sense-impressions should stimulate our thinking and feeling into
action, and that symbols, woven by the picturing faculty out of these
impressions, should then express these our thoughts and feelings; and
the need we have, for the due awakening, discipline and supplementation
of every kind and degree of experience and action, that social
tradition, social environment, social succession should ever be before
and around and after our single lives: correspond to and demand the
Institutional and Historical Element of Religion. This element is as
strictly necessary as are that force and that law.

Yet if this force and need of the soul, and this religious element
are allowed to emasculate the other two primary soul-forces and needs
and the religious elements corresponding to them, it will inevitably
degenerate into more or less of a Superstition,--an oppressive
materialization and dangerous would-be absolute fixation of even quite
secondary and temporary expressions and analyses of religion; a ruinous
belief in the direct transferableness of religious conviction; and a
predominance of political, legal, physically coercive concepts and
practices with regard to those most interior, strong yet delicate,
readily thwarted or weakened, springs of all moral and religious
character,--spiritual sincerity and spontaneity and the liberty of
the children of God. We thus get too great a preponderance of the
“Objective,” of Law and Thing, as against Conviction and Person; of
Priest as against Prophet; of the movement from without inwards, as
against the movements from within outwards.

The Spanish Inquisition we found to be probably the most striking
example and warning here. Yet the Eastern Christian Churches have
doubtless exhibited these symptoms, if less acutely, yet more
extensively and persistently. And the Protestant Reformation-Movement,
(even in the later lives of its protagonists, Luther, Zwingli, and
Calvin), much of orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism, and some forms and
phases of Anglican Highchurchism and of Scotch Presbyterianism, show
various degrees and forms of a similar one-sidedness. In Judaism the
excesses in the Priestly type of Old Testament religion, especially
as traceable after the Exile, and their partial continuation in
Rabbinism, furnish other, instructive instances of such more or less
partial growth,--the Pharisees and the Jerusalem Sanhedrin being here
the fullest representatives of the spirit in question. The classical
Heathen Roman religion was, throughout, too Naturalistic for its,
all but exclusive, externalism and legalism to be felt as seriously
oppressive of any other, considerable element of that religion. And
much the same could doubtless be said of Indian Brahmanism to this
day. But in orthodox Mohammedanism we get the truly classical instance
of such a predominance, in all its imposing strength and terrible,
because all but irremediable, weakness--with its utterly unanalytic,
unspeculative, unmystical, thing-like, rock-solid faith; its detailed
rigidity and exhaustive fixity; its stringent unity of organization
and military spirit of entirely blind obedience; its direct, quite
unambiguous intolerance, and ever ready appeal to the sword, as the
normal and chief instrument for the propagation of the spirit; and its
entirely inadequate apprehension of man’s need of purification and
regeneration in all his untutored loves, fears, hopes and hates.

(2) Then there is the soul-force by which we analyze and synthesize,
and the law of our being which requires us to weigh, compare, combine,
transfer, or ignore the details and the evidential worth of what has
been brought home to us through the stimulation of our senses, by our
picturing faculty and memory, and by means of our Social, Historical,
and Institutional environment, and which orders us to harmonize all
these findings into as much as may be of an intelligible whole of
religion, and to integrate this religious whole within some kind of,
at least rough, general conception as to our entire life’s experience.
And this force and law are answered by the Critical-Historical and
Synthetic-Philosophical element of religion. We thus get Positive
and Dogmatic Theology. And this element is as humanly inevitable and
religiously necessary as is that soul-force and law.

Yet here again, if this force, law, and element are allowed
superciliously to ignore, or violently to explain away, the other kinds
of approaches and contributions to religious truth and experience,
special to the other two soul-forces and religious elements, we shall
get another destructive one-sidedness, a Rationalistic Fanaticism,
only too often followed by a lengthy Agnosticism and Indifference.
Whilst the Rationalist Fanaticism lasts, everything will doubtless
appear clear and simple to the soul, but then this “everything” will
but represent the merest skimmings upon the face of the mighty deep
of living, complete religion,--a petty, artificial arrangement by the
human mind of the little which, there and then, it can easily harmonize
into a whole, or even simply a direct hypostatizing of the mind’s own
bare categories.

The worship of the Goddess of Reason at Notre-Dame of Paris we found to
be here, perhaps, the most striking instance. Yet Rationalist excesses,
varying from a cold Deism down to an ever short-lived formal Atheism,
and the lassitude of a worldly-wise Indifferentism, are traceable
within all the great religions. Thus a large proportion of the educated
members of the ancient Graeco-Roman world were, from the Sophists and
the Second Punic War onward, stricken with such a blight. The Sadducees
are typical of this tendency among the Jews for some two centuries.
The tough persistence of a mostly obscure current of destructive
free-thought throughout Western Europe in the Middle Ages shows well
the difficulty and importance of a mental and spiritual victory over
these forces of radical negation, and of not simply driving them
beneath the surface of society. And the ready lapse of the most daring
and intense of the Medieval, Jewish and Christian, Scholastics into a
thoroughly Pantheistic Panlogism, points to the prevalence, among these
circles, of a certain tyranny of the abstractive and logical faculty
over the other powers and intimations of the soul.--Unitarianism again
is, in its origins and older form, notwithstanding its even excessive
anti-Pantheism, strongly Scholastic in its whole temper and method, and
this without the important correctives and supplementations brought
to that method by the largely Mystical and Immanental Angel of the
Schools. The greater part of the “Aufklärung”-Movement was vitiated
by an often even severer, impoverishment of the whole conception of
religion. And, in our day, the Liberal movements within the various
Christian bodies, and again among Brahmanic religionists in India,
rarely escape altogether from ignoring or explaining away the dark
and toilsome aspects of life, and the inevitable excess of all deep
reality, and indeed of our very experience of it, above our clear,
methodical, intellectual analysis and synthesis of it. Too often and
for too long all such groups have inclined to assimilate all Experience
to clear Knowledge, all clear Knowledge to Physico-Mathematical
Science, all Religion to Ethics, and all Ethics to a simple belief
in the ultimacy of Determinist, Atomistic Science. The situation is
decidedly improving now; History and Culture are being found to have
other, more ultimate categories, than are those of Mathematics and
Physics, and to bring us a larger amount of reality, and Ethics and
Religion are discovered to be as truly distinct as they are closely
allied and necessary, each to the deepest development of the other.

(3) The faculty and action of the soul, finally, by which we have an
however dim yet direct and (in its general effects) immensely potent,
sense and feeling, an immediate experience of Objective Reality, of
the Infinite and Abiding, of a Spirit not all unlike yet distinct from
our own, Which penetrates and works within these our finite spirits
and in the world at large, especially in human history; and by which
we will, and give a definite result and expression to, our various
memories, thinkings, feelings, and intuitions, as waked up by their
various special stimulants and by the influence of each upon all the
others: is met by the Mystical and the directly Operative element of
Religion. And here again we have a force and law of the human spirit,
and a corresponding element of religion, which can indeed be starved
or driven into a most dangerous isolation and revolt, but which are
simply indestructible.

The Apocalyptic Orgies of the Münster Anabaptists we found to be
perhaps the most striking illustration of the dire mischief that can
spring from this third group of elemental soul-forces, when they ignore
or dominate the other two. Yet some such Emotional Fanaticism can be
traced, in various degrees and forms, throughout all such religious
groups, schools, and individuals as seriously attempt to practise Pure
Mysticism,--that is, religious Intuition and Emotion unchecked by the
other two soul-forces and religious elements, or by the alternation of
external action and careful contact with human Society and its needs
and helps, Art and Science, and the rest.

Thus we find that, after the immense, luxuriant prevalence of an
intensely intuitive, emotional, tumultuously various apprehension
and manifestation of religion during the first two generations
of Christians, and even after the deep, wise supplementation and
spiritualization of this element by St. Paul, who in his own person so
strikingly combined the Institutional, Rational and Intuitive-Emotional
forces and elements, this whole force and element rapidly all but
disappeared for long from Western Christian orthodoxy. And Montanism
in still early times, and, during the very height of the Middle
Ages, the Waldensian and Albigensian movements--all predominantly
intuitive, enthusiastic, individualist--appear as so many revolutionary
explosions, threatening the whole fabric of Christendom with
dissolution. The “Eternal Gospel” movement of Abbot Joachim, on
the other hand, gives us the intuitional-emotive element in a more
purified, institutionally and rationally supplemented form.

Again we find that, for a while, in reaction from an all but hopelessly
corrupt civilization, the Fathers of the Desert attained in many cases,
by means of an all but Exclusive Mysticism, to a type of sanctity
and to the inculcation of a lesson which the Church has gratefully
recognized. We have to admit that many of the Italian, French and
Spanish Quietists of the Seventeenth Century were no doubt excessively,
or even quite unjustly, suspected or pursued, as far at least as their
own personal motives and the effect of their doctrines upon their own
characters were concerned; and that the general reaction against even
the proved, grave excesses of some of these men and women, went often
dangerously far in the contrary direction. Indeed even the fierce
fanaticism of the Dutch-Westphalian Apocalyptic Intuitionists can but
excuse, not justify, the policy of quite indiscriminately ruthless
extermination pursued by Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, and by their
official churches after their deaths, towards any and all Illuminism,
however ethically pure and socially operative. The “Society of Friends”
which, measured by the smallness of its numbers, has given to the world
an astonishingly large band of devoted lovers of humankind, is a living
witness to the possibility of such an Illuminism.

And we can note how the sane and solid, deep and delicate constituents,
which had existed, mixed up with all kinds of fantastic, often
hysterical and anti-moral exaltations, within most of those all but
purely Intuitionist circles, gradually found their escape away into all
sorts of unlikely quarters, helping to give much of their interiority
and religious warmth, not only to various, now fairly sober-minded,
Nonconformist Protestant bodies on the Continent, in England and
America, but also to the more religious-tempered and more spiritually
perceptive among modern philosophers--such as Spinoza, Kant, Fichte,
Schleiermacher, Schelling and Fechner.

Within the Jewish world, we get much of this element at its noblest
and at its worst, in the true and false Prophets respectively; then
among the Essenes, for the times between the Maccabean resistance and
the revolt of Bar Cochba; and later on in the Kabbala. The Mohammedans
still furnish the example of the Sufi-movement. The Classical Heathen
world produced the Neo-Platonist and the Mithraic movements; and we can
still study, as a living thing, the Buddhist Mysticism of Thibet.

We have then, here too, something thoroughly elemental, which requires
both persistent operative recognition and a continuous and profound
purification and supplementation by becoming incorporated within a
large living system of all the fundamental forces of the soul, each
operating and operated upon according to the intrinsic nature and
legitimate range of each.


2. _Each element double; endless combinations and conflicts._

We have also found that these three forces and elements are each
double, and that collisions, but also most fruitful interactions, can
and do obtain between even these yoke-fellows: between Institutionalise
and History,--the Present and the Past, a direct Sense-Impression and
Picture and a Memory; between Criticism and Construction,--Analysis
and acuteness of mind, and Synthesis and richness and balance of
imagination, head, heart, and will; and between Mysticism and Action,
as respectively Intuitive and quiescent and Volitional and effortful.

And both the three forces and elements as a whole, and the single
members of each pair, can and do appear in every possible variety of
combination with, and of opposition against, the others, although
there is a special affinity between the Critical-Speculative and the
Intuitive-Volitional pairs (in combination against the Sense-and-Memory
pair); between the Sense-and-Memory pair and the single member of
Action; and between the single members of Speculation and of Intuition.
Yet, ultimately, not any one pair or member can bear its fullest fruit,
without the aid of all the others; and there is not one that, in actual
human nature, does not tend to emasculate, or to oust as much as
possible from the soul, the other pairs or single members.


3. _Our entire religious activity but one element of our complete
spirit-life._

And we have noted further, how even the fullest development in
any one soul of all these three couples of specifically religious
activities--even supposing that they could be developed to their
fullest, without any participation in and conflict with other degrees
and kinds of life and reality--do not, by any means, exhaust the range
of even the simplest soul’s actual energizings.

(1) For over and beyond the specifically religious life--though this,
where genuine, is ever the deepest, the central life--every soul lives,
and has to live, various other lives. And indeed--and this is the
point which specially concerns religion--the soul cannot attain to its
fullest possible spiritual development, without the vigorous specific
action and differentiation of forces and functions of a not directly
religious character, which will have to energize, each according
to its own intrinsic nature, within the ever ampler, and ever more
closely-knit, organization of the complete life of the soul.

(2) And within this complete life, the three pairs of religious forces
and elements each possess their own special affinities and antipathies
for certain of the forces and elements which constitute the other,
less central organizations of man’s marvellously rich activity.
The Historical-Institutional element of Religion has necessarily
a special affinity for, and borrows much of its form from, social,
legal, political history and institutions of a general kind. The
Critical-Speculative element of religion is necessarily cognate to, and
in a state of interchange with, the general historical criticism and
philosophical insight attained during the ages and amongst the races in
which any particular religion is intellectually systematized. And the
Mystical-Operative element is necessarily influenced by, and largely
utilizes the general emotive and volitional gifts and habits, peculiar
to the various ages and peoples within which this double religious
element is in operation.

(3) It is thus abundantly clear how greatly a work so manifold in its
means, and so harmonious in its end, requires, if it is to come to
a considerable degree of realization, that single souls, and single
classes and types of souls, should have around them a large and varied
Historical and Institutional, a Social life both of a specifically
religious and of a general kind, and that, within this large ambit of
the actualized religion of others and of the still largely potential
religion of their own souls, they shall develop and be helped to
realize their own deepest spiritual capacities and _attrait_. They
will have to develop these special capabilities to the utmost degree
compatible with some practice of the other chief elements of religion,
with a continuous respect for and belief in the necessity of the other
types of soul, and with a profound belief in, and love of, the full,
organized community of all devoted souls, which builds up, and is built
up by, all this variety in unity. The Kingdom of God, the Church, will
thus be more and more found and made to be the means of an ever more
distinct articulation, within an ever more fruitful interaction, of
the various _attraits_, gifts, vocations, and types of souls which
constitute its society. And these souls in return will, precisely
by this their articulation within this ampler system, bring to this
society an ever richer content of variety in harmony, of action and
warfare within an ever deeper fruitfulness and peace.


4. _Two conditions of the fruitfulness of the entire process._

Yet even the simplest effort, within this innumerable sequence and
simultaneity of activities, will lack the fullest truth and religious
depth and fruitfulness, unless two experiences, convictions and motives
are in operation throughout the whole, and penetrate its every part,
as salt and yeast, atmosphere and light penetrate, and purify and
preserve our physical food and bodily senses.

The vivid, continuous sense that God, the Spirit upholding our poor
little spirits, is the true originator and the true end of the whole
movement, in all it may have of spiritual beauty, truth, goodness
and vitality; that all the various levels and kinds of reality and
action are, in whatever they have of worth, already immanently
fitted to stimulate, supplement and purify each other by Him Who, an
Infinite Spiritual Interiority Himself, gives thus to each one of us
indefinite opportunities for actualizing our own degree and kind of
spiritual possibility and ideal; and that He it is Who, however dimly
yet directly, touches our souls and awakens them, in and through all
those minor stimulations and apprehensions, to that noblest, incurable
discontent with our own petty self and to that sense of and thirst for
the Infinite and Abiding, which articulates man’s deepest requirement
and characteristic: this is the first experience and conviction,
without which all life, and life’s centre, religion, are flat and
dreary, vain and philistine.

And the second conviction is the continuous sense of the ever
necessary, ever fruitful, ever bliss-producing Cross of Christ--the
great law and fact that only through self-renunciation and suffering
can the soul win its true self, its abiding joy in union with the
Source of Life, with God Who has left to us, human souls, the choice
between two things alone: the noble pangs of spiritual child-birth, of
painful-joyous expansion and growth; and the shameful ache of spiritual
death, of dreary contraction and decay.

Now it is especially these two, ever primary and supreme, ever deepest
and simplest yet most easily forgotten, bracing yet costing, supremely
virile truths and experiences--facts which increasingly can and
ever should waken up, and themselves be vivified by, all the other
activities and gifts of God which we have studied--these two eyes
of religion and twin pulse-beats of its very heart, that have been
realized, with magnificent persistence and intensity, by the greatest
of the Inclusive Mystics.

And amongst these Mystics, Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna, the Saint
of Genoa, has appeared to us as one who, in spite of not a little
obscurity and uncertainty and vagueness in the historical evidences for
her life and teaching, of not a few limitations of natural character
and of opportunity, and of several peculiarities which, wonderful to
her _entourage_, can but perplex or repel us now, shines forth, in
precisely these two central matters, with a penetrating attractiveness,
rarely matched, hardly surpassed, by Saints and Heroes of far more
varied, humorous, readily understandable, massive gifts and actions.
And these very limits and defects of her natural character and
opportunities, of her contemporary disciples and later panegyrists,
and of our means for studying and ascertaining the facts and precise
value of the life she lived, and of the legend which it occasioned,
may, we can hope, but help to give a richer articulation and wider
applicability to our study of the character and necessity, the limits,
dangers and helpfulness of the Mystic Element of Religion.




INDEX


(_Some corrections of mistakes in names and references, as given in the
foregoing work, have been silently effected in the following Index_)


I. OF SUBJECT-MATTERS

  Abelard, I. 61

  Absorptions of St. Catherine, I. 226-229

  Acarie, Madame, I. 89

  Acquasola, Genoa, I. 144, 145 _n._ 1, 168

  Action (reflex), its three elements, I. 57-58

  Adorni Family, I. 96, =101=, 102
    various, I. 102, 145 _n._ 1, 151, 153-155, 173, 300, 327, 377

  Adorno, Giuliano, I. =101=, =102=, 103, 138, 145 _n._ 1, =149=, 153,
      173, 187, 225, 296, 297 _n._ 1, 300, 307, 308, 309, 311, 313,
      325 _n._ 1, 377, 378, 379, 382, 386, 388, 394, 454, 455; II. 29, 74
    he becomes a Tertiary of the Order of St. Francis, I. 130
    his bankruptcy, I. 128-129
    character, I. 102
    conversion, I. 129
    his death, I. 149-156, 379
    his illness, I. 149 _n._ 1.
    his life in the little house within the Hospital, I. 129-131
    his monument, I. 297 _n._ 1
    his natural daughter, I. 129
    his will, I. =151-152=, 378-379
    moves into the Hospital, I. 141, 142
    sells his palace, I. 148 _n._ 1

  Adorno Palazzo, I. 108, 128, 148, 327, 377, 379, 403

  Aeschylus, II. 189, 271

  Afer, Victorinus, I. 266 _n._ 3

  Affinities, human, furthered by Mysticism, II. 331-335

  After-life beliefs, in Asiatic countries, II. 183-185
    in Greece, II. 185-189
    of the Jews, II. 189-191
    problems, ethico-practical difficulties of, II. 197-199
      historical difficulties of, II. 182-194
      philosophical difficulties of, II. 194-197

  After-life, its forecasts in St. Catherine, II. 200-203
    Plato’s influence on them, II. 203-211

  Agnosticism (Mystical), criticism of, II. 287-296

  Agrigentum, II. 188

  Aix, Cathedral of, and triptych, I. 96

  Akiba, Rabbi, II. 233, 268, 292

  Alacoque, St. Marie Marguerite, II. 42, 56, 58

  Albigensian movement, II. 391

  Alcantara, St. Peter of, II. 143

  Alexander VI, Pope (Borgia), I. 95
    VII, Pope (Chigi), II. 168 _n._ 1

  Alexandrian School, I. 61

  Alfred, King, II. 44

  Aloysius, St. Gonzaga, I. 88

  Alvarez, Venerable Balthazar, S.J., I. 64

  Ambrosian Library, Milan, I. 411 _n._ 1, 466

  America, II. 370, 392

  Amos, II. 189, 268

  Anabaptists, I. 9, 63; II. 391
    their orgies, I. 10, 340; II. 391

  Anaxagoras, I. 12

  Andrew, Monastery of St., Genoa, I. 325 _n._ 2

  Andrewes, Anglican Bp. Lancelot, I. 63

  Angelica Library, Rome, I. 411 _n._ 1

  Angelo, Castel S., Rome, I. 327
    of Chiavasso, Blessed, O.S.F., I. 116

  Anglican Highchurchism, II. 63, 388

  Anglicanism, its three elements, I. 8, 9, 63

  Anguisola, Donna Andronica, I. 359, 361, 363, 364, 403, 413, 416

  Animal-life, St. Catherine’s sympathy with, I. 163, 164

  Anjou, Charles I. of, I. 96
    Margaret of, I. 96
    René of, King of Naples, I. 96

  Annunciation, Church of the, Sturla, I. 451

  Annunziata in Portorio, Church of Sma., Genoa, I. 98 _n._ 1 (99), 130,
      201 _n._ 3, 297 _n._ 1, 313, 325 _n._ 1
    Monastery of, I. 319, 325

  Annunziata, Piazza della Sma., Genoa, I. 102

  Anselm, St., Archbishop, I. 78; II. 142, 181

  Anthony, St., I. 373

  Antiochene School, I. 61

  Antiochus Epiphanes, II. 292

  Antonietta (servant), I. 149, 153, 226

  Apocalypse, II. 269

  Apollo Katharsios, II. 93

  Apostles, I. 27, 389

  Apprehension, Mystical, no distinct faculty of, II. =283-284=

  Arc, Jeanne d’, Ven., II. 47

  Archives, Archiepiscopal, of Genoa, I. 411 _n._ 1
    of the Cathedral Chapter, Genoa, I. 384

  Archivio di Stato in Genoa, I. 153 _n._ 1, 172, 176 _n._ 1, 2,
      378 _n._ 1, 379 _n._ 1, 381 _n._ 1, 203 _n._ 1, 213; II. 10 _n._ 1.

  Argentina, del Sale (de Ripalta), I. 149, 151, 162 _n._ 2 (163),
      =169-171=, 173, 175, 197 _n._ 4 (198), 210 _n._ 1, 213 _n._ 1,
      =215-219=, 223, 226, 297 _n._ 1, 298, 299, 367, 310-312, =313=,
      =314=, 387-389, 402, =452=, =453=, 464; II. 4, 26
    adopted by St. Catherine, I. 170, 171
    her fate, I. 313, 314
    much alone with St. Catherine in 1510, she helps on growth of
      legends, I. 203; II. 4, 26, 197 _n._ 4 (198), 203, 209, 210 _n._ 1,
      219, 452, 453
    wills of, I. 313, 381

  Arias, Francisco, S.J., I. 89

  Aristotle, I. 7, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 41, 42; II. 131, 132, 194, 203, 249,
      250, 252, 264, 310, 311, 312, 320, 324, 379
    his conception of “Unmoving Energy,” II. =131=, =132=, 250
      of the Noûs, II. 32
      of God as sheer abstract Thought, II. 251
    his general doctrine, I. 19-23

  Arnold, Dr. Thomas, of Rugby, I. 63

  Ars, Curé d’, the Bl. J. B. Vianney, II. 143

  Arvenza, on the Riviera, I. 318

  Asceticism and Mystical abstractiveness, II. 348-349
    ordinary and social Christianity, II. 355-358
    ordinary, as practised by Mystics, II. 341-343

  Asia Minor, II. 188

  Assyria, II. 185

  Atman, II. 183

  Augsburg, David of, O. S. F., II. 363

  Augustine, St., I. 61, 100; II. 117, 129, 131, 142, 205, 211, 212, 213,
      214, 215, 261, 266 _n._ 3, 270, 282, 298, 380
    on Evil as negative, II. 293
    on fire of Hell, II. 216
    on mitigation of sufferings of the Lost, II. 225
    on Purgatory, II. 216, 217
    on soul’s Rest between death and resurrection, II. 211, 212
    on Original Sin, II. 298-301
    on God and the soul as out of Space, II. =212=, =213=
    on Time and Eternity, II. 165 _n._, =248=

  Augustinian Canonesses, I. 103 _n._ 1; II. 62
    Canons, I. 103 _n._ 1

  Augustinianesses, Chapel of the, Genoa, I. 109, 170

  Avicebron, _see_ Gebirol Ibn

  Avicenna, II. 317

  Avignon exile, I. 94

  Azzolini, Cardinal, I. 305
    dei Manfredi, cavaliere, I. 99 _n._


  Babylonia, II. 185

  Bacon, Francis, II. 369

  Baius, condemnation of, II. 242

  Balilla, via, Genoa, I. 129

  Ballerini, Father Antonio, S. J., I. 121

  Bar Cochba, revolt of, II. 392

  Barnabites, I. 340

  Baronius, Cardinal, I. 318

  Basil, St., II. 166

  Beethoven, L. von, II. 27, 42, 265

  Beguards, II. 131 _n._ 1

  Bellarmine, Cardinal, S.J., I. 88

  Bell’Huomo, G., S.J., II. 144

  Benedetta Lombarda, servant, I. 130, 149, 153, 172, 176, 226,
      =311=, =312=, 317, 379

  Benedict XIV, Pope (Lambertini), I. 136, 253
    St., I. 104, 127, 240, 460

  Benedictines, I. =63=, =64=, 103 _n._ 1, 373; II. 161,
  363

  Bentham, Jeremy, II. 272

  Bergson, Henri, Professor, II. 247, 282, 370

  Bernard, St., of Clairvaux, I. 7, 61, 69; II. 242, 182
    Claude, II. 192

  Bernières-Louvigny, Jean de, II. 141

  Bernouilli, Dr. C. A., I. 373

  Berulle, Venerable Cardinal de, I. 88, 317

  Bible, Catherine’s love of the, I. 258

  Biographies, religious, the three attitudes possible concerning,
      I. =374-375=

  Biography, religious, laws regulating its growth, I. =371=

  Bismarck, Otto von, II. 272

  Bliss, its “pain”-element, II. =255=

  Blondel, Prof. Maurice, II. 282

  Body, Catherine’s view concerning it, and the elements of this view,
      II. 123-126
    dualistic view concerning it, ever only pragmatic, II. =126-129=
    dualistic view, un-Catholic, II. 126, 127
    its valuation in the N. T., II. 122-123

  Boerio, Maestro G. B., I. 200, 201 _n._ 3, 202, 208, 217, 218, 389, 451,
      464; II. 14, 15, 17
    Don Giovanni, I. 201 _n._ 3 (202), 208, 451

  Boetius, II. 317

  Bollandists, I. 372

  Bona, Cardinal, Cistercian, I. 88

  Boniface VIII, Pope (Gaetani), II. 83
    his Bull “Unam Sanctam,” I. 94

  Bosco Bartolomeo, I. 130

  Bossuet, Bishop J. B., I. 64, 89; II. 141, 161, 162, 171, 173

  Boudon, Archdeacon H. M., II. 141

  Bousset, Prof. W., on individual experience and traditional form, II. 309

  Brahman, II. 183

  Brahmanism, II. 388
    its three elements, I. 60

  Brescia, Hospital in, I. 322
    Vincenzo da, painter, I. 99

  Bridgettines, Convent of the, Genoa, I. 312

  Browning, Robert, II. 57, 108, 223, 227, 271

  Buddha, Gautama, I. 71; II. 184, 268

  Buddhism, II. 183, 184, 273
    its three elements, I. 60

  Buddhist Mysticism, II. 392

  Bunyan, John, his works, I. 63

  Burke, Edmund, II. 271

  Burmah, II. 183

  Burnet, Anglican Bishop Gilbert, II. 145

  Busenbaum, Hermann, S. J., I. 121

  Butler, Anglican Bishop Joseph, II. 371


  Caesar, II. 272

  Caird, Professor Edward, II. 91 _n._ 1, 282

  Cajetanus, Thomas de Vio, Cardinal, O.P., II. 162

  Callisto da Piacenza, Padre, I. 323, 324

  Calvin, I. 341, 414, 415; II. 117, 118, 388, 392
    _Institutio Religionis Christianæ_ I. 340
    Calvinism, I. 9, 63
    early stages of, I. 339-341

  Cambridge Platonists, the, II. 371

  Camillus of Lellis, St., I. 129 _n._ 2

  Campanaro Family, of Genoa, I. 101

  Campion, Blessed Edmund, S.J., I. 64; II. 129

  Campofregoso, Paolo, of Genoa, I. 101

  Canada, II. 141

  _Canticle of Canticles_, I. 258, 356
    its imagery dear to V. Battista Vernazza, I. 111, 356, 432
      remote from St. Catherine’s mind, I. 229, 258, 432;
      II. 100, 101, 107

  Capuchins, I. 311, 340, 341

  Caraccioli, Cardinal, Archbishop of Naples, II. 139

  Caraffa, Cardinal, _see_ also Paul IV. (Pope), I. 327, 340

  Carenzio, Don Jacobo, 155 _n._ 1, 175, 202, 204 _n._ 1, 213, 216, 217,
      295, 299, 301, =307-309=, 310 _n._ 1, 384, 464; II. 26
    his fate, I. 307-309

  Carenzio, Don Jacobo, his funeral, I. 381

  Carlyle, Thomas, II. 271

  Cassian, I. 78

  Cassino, Monte, I. 103 _n._ 1

  Castagneto, Brigidina, I. 175

  Catherine, of Alexandria, St., I. 97, 348

  Catherine of Genoa, St. (Caterinetta Fieschi Adorno), I. 86, 95, 97,
      98 _n._ 1, 100, 101, 102, 103, 103 _n._ 1, 104, 105, 111, 112,
      113, 123, 151, 168, 169, 170, 171, 338, 339, 376, 382, 387, 388,
      389; II. 42, 50, 56, 58, 63, 64, 96, 97, 98, 109, 131, 136, 142,
      146, 170, 172, 206, 208, 209, 218, 288, 289, 297, 298, 304, 306,
      395, 396

  Catherine, St., her AFTER-LIFE CONCEPTIONS, II. 199-218
    her apparitions after death, I. 216, 218
    her external appearance, I. 97
    ecclesiastical approbation of her doctrine, I.  255, 256, 413,
      =448=, =449=, 464
    and Argentina del Sale, I. 170, 171, 203, 209, 210, 213, 217, 298
    her BAPTISM, I. 97
    and Baptism, I. 436; II. 76
    her birth, I. 93, 97
    her breadth of sympathy and unsuspiciousness, II. 83, 84
    her brothers, I. 97, 167, 172, 176
    her burial, I. 296, 297
    her burial-place, shifting of, I. 152, =185-187=, 213
    and business, I. 154, 186
    the three CATEGORIES of her teaching, ‘In,’ ‘Out,’ ‘Over,’
      I. 273-276
    her codicils of 1503, I. 168, 169, 380
      of 1508, I. 175, 176, 380
      of 1510, I. 212-214, 380
    colours, her sensitiveness to, I. 208, 210, 298; II. 17, 24
    compared with St. Augustine, II. 211-214, 216, 225, 248, 293, 294
      with Clement and Origen of Alexandria, II. 219, 234-236
      with Pseudo-Dionysius, II. 90-101, 205, 236
      with the Joannine writings, II. 79-90
      with St. John of the Cross, II. 257, 258, 346, 347, 385, 386
      with the Pauline writings, I. 140; II. 63-79, 322
      with Plato, II. 66, 201-211, 235, 251
      with Plotinus, II. 204, 322, 323
      with Proclus, II. 204, 205, 294, 313
      with the Synoptic Gospels, II. 122-124, 153-158
      with St. Teresa, II. 288, 289, 324, 325
      with St. Thomas Aquinas, I. 120; II. 162-164, 222-224, 301,
      337, 338
      with Ven. Battista Vernazza, I. =332-366=, 408, 409, 423,
      429-433
      with Ettore Vernazza, I. 317-323, 328, 329, 331-335
    and Confession, I. 109, =117-121=, 158, 159, =424-427=
    and her Confessor (Don Marabotto), I. 155-158, 184, 185, 193-196,
      455-457
    her Conversion, I. 104-109, 403-406, 458-462; II. 29-31
    Cross and Passion, her attitude towards, I. 108, 109, 205, 209, 210,
      =403-406=, 409, =411-413=, 452, 453
    Cultus, her popular, I. 301-303, 332, 335, 394
    her DEATH, I. 215, 216
    her Deed of Cession, 1456, I. 376, 377
    her _Deposito_, I. 98 _n._
    her desire for death, I. 183, 184, 192, 210
      for life, I. 200-202
      for human sympathy, I. 195
    and the Devil, I. 124, 125, 205, 206, 264; II. 36, 37
    men devoted to her spirit, I. 89, 90
    her DIALOGO, _see_ Vita (D) in Index II
    her _Dicchiarazione, see_ Vita (T) in Index II
    her doctrine presented in theological order, I. 257, 260-294
    dualistic tendencies in, considered, II. 121-129
    her ECSTATIC states, I. 161, 162, 226, 229; II. 34
    and the H. Eucharist, I. 113, 114, 116, 204, 208, 214, 240, 241,
      288, 289, 263; II. =87=, =88=
    her attitude towards Evil, I. 266-270; II. 294
    her FASTS, I. 135-139, 155; II. 34
    her Father, I. 96, 97, 101
    and Tommasa Fiesca, I. 131, 132, 168, 169, 174
    GROWTH, her spiritual, I. 112, 113, =236-239=
    and HEAVEN, I. 159-161; II. =246-258=
    and Hell, I. 281-288; II. =218-230=
    her attitude towards historical and institutional religion, I. 190,
      204, 206, =239-241=
    and the Hospital _Chronici_, I. 173, 174
    and the Hospital _Pammatone_, I. 129-131, 141-143, 175, 202
    and her husband, I. 102-104, 129, 152, 153
    hysteriform appearances in her health, II. 20, 21, 23-25
    her fundamental difference from hysteria-patients, II. =25-27=
    her ILLNESS, during last days, I. 207, 214; II. 13
    during last months, I. 193; II. 9, 10
    and Indulgences, I. 123-126, 202
    and intercessory prayer, I. 127
    and invocation of saints, I. 104, 127
    LESSONS of her life, I. 244-246
    Life, conceptions of, in, II. 88-90
    her literary obligations, I. 234-238; II. 62-110, 203-211
    Pure Love, her doctrine of, I, 108, =139-141=, =159-161=, 262, 263,
      265, 266
      her practice of, I. 116, 144, 170, 184, 185, 187, 197
    and MARRIAGE, I. 101, 223-225, 246, 248, 249
    her Marriage-settlement, I. 377
    materialization of her experiences and ideas, I. 218, 219
    matron of Hospital, I. 143, 147, 148
    and her NEPHEWS, I. 154, 167, 171, 176, 213
    and her Nieces, I. 154, 167, 172, 173
    ORIGINALITY of her doctrine, I. =246-250=, 347
    and PAIN, physical and psycho-physical, 196-198, 198-200; II. 10, 11
    her penitence, I. 109-112, 131-134
    the periods of her convert life, I. 111, 112, 112 _n._ 1, 118, 119,
      138, 390-393
      first period, I. 128-131
      second period, I. 128-140
      third period, I. 157-159, 175, 176
    and physicians, I. 200, 201, 208, 211, 212
    pictures, her care for religious, I. 99, =168=, =169=, 188, 189,
      191; II. 29, 30
    portraits of, I. 98 _n._ i, 301
    her possessions at time of her death, I. 297-299
    her psycho-physical peculiarities, in themselves, I. 176-181, 193,
      196-200; II. 10-13, 17-21
    her attitude towards them, I. 164, 165, 211, 212; II. 16, =35-39=
    and Purgatory, I. 283-294; II. =230-246=
    and prayer of QUIET, I. 227
    her quietistic-sounding sayings, I. =236=, =237=, 265, 266, 271, 279
    causes of her apparent quietism, II. =34-36=
    her RELICS, I. 98, _n._ 1, 300-304
    her Rigoristic trend, I. 342
    her “SCINTILLA”-experience, I. 187-191, 451
    and Holy Scripture, I. 258
    her self-knowledge, I. 164, 165, =206=, =207=, 247; II. 14, 15
    her extreme sensitiveness, I. 176-181, 207-209
    “Serafina,” I. 161, 262
    and her servants, I. 148, 149, 161, 162, 169, 171, 172, 175, 176,
      217; II. 26
    and her sister, I. 100, 105, 167
    social interests in 1506, I. 172-174
      in 1506-1510, I. 175-176
    Spirit, the, her conception of, II. =67-69=, =84=, 320-322
    symbols used by,: air and flying, I. 189; II. 103
      arrow and wounding, I. 97; II. 105, 106
      bread and eating or being devoured, I. 288, 289, =270=
      cork under water, I. 275
      dog and his master, I. 263
      drops, liquid, I. 159, 160, 189; II. 52
      fountain, I. 189, 260, 261
      fragments and table, I. 277
      heat and cold, I. 194, 197; II. 109
      light, rays of the sun, and fire, sparks of, I. 178-180, 187,
      188, 269, 276, =290-292=; II. 94, 95, 323
      motes, spots, stains, rust, I. 189, 267; II. 236, =238=, =239=
      nakedness and garments, I. =275=, =276=, 290-292, 428, 432;
      II. 77, 78, 98, 123, =209=, =210=
      places and abiding in them, I. =277=, =278=; II. =69=, =70=,
      77, =80=, =81=, 212, 213, 322
      the plunge, I. 268, =284=, =285=, 332; II. 70, 89, =207=,
      =208=, 385
      prison, exile, I. 273, 274; II. 105, 126, 239
      the (golden) rope, I. 432; II. 92, 93
      water (the sea) and drowning, I. =274=, =275=; II. 103, 106,
      =108=, =109=, 322
    symbols used by her, why material and extensional, not personal
      and successive, I. 237-239, =245-247=; II. =39=, =40=, =100=, =101=,
      285, 286, 330, 331, 349, 350
    her TEACHING, general character of, I. 229-234
    fortunate circumstances of, I. 255, 256
    her special temperament, I. 220-223
    and Thobia, I. 129, 153, 169
    her times, I. 94, 95
    and Transcendence, I. 274-277; II. =100=
    and UNCTION, Extreme, I. 195, 197, 204, 206
    Union, her thirst for absolute, I. 116, 159-161, 263, =265=,
      =266=, 269-271, 280
    and Battista VERNAZZA, I. 149, 337
    and Ettore Vernazza, I. 145-147, 191-193, 203, 204, 226, 331-335,
      =453-455=
    veracity of her mind, I. 119
    her VISION of the Bleeding Christ, I. =107-109=, 181, 209, 239,
      403, 405, 418, =460-462=, 466 _n._ 2; II. 31, 32, 71
    WARFARE, method of her spiritual, II. =34-39=
    and the two ways, negative and positive, I. 276-280
    words, her last, I. 216, 465
    her Wills, i, I. 152, 153, 377-378
      ii, I. 152-154, 380
      iii, I. 172-174, 380
      iv, I. 172-173, 174, 176, 185-187, 202, 203, 308, 380
    her wills in general, I. 297-299; II. 26
    her “writings” not her composition, I. 87, 407, 433, 447, 448, =466=
    her YOUTH, I. 99-101
    of Siena, I. 87, 94, 306, 341, 382; II. 42, 47, 306, 307

  Catholicism, its three elements, I. 63-64

  Catholic mind, its characteristics, I. =122-123=

  Caussade, Père de, S.J., II. 143

  Censor, Dominican, the, of the _Vita_, I. 372, =413=, 464

  Centurione, Adam, Lord, I. 385
    Ginetta, Lady, I. 385
    Orientina, Donna, I. 385, 391

  Cesarini, Cardinal, I. 305

  Chantal, St. Jane Frances de, II. 142, 143, 363

  Child, the, its apprehension of religion, I. 51

  China, II. 182, 183

  Chios, Isle of, I. 101, 151; II. 27, 83

  Christian conception of life, I. 48-49
    doctrine (survey of), I. =25-28=
      its three N. T. presentations, I. =28-39=

  Christianity, conflicts between its Intuitive-Emotional and its other
      elements, I. =70-77=
    excludes Pantheism, II. 334-335
    its preliminary Pessimism and ultimate Optimism, II. 358-361
    its three elements, II. 61
      in the Humanist Renaissance, I. 62
      the Middle Ages, I. 61-62
      the Protestant Reformation, I. 62-63

  Christina, Queen of Sweden, I. 305, 305 _n._ 1

  Christofero of Chiavari, I. 168, 298

  _Chronici_, Spedale dei, Genoa, I. =173=, =174=, 317, 319, 326, 327, 333;
      II. 10
    Protectors of, I. 318, 326
    Sindaco of, I. 319

  Chroniclers of St. Catherine, rivalry between them, I. 216

  Chronicles, Books of, David in, I. 373

  Church, the, her life and spirit, I. 123

  Cibo Donna Maddalena (born Vernazza), I. 322

  Cicero, Don Blasio, I. 152

  Clement of Alexandria, I. 61, 78; II. 131, 142, =166=, =219=, =235=, 239,
      268, 282, 306, 333

  Clement XI, Pope (Albani), II. 131, 161
    Fénelon’s letter to, I. 69
    X, Pope (Altieri), I. 305
    XII, Pope (Orsini), I. 306
    his Bull of Catherine’s Canonization, I. 466

  Cogoleto, on Riviera, I. 318

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, II. 371

  Collino, Padre Serafino, C.R.L., I. 364, 366

  Colonna, Vittoria, I. 341, 342 _n._ 2

  Chrysostom, St. John, II. 225

  Columbus, Christopher, I. 94, 146

  Confucianism, II. 182, 183

  Confucius, II. 183

  Constance, Council of, I. 94, 342

  Constantinople, I. 94

  Contarini, Gaspar, Cardinal, I. 342 _n._ 2

  Contemplation and Social Christianity, II. =355-358=

  _Conversione_-booklet, I. 449, 464

  _Convertite_ the, Genoa, I. 327

  Corsica, I. 156

  Counter-reformation, I. 62

  Covenant, Book of the, I. 373

  Criticism, of the writings of Saints, how far allowed, I. 254 and foll.

  Croton, II. 188

  Crusading Age, the, II. 380

  Cynic school, I. 23

  Cyprian, St., II. 43

  Cyrenaic school, I. 23


  Dante, II. 165, 265

  Darwin, Charles, II. 271

  David, three stages of his biography, I. 373

  Delphi, II. 187

  Demeter, II. 97

  Democritus, II. 12

  Descartes, René, I. 7, 40, 317
    his apprehension of law, I. 40

  Determinism, its place in the spiritual life, II. 330, 331, =369-379=,
      385, 386

  Deuteronomy, Book of, Moses in, I. 373

  Developments, partial, of the Gospel-Ideal, II. 116-120

  de Vere, Aubrey, paraphrases the _Trattato_, I. 89

  _Dialogo_ of St. Catherine, see _Vita e Dottrina_

  Diano, Castello of, on Riviera, I. 308, 309

  _Dicchiarazione_-booklet, I. 464, and see _Vita_ (T)

  Dionysiac sect, II. 188

  Dionysius (Pseudo-) Areopagite, I. 163 _n._, 177, 256, 259, 266 _n._ 3;
      II. 63, 109, 131, 142, 205, 211, 288, 307, 313, 329, 333, 344, 366
    and Catherine, II. =90-101=
    Catherine’s direct knowledge of, II. 258, 259
    his conception of God’s general action, II. 91-94
      Deification, II. 99, 100
      the soul’s reaction, II. 94-99
    his influence in Middle Ages, II. 314-317
    Neo-Platonism in, II. 91-99, 294, 312, 313
    Platonism, in, II. 93, 94, 96, 97, 101

  Diotima, in Plato’s _Symposium_, St. Catherine compared to, I. 257

  Direction, spiritual, its advantages, II. 364

  Disciple, the Beloved, symbol of, I. 111

  Domenico, Monastero Nuovo di S., Genoa, I. 132, 168, 174, 451
    de Ponzo, Padre, O.S.F., I. 140 _n._ 4

  Dominicans, I. =63=, =64=, 253, 413, 464; II. 52, 53 _n._ 1, 316,
      317, 324

  Doria, Andrea, Admiral, I. 93, 104-146
    other members of family, I. 96, 376

  Draco, laws of, II. 87

  Drexel, Jeremias, S.J., I. 89

  Droysen, J. G., II. 271

  Dualism, as regards body, II. 121-129, 289, 298
    and question of Evil, II. =290-308=
    unconscious, in Kant’s Epistemology, II. 278


  Eberhard, Father, O.P., II. 52

  Ecclesiastes, II. 189

  Eckhart, Meister, his Deistic tendencies, II. 252
    on Evil as purely negative, II. 294
    on Godhead as distinct from God, II. 317, 318
    Father Denifle, on, II. 317

  Ecstasies, difficulty in testing them, I. 161, 162; II. 49-51
    of St. Catherine, I, 139-140, 226-229; II. 34

  Ecstasy, in Dionysius, II. 95, 96
    in Plotinus and Proclus, I. 24; II. 95, 96

  Ecstatics, their psycho-physical organisation, II. =40-47=

  Egypt, II. 185, 233

  Eleatic philosophers, II. 188

  Eleazar, Rabbi, II. 153

  Eleusinian Mysteries, II. 185, 187, 189

  Elijah, II. 268

  Eliot, George, II. 199

  Elohist, the, writer, and figure of Moses, I. 373

  Embriaco, Guilielmo, I. 100

  Emmerich, Anne Catherine, I. 334, 335

  Emotional-intuitive element in Religion, I. 8-10
    in the various Churches, I. 8-10
    in Christian Religion, its exclusiveness, I. =73-79=
    its danger and yet necessity, I. 6, 59, 60; II. =260-263=, =387-393=

  Emotional-intuitive personalities, movements and races, I. 6-7

  Empedocles, I. 11; II. 188

  _Energeia_, Aristotle’s great contribution, II. 250-251

  England, I. 62, 63, 65, 200; II. 371, 392

  Epictetus, II. 268

  Epicurean school, I. 23

  Epistles, Pastoral, II. 269

  Epopteia, the Eleusinian, II. 97

  Erasmus of Rotterdam, I. 311, 340; II. 119 _n._ 1

  Eschatology, Catherine’s simplifications of it, II. =211-218=

  Esparta, Father Martin, S.J., II. 144

  _Essays and Reviews_, I. 63

  Essenes, I. 61; II. 392

  Este, Eleonora d’, I. 341

  Estius, William, II. 63 _n._ 2

  Eucken, Prof. R., II. 63 _n._ 2, 282, 333, 370
    on Evil as positive, II. 296
    hyper-empirical processes as a _sine qua non_ for religion,
      II. 270, 271
    “universal” religion and “characteristic” religion, II. 296

  Euripides, II. 189

  Evangelicalism, I. 8-10; II. 392

  Evil denied by extreme Mysticism, II. 292-293
    its origin and Mysticism, II. =279-302=
    Mysticism and the warfare against, II. 302-308
    positive but not supreme, II. =291-297=
    positive conceptions of, II. 304, 305

  Experience not directly transmissible, I. 4-5
    of the human race, I. 6-7
    personal, its influence upon our convictions, I. 4

  Experiences, distinguished from their expression, and their analysis,
      II. =130-134=

  Experimental matter and theoretical form, II. 308-309

  Ezekiel, II. 189, 220, 268, 292, 332
    his ecstasies and psycho-physical peculiarities, II. =45-46=
    his individualistic trend, II. 189, 220


  Faber, Frederick, Father, I. 65

  Falconi, Juan, II. 146
    his _Alfabeto_ and _Lettera_ II. 143, 144

  Falconieri, St. Juliana, I. 306; II. 56

  Fasts, Catherine’s, II. 33
    end of, II. 148

  Fechner, G. T., II. 392

  Felicitas, St., I. 361

  Fénelon, I. 64, 68, 89; II. 138, 141, 142, 143, =160-162=, 174, 177
    his condemnation, the questions to which it applies, II. =165-169=
    on need of Metaphysics in Theology, II. 181
    on “Passivity,” II. 141, 142
    works of, distinction between them, II. 160, 161

  Ferrara, Duchess of (Renée de Valois), I. 340, 341

  Ferretto, Dottore Augusto, I. 125 _n._ 1, 152 _n._ 1, 155 _n._ 1,
      172 _n._ 2, 176 _n._ 1, 2; 203 _n._ 1, 213 _n._ 1, 378 _n._ 1,
      381 _n._ 1

  Feuerbach, Ludwig, II. 332

  Fichte, J. G., II. 271, 392

  Ficino Marsilio, his translation of Dionysius’ works, I. 259

  Fiesca, Adorna Caterinetta, _see_ Catherine, St.

  Fiesca, Francesca, I. 376, 377
    Maria, B., I. 176, 302
    Tommasa Suor, I. =131=, =132=, 143, 217, 259, 384, 387, 457, 464;
      II. 62, 175
      possible contributions to the _Vita_, by, I. 457
      death of, I. 381
      life and works (upon the Areopagite and the Apocalypse), I. 132

  Fieschi, Battista, I. 153, 154, 172
    Family, I. 95-97, 101, 157, 303
    Francesco, I. 125, 213, 315
    Giorgio, Cardinal, I. 102
    Giovanni, I. 97, 153, 154, 377, 378
      death of, I. 167 _n._ 3 (168), 172
      sons of, I. 167
      Cardinal, I. 125, 126
    Jacobo, I. 149 _n._ 1; 153, 167 _n._ 3 (168), 376, 384
      death of, I. 172
      his daughters, I. 167, 379
    Limbania, I. 97, 100, 105, 153, 167, 172, 186, 321, 379; II. 62
    Lorenzo, I. 97, 153, 154, 167 _n._ 3 (168), 172, 187, 215, 299,
      370, 377
      Cardinal, I. 302
    Luca, Cardinal, I. 96
    Maria, I. 153, 154, 167, 172
    Marietta, I. 146
    Napoleone, Cardinal, I. 102
    Nicolò, Cardinal, I. 96
    Roberto dei, I. 95

  Fieschi, Sinibaldo de, _see_ Innocent IV, Pope

  Fiesco, Emmanuele, I. 175

  Fisher, Bishop John, Blessed, I. 340

  Florence, Council of, II. 226
    decisions concerning Purgatory, II. 217, 242

  Fontana, Padre, Barnabite, II. 226

  France, I. 64, 94; II. 148

  Franchi, de’, Archbishop, I. 306
    Tobia dei, I. 102

  Francis, St., of Assisi, I. 8, 65, 389; II. 42, 47, 261
    his life and legend, I. 372

  Franciscans, I. =61=, =64=, 130, 140 _n._ 4, 385, 386, 389, 390;
      II. 105, 106, 109, 143, 144, 316, 317, 363

  Francis, St., de Sales, I. 88; II. 142, 143, 363

  Frank, Sebastian, I. 63

  Fregosi Family, Genoa, I. 96, 101

    Ottaviano, Doge, I. 327, 329, 330

  Friendship, St. Catherine’s attitude concerning, I. 225, 226

  Fust, Printer, I. 94


  Galilei, Galileo, I. 7

  Gamaliel, II. 63

  Ganymede, II. 187

  Gardner, Prof. P. and Miss A. on Confession and Direction,
      II. 364 _n._ 1

  Gemiluth Chasadim, II. 153

  General, its relation to Particular according to Greek philosophy,
      I. 10-25; II. =310-319=

  Geneva, I. 9

  Genoa, I. 96, 100-102, and _passim_
    position and climate, I. 93
    Republic of, I. 303, 305, 306, 449

  Genoese Republic, I. 203
    the people, their character, I. 93-94

  George, Bank of Saint, I. 125, 152, 153, 169, 172, 318, 326 _n._ 1,
      330, 365, 376, 379
      cartulary of the, I. 149 _n._ 1, 365, 379

  Germano, Borgo San, Genoa, I. 145 _n._ 1

  Germany, I. 62, 94; II. 370

  Geronimo of Genoa, Fra, O.P., I. 253, 413, 464

  Gerson, John, Chancellor of Paris, I. 62, 94, 342

  Gertrude, Saint, I. 64

  Giovo, Angelo L., Prot. Ap., I. 93, 172 _n._ 1, 208 _n._ 2, 297 _n._ 1,
      395, 396

  _Giuseppine_, Genoa, I. 327

  Giustiniano, Agostino, Bishop, his account of St. Catherine’s life,
      remains and biography, I. 382-384

  Gnosticism, approximations and antagonisms to, in Fourth Gospel, II. 81,
      82

  God as supremely concrete, II. 249, 255
    natural conformity between, and all rational creatures, I. 261
    hunger after, I. 263
    His illumination of souls, I. 270-271
    His way of winning souls, I. 271-272
    co-operation of the living, and the living soul, I. 73
    ever apprehended in His relation to ourselves, II. =169-170=
    as the _Actus Purus_, II. 80, 81, 131, 132
    the essence of things, I. 256, 266
    Unity and Trinity of, I. 66-67
    various conceptions concerning His relations with the human soul,
      II. 319-325
  God’s “anger” and offendedness, I. 292; II. 69, 70
    “ecstasy,” I. 260, 262, 352; II. 95, 96, =254=
    immanence, I. 276, 280; II. 280-284, =287-290=, 324, 325, 330,
      =336-340=
    “jealousy,” II. 353, 355
    transcendence, I. 276, 280

  Goethe, II. 229, 271, 327

  Gordon, Charles, General, I. 89; II. 271

  Görres, Joseph von, and question of true Mysticism, II. 315

  Gospels, pre-Pauline and Pauline, apprehensions in the, II. 117-118

  Gospels, the, _see_ John, St., Evangelist, and Synoptic Gospels

  Grace and Free Will, I. =69=, =70=; II. 141, 142, =174=

  Graces, Interior, I. 263, 265

  Grasso, Don Giacomo C., I. 299 _n._ 1

  Greece, II. 185, 191, 192

  Greeks, I. =10-25=, 151, 155, 246, 259; II. 83, 90-101, 131, 132,
      185-189, 205-211, 294, 310-314, 319, 320, 325-327, 333, 356-358,
      389

  Green, Thomas Hill, II. 371

  Gregory I, the Great, Pope, Saint, I. 64
    VII, Pope (Hildebrand), I. 64
    St., of Nazianzum, II. 166, 181
    of Nyssa, I. 61; II. 31, 166

  Grimm, Jacob, II. 271

  Grisell, Hartwell, I. 98 _n._ 1 (99)

  Grou, Père J. N., S.J., I. 64; II. 143, 363, 365
    combines deep mystical life and critical labours, II. =138=

  Gutenberg (John Gensfleisch), I. 94

  Guyon, Madame la Mothe, II. 138, 143, 175


  Hadrian, Emperor, II. 292
    V, Pope (Fieschi), I. 95
    VI, Pope (Dedel), I. 340

  Hamann, J. C., II. 371

  Hannibal, II. 272

  Heaven and Pure Love according to St. Catherine’s conception,
      I. =159-160=
    and Time; concreteness; and pain, II. =247-258=

  Hecker, Father Isaac, I. 89; II. 58

  Hedley, Bishop J. C., O.S.B., on the condemnation of Fènelon, II. 161

  Hegel, G. W. F., II. 271, 291, 296, 371

  Hegelian school, II. 269

  Hell, St. Catherine and, II. =218-230=
    disposition of souls in, II. 221-225
    endlessness of, II. 227-230
    fire of, II. 215-218
    mitigation of its pains, II. 225-227
    St. Catherine’s doctrine concerning, I. =281-283=

  Hellenism, I. =11-25=
    its qualities, I. 48
    its three religious elements, I. 60

  Henry VI, of England, I. 96
    VII, of England, I. 200, 201, and _n._ 2
    VIII, of England, I. 311

  Hensel, Luise, I. 334

  Heraclitus, I. 11, 12; II. 188
    his doctrine, I. 4, 11

  Herder, J. G., II. 327, 371

  Hermann, Prof. Wilhelm, II. 263, 264, 265
    impossible simplification of religion, II. =269-272=
    Panchristism of, II. 266

  Heroes, Cultus of, II. 187

  Hezekiah, II. 190

  Hildegard of Bingen, St., I. 64

  Hindooism, II. 273

  Historical element of Religion, its division, I. 85
    science, _see_ Science

  Hobbes, Thomas, I. 7

  Höffding, Prof. Harald, on religious “Agnosticism,” II. =287=, =288=

  Holtzmann, Prof. H., on retaining vivid sense both of determinist
      physical law and of libertarian spiritual life, II. =377=, =378=
    on Conditional Immortality, II. 229
    on Metaphysical factors in N. T. writings, II. =269=, =270=

  Holtzmann, Prof. H., on category of time, as secondary in man’s spiritual
      life, II. =247=, =248=

  Hume, David, II. 272

  Hus, John, I. 94

  Huxley, Prof. Thomas, II. 272

  Huysmans, J. K., II. 56

  Hylozoism, I. 12

  Hysteria, St. Catherine’s condition only superficially like, II. =22-27=
    three popular errors concerning, II. 22, 23


  Ignatius, of Antioch, St., I. 219 _n._ 2; II. 43, 133 _n._
    of Loyola, St., I. =68, 80=; II. 142

  Illingworth, Rev. J. B., II. 333

  Illuminists, I. 9

  Imagery, Battista Vernazza’s, I. 409, 432
    St. Catherine dominates her own imagery, I. 237, 238
    St. Catherine’s imagery, I. 266-268, 270, 277, 284-285, 287-293
      compared to B. Vernazzas, I. 409, 432

  Immanence, Divine, II. 287-290, =336-340=
    facts indicative of the, II. =280-284=
    in V. Battista Vernazza, I. 352; II. 289
      St. Catherine, I. 261-263; II. 347
      St. Paul, II. 70
      Plotinus, II. 92, 96
      St. Teresa, II. =324=, =325=
      St. Thomas, II. 288, 289, =337=, =338=
      recent thinkers, I. 270, 271, =339-340=

  Immortality, belief in, among great Eastern religions, II. 181-185
    its beginnings amongst Greeks and Jews, II. 185-191
    morbid, character of the Greek beginnings, II. 191-194
    philosophical and ethical difficulties of, II. =194-199=

  Imperiali, Cardinal, I. 305

  Incarnational doctrine, I. 369; II. 136, 139, 194, 195, 237, 238,
      =253-255=, 343, 344, =355-357=, 395, 396

  Incorruption of St. Catherine’s body, I. 302 and _n._ 2

  India, II. 183, 332

  Individual, the, its apparent power over the emotions and the will,
      I. 3-6;
    its power derived from expressing the Abiding and Personal,
      =I. 367-370=

  Individuality, right, of every soul, II. =255=, =256=

  Indulgences, St. Catherine’s assertions about them, I. 123-124
      authenticity of, I. 124
    St. Catherine’s attitude towards them, I. 124-125
    the Congregation of Rites on St. Catherine’s attitude towards
      indulgences, I. 125-126

  Innocent IV, Pope (Fieschi), I. 95
    XI. Pope (Odescalchi), I, 253, 305; II. 140, 144, 168 _n._ 1

  Inquisition, Roman, I. 341
    Spanish, I. 72; II. 380

  Intellectual element of Religion, its division, I. 85-86
    personalities, movements and races, I. 6-7
      gaps in, stopped by the Emotional-volitional element, I. 7

  Intercommunication, will-moving, between men, its conditions, I. 367-370

  Interiorization, the soul’s, of God, I. 263

  Intuitionists, Dutch-Westphalian Apocalyptic, I. 63; II. 392

  Invocation of Saints, by St. Catherine, I. 240
      her attitude concerning it, I. 126-127

  Isolation, moral and spiritual, I. 5-6

  Isaiah, I. 258; II. 189, 268

  Italy, I. 65, 94, 259, 311, 315, 341; II. 29, 270, 370
    Quietism in, II. 148


  Jacobi, F. H., II. 371

  Jacopone, da Todi, I. 130, 163 _n._, 177, 234, 235, 255, 258, 259, 275,
      386; II. 62, 63, 83, 205
    his _Lode_, their influence upon Catherine’s conceptions,
      II. =102-110=
    Neo-Platonism in, II. 104, 109
    Platonism in, II. 103-105, 109

  Jahvist and Elohist writings, Moses in, I. 373

  Jamblichus, I. 6

  James, Saint, _Epistle of_, II. 116, 269
    Prof. William, II. 6, 265
    on psychical normality and fruitfulness of formless recollection,
      II. =266=
    on pace of conversion, as primarily a temperamental matter, II. 30

  Janet, Pierre, Professor, II. 265
    on three popular errors concerning Hysteria, II. 22, 23
    hysterical peculiarities registered by him, II. 23-25

  Japan, II. 183

  Jean Baptiste de la Salle, St., I. 78

  Jean, François St. Regis, S.J., I. 306

  Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, II. 371

  Jeremiah, II. 189, 190, 268, 292, 332

  Jerome, St., I. 78

  Jesuits, I. =63=, =64=, 121; II. 129, 142, 144, 162, 170 _n._, 225, 226,
      241, 242, 245, 288, 307

  Jesus Christ, compared with Buddha and Mohamed, I. 71
    His Cross, its necessity for the soul’s fullest life, I. 82;
      II. 331, =360=, =361=, 395
    multiplicity within unity of His action and interests, I. =25-28=
    His place in teaching of V. Battista Vernazzo, I. 359, 360, 405,
      406, 413
    St. Catherine, I. 108, 109, 209, =239-241=, 360, 412, 413;
      II. 70-74, 77, 79-83, 85
    Joannine writings, II. 80, 81
    St. Paul, II. 71, 72, 76-79, 158, 159
    in conception of Prof. W. Hermann, II. 263-268, 332
    His teaching, primarily not moral, but religious, II. =274=
      on Pure Love, II. 153-158
      its Petrine, Pauline, Joannine presentations, II. 28-39

  Jews, II. =189-191=, 194, 213, 214, 220, 224, 233, 234, 239, 315, 316

  Joachim, Abbot, II. 391

  Job, II. 189

  John, St. Damascene, II. 225
    St., Evangelist; the Joannine writings, I. 223, 234, 235, 258, 353,
      374; II. 62, 63, 116, 202, 205, 253
    and organized Ecclesiastical Christianity, II. 83, 84
    and St. Paul, II. 80, 82, 85, 87, 88
    and the Synoptic Gospels, II. =81-86=, =116=, =117=
    and other systems, II. 79, 80, 81-83
    on God, Salvation, Sacraments, Last Things, compared with St.
      Catherine’s teachings, II. =84-90=

  John, St., on Pure Love, II. 160
    the Baptist, St., I. 65, 97
    chapel of, Cathedral, Genoa, I. 77, 161
    the Beheaded, Company of, I. 327, 328, 430
    XXII, Pope (Duèse), II. 318
    St., of the Cross, I. 67, 87, 180, 247; II. 50, 59, 142, 143, 146,
      147, 288, 306-308, 346, 366
    on right attachment, II. =353=
    on faith, as sole proportionate means of union with God, II. 343,
      348
    on a loving knowledge producible by God’s aid alone, II. 307
    on perception of God’s incomprehensibleness, II. =257=, =258=
    on the true test of perfection, II. =51=
    his helpfulness towards finding place for temper of determinist
      science within the spiritual life, II. 385
    his predominant theory requires continuous remembrance of his
      practice and occasional description of the soul’s other movement,
      II. =343-345=

  Josephus, II. 233

  Jowett, Benjamin, I. 63

  Judaism, II. 79
    its three elements, I. =61=; II. 388, 389, 392

  Judas Maccabaeus, II. 233, 292

  Juliana, Mother, of Norwich, on Eternal Punishment, II. 218, 219
    on negative character of Evil, II. 394
    and Direction, II. 363
    her Christian optimism, II. =305=, =306=

  Julianus, Monk, Pelagianizer, II. 293

  Julius II, Pope (Rovere), I. 94, 146, 155

  Justina, Benedictine, Congregation of St., Padua, I. 103 _n._ 1

  Justin, St., Martyr, II. 268, 333


  Kabbala, II. 392

  Kant, Immanuel, I. 43; II. 27, 42, 168, 179, 247, 261, 264, 275, 295, 370,
      371, 392
    deepens contrast between quantitative science and qualitative
      spiritual life, I. 43
    his defective religious sense, II. =260-262=
    on disinterested religion, II. 177-179
    his dualistic assumption in epistemology, II. 278
    on Evil as positive and radical, II. =295=, =296=
    on obscure apprehensions, II. 265

  Keble, Rev. John, I. 63

  Kempen, Thomas of, I. 62

  Kepler, Johann, I. 7; II. 27

  Kierkegaard Sören, his radical Asceticism, II. 345, 346, 353
    on God’s utter difference from Man, II. =287=, =288=
    on “Repetition,” II. 285

  Knowledge, its three constituents, I. 54-57


  Laberthonnière, Abbé L., _Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne_, 1905, 1906,
      II. 307

  Lallemant, Louis, Pére, S.J., I. 64; II. 365

  Lancisius, Nicolas, S.J., I. 89

  Laplace, P. S. de, II. 272

  Lateran, Fourth Council of, I. 120, 121

  Laud, William, Anglican Archbishop, I. 63

  Laurence, St., quarter of, Genoa, I. 377

  Lavagna, on Riviera, I. 95

  Lazaretto, Genoa, I. 332

  Lazzaro, S., Genoa, I. 406
    poor of, I. 145 _n._ 1

  Leibniz, I. 42, 113; II. 145, 177, 231, 261, 271, 282, 291
    on dim Presentations, II. =338=
    on Pure Love, II. =176=
    his share in development of modern scientific spirit, I. =42=, =43=

  Leo X (Medici), Pope, I. 259, 311, 321, 322
    _Bull “Exurge Domine,”_ I. 340, 448

  Lessing, G. E., II. 271, 327
    on soul’s incapacity for any unmixed emotion, II. =256=
    on Purgatory, II. 231

  Leucippus, I. 11

  Library, University, of Genoa, I. 171 _n._ 1, 172 _n._ 1

  Life, Spiritual, three stages of, I. =241-244=

  Liguria, I. 96

  Ligurians, I. 96

  Limbania, Beata, of Genoa, I. 97, 100

  Littré, Emil, II. 271

  Locke, John, II. 261

  Loisy, Alfred, Abbé, II. 360 _n._ 1

  Lombard, Peter, I. 120; II. 325 _n._ 3

  Lomellini family, Genoa, I. 327

  Lorenzo, Cathedral of S., Genoa, I. 97, 101, 320
    Piazza S., I. 97

  Lost, mitigation of sufferings of the, II. 225-227
    perversion, their total moral, II. =221-225=

  Lotze, Hermann, II. 271

  Louis XII, King of France, I. 340
    XIV, King of France, I. 305
    St., King of France, I. 361

  Love, of God and of oneself, I. 262-263
    Pure, I. 261
      according to St. Catherine’s conception, I. 159-160
      according to the New Testament, I. =153-159=
      acts, single, of, II. =163-164=
        pleasurableness that follows them, II. =170-172=
        relation of, to Contemplative Prayer, II. 172
      and its cognate problems, II. =169-174=
      Catherine’s, I. 140-141
      controversy concerning, II. =160-169=
      distinction from Quietism, II. 151-181
      exactingness of, I. 268-269
      Fénelon on, II. 161, 165
      the Joannine writings on, II. 160
      Kant on, II. 177
      Leibniz on, II. 176
      Our Lord’s teaching concerning, II. =153-158=
      St. Paul on, II. =158-160=
      three rules of, according to St. Catherine, I. 138-139
      Spinoza’s view concerning, II. 175, 176
      state of, II. =165-169=
      St. Thomas Aquinas on, II. =162-165=, 301

  Loyola, St. Ignatius of, I. 68, 80; II. 142

  Lucretius, II. 271

  Lugo, John Cardinal de, S.J., I. 121

  Lukardis, Venerable Sister, Cistercian, II. 52, 53, 54, 55, 58

  Luke, St., I. 351, 374
    _Acts of the Apostles_, I. 162, 374; II. 269
    _Gospel according to_, I. 223
      and St. Paul, II. 157, 158

  Lunga, Signora, I. 329

  Luther, I. 9, 62, 63, 95, 340, 412, 448; II. =117-119=, 263, 388, 392
    Theses of, I. 252, 311, =448=

  Lutheranism, I. 9; II. 388
    early stages of, I. 339-341

  Lyell, Sir Charles, II. 271


  Maccabean Heroes, I. 373
    resistance, I. 392

  Maccabees, First and Second Books of, the, the Maccabean heroes in,
      I. 373

  “Maestà” (triptych), I. =168=, 172, 181, 239, 298

  Magdalen, Mary, St., I. 110, 170

  Maldonatus, Juan, S.J., I. 64

  Malebranche, Nicholas, Père, I. 63; II. 331

  _Mandiletto_, Compagnia del, I. 154, 332

  Manichaeans, II. 221, 289

  Manichaeism, II. 230

  Manning, H. E., Cardinal, I. 89

  Manuscripts, Genoese, of the _Vita_, I. 93

  Manuscript “A” (University Library), I. 112 _n._ 1, 159 _n._ 1,
      162 _n._ 3 (163), 166, 188 _n._ 1, 197 _n._ 2, 214, 304, 434,
      435, 442, 451
    additions and variations of, as compared with Printed _Vita_,
      I. =384-394=
    and Argentina del Sale, I. 387
    characteristics of, I. 396
    authentic contributions of, I. =387-388=
    date and scribe of, I. 385
    modification from a tripartite to a quadripartite scheme,
      I. =390-394=

  Manuscript “B” (Archives of the Cathedral-chapter), I. 162 _n._ 3 (163),
      166, 188, 197 _n._ 2, 214, 396, 412, 415, 442
    dependence from MS. “A”, I. 394
    its divisions, I. 394-395
    its very primitive heading, I. =394=

  Manuscript “C” (University Library), differences from MSS. A and B,
      origin and attribution, I. 395-396

  “Maona” Company, Genoa, I. 151

  Marabotti, various, I. 156, 157

  Marabotto Cattaneo, Don, I. 90, 98 _n._ 1, 110, 117 _n._ 2, 118, 119,
      120, 121 _n._ 3, 135 _n._ 1, 140 _n._ 4, 147 _n._ 1, =156-159=,
      162 _n._ 3 (163), 166, 172, 173, 175, 176, =185=, =186=, 187, 191,
      193, 204 _n._ 1, 207, 213, 216, 217, 218, 225, 252, 256, 264, 296,
      299, 300, 301, 308, 309, 313, 314, 356, 371, 384, 390, 393, =415=,
      =416=, =419=, =421=, 431, 432, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 454, 455,
      =463=, =464=; II. 9, =15=, =17=, =25=, =26=
    attitude concerning Catherine, I. 218
    character of, I. =157=
    Catherine’s confessor, I. =157-158=
    contributions to _Vita_-proper, I. 392-394, =455-457=
    contributions to _Dicchiarazione_ (_Trattato_), I. 447-448
    death of, I. 381
    family, I. 156-157
    fate of, I. 310-311
    first relations with Catherine, I. 155-156
    influence and work concerning Catherine, I. 193-196
    misunderstandings, I. 120 _n._ 1
    scruples, I. 194-195
    scent-impression from his hand, I. 184-185
    will of, I. 381

  Marco del Sale, I. 127, 203, 388, 402
    story of his death, I. =169-171=

  Marcus Aurelius, Emperor, II. 268

  Maria delle Grazie, Santa, Genoa, church and convent of, I. =99-101=,
      132, 143, 170, 186, 319, 321, 325, 339, 365, 366 n. 2, =395=, 460;
      II. 205

  Maria delle Grazie Vecchia, S., church of, Genoa, I. 170

  Maria di Castello, church of S., Genoa, I. 100, 101, 366 _n._ 1

  Marie de l’Incarnation, the Ven., Ursuline, II. 141

  Mariola Bastarda, servant, I. 149, 153, 161, 162 _n._ 3 (163), 172, 175,
      176, 216, 217, 226, =310-313=, 379, 381, 384, 457

  Mark, Bishop of Ephesus, II. 225

  Mark, St., Gospel according to, I. 67, 257, 374

  Marriage, Catherine’s attitude concerning, I, 223-225; II. 124
    settlement, Catherine’s, I. 337
    Church teaching concerning, II. =128-129=

  Martineau, Dr. James, II. 329, 330

  Martin St., of Tours, I. 373

  Mary, Blessed Virgin, I. 99, 127, 168, 338, 426, 432
    (Tudor), Queen of England, I. 95
    (Stuart), Queen of Scots, I. 366

  Matthew, St., Gospel according to, I. 374
    Levi, Apostle, I. 374

  Maurice, Frederic Denison, II. 227

  Mazone, Giovanni, painter, I. 98 _n._ 1 (99)

  Mazzini, Giuseppe, I. 97

  Megaric School, I. 23

  Melanchthon, and his _Loci_, I. 341

  Menelaus, II. 186

  Mercier, D. Cardinal, _Critériologie Générale_, II. 7 _n._ 1

  Merovingian Saints, I. 373

  Metaphysics and Religion, II. 181, 262, =269-272=

  Micah, Prophet, II. 189

  Michael Angelo Buonarotti, I. 94

  Milan, Dukes of, I. 96

  Milano, Carlo da, painter, I. 98 _n._ 1 (99)

  Mill, John Stuart, I. 51; II. 227, 271

  Misericordia, Donne della, Genoa, I. 130, 131, 401, 402
    Office of, Genoa, I. 152, 154, 319

  Missione Urbana, Biblioteca della, Genoa, I. 98 _n._ 1, 125 _n._ 1,
      167 _n._ 3 (168), 171 _n._ 1 (172), 202 _n._ 2, 203 _n._ 1,
      208 _n._ 2, 3; 296 _n._ 1, 297 _n._ 1, 299 _n._ 1, 301 _n._ 1,
      308 _n._ 1, 309 _n._ 1, 312 _n._ 1, 313 _n._ 1, 381 _n._ 1, 2

  Mithraic movement, II. 392

  Mohamed, compared with Christ, I. 71

  Mohammedanism, II. 270, 388
    its three elements, I. =60-61=

  Mohammedans, II. 392

  Molinos, Miguel de, I. 253; II. 131 _n._ 1, 141, 145, 365
    his condemnation, its history, motives, limits, II. =136-148=
    _Guida Spirituale_, II. 140, 143, 144
    _Breve Trattato_, II. 144

  Moltke, Field-Marshal von, II. 271

  Mommsen, Theodor, II. 272

  Monasticism, the abiding needs met by, II. =352-355=

  Monica, St., I. 361

  Monism, I. 40; II. 294, 314, 326, =377-379=

  Montanism, II. 391

  Morality, relations to Mysticism, Philosophy and Religion, II. =259-275=

  More, Sir Thomas, Blessed, I. 62, 340; II. 129

  Moro, Dottore Tommaso, I. 149, 252, 337, 341, 358, 364, 414, 415; II. 83
    becomes a Calvinist, I. 341-342

  Moro, Dottore Tommaso, his letter to Battista Vernazza; and her letter
      to him, I. 341-342, =342-344=
    his return to the Catholic Church, I. 344
    Morone, Giovanni, Cardinal, I. 327, 342 _n._ 2

  Moses, I. =373=; II. 189, 268

  Mühlhausen, Father Henry of, O.P., II. 52

  Multiplicity, within every living Unity, I. =66-70=
    difficulty of its maintenance, I. 65, =70-77=; II. 264, =273-275=
    needful for all spiritual life, II. =150-152=, 283, 284, 343, 344

  Münsterberg, Prof. Hugo, II. 308, 370

  Mysteries, Eleusynian, I. 60; II. 97

  Mystical Element, its apparent worthlessness but essential importance,
      I. 6-10, 48, 49, 50-53, 58-65; II. =260-269=

  Mysticism and Pantheism, II. 325-340
    and the limits of human knowledge, II. 275-290
    and the question of Evil, II. 290-308
    and historical religion, II. 263-269
    Christian, II. 251, 252
    “exclusive” or pseudo-mysticism and “inclusive” or true mysticism,
      II. 283, =290-291=, 319
    ruinousness of exclusive, II. 304-308, =351-353=
    its place in complete Religion, II. =272-275=
    and the scientific habit of mind, II. =367-372=
    points on which it approaches Pantheism, II. =329-334=
    predominantly individualistic, II. 365-366
    tends to neglect the sensible, the successive, and spiritual
      self-excitation, II. =284-287=

  Mystic Saints, II. 142-143

  Mystics, I. 61, 247
    and spiritual Direction, II. 362-363
    their special weaknesses and strengths, II. =284-289=, =289-295=,
      297, 298, 301, 302, =343-346=, 385, 386


  Naples, I. 97
    Hospital in, I. 323, 329
    Kingdom of, I. 96
    Society for escorting culprits to death, I. 323-324

  Napoleon, II. 41-42, 133, 272

  Negri Family, Genoa, various members of, I. 97, 100, 377

  Nelson, Admiral Lord, II. 133

  Neo-Platonism, in general, I. =23-25=, 61
    its direct influence with St. Augustine, II. =212=, =213=, =248=,
      =293=
      Pseudo-Dionysius, II. =91-99=, 294, =312=, =313=
    Its influence, through Dionysius, with V. Battista Vernazza,
      I. =352-354=, 356, 358, 428
      St. Catherine, II. =91-99=, =123-126=, =234-239=, 294
      Jacopone da Todi, II. 104, 108, 109
      Medieval Mystics and Pantheists, II. 131, 147, 314, 315, 317,
      318, 323, 324
      St. Thomas Aquinas, II. =249-252=, 254, 294, 316, 317
    its truth, II. =92=, =248=
    its weaknesses and errors, II. 252, =287=, =288=, =293=, =294=,
      =351-353=

  Neri, St. Philip, I. 318
    Church of, Genoa, I. 102

  Nero, Emperor, II. 292

  Nervous system, late realization of, II. 4, 5

  “Nettezza,” I. 266 _n._ 3

  Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, I. 65, 78; II. 371
    _Dream of Gerontius_, I. 89; II. 245
    on Eternal Punishment, II. 230
    on Physical Science, its limited scope and its autonomy, II. =369=

  Newton, John, I. 63
    Sir Isaac, II. 27, 41, 42, 271

  Nicolas of Coes (Cusanus), Cardinal, I. 62, 78, 96; II. 131, 142, 282,
      291, 331

  Nicolas V, Pope (Parentucelli), I. 103 _n._ 1

  Nicolo in Boschelto, S., near Genoa, church and monastery of, I. 103,
      189, 213, 313, 319, 321, 325; II. 274

  Nietzsche, Friedrich, II. 274

  Nominalism, I. 61, 62

  Nonconformists, I. 63; II. 392

  Nonconformity, I. 8, 9

  Novara, Luca da, painter, I. 98 _n._ 1 (99)


  Occam, William of, O.S.F., I. 64

  Occhino, Bernardino, I. 341, 342

  Oldenberg, H., on _Nirvana_, II. 183-185

  Oratory (French), I. 63

  Orders, Catholic, religious, their three tendencies, I. 64

  Organic life, the successive stages of, II. 281, 304

  Origen, I. 6; II. 131, 142, 219, 239, 268
    his _Apocatastasis_--doctrine, II. 225, 228
    on fire of Hell, II. 216
    on an ameliorative Purgatory, II. 234-237

  Originality, treble, of St. Catherine, I. 246-249

  Orphic belief, II. 193
    influence, through Plato, upon Christian thought, II. 123, 124,
      =235-238=
    literature, II. 235
    mysteries, II. 188
    sect, II. 192


  Palaeologus, Michael, his confession of faith, II. 242

  Palladius, _Historia Monachorum_, I. 373

  Pammatone, Hospital of, I. =129-132=, 142, 145 _n._ 1, 148-153, 169,
      170, 213, 226, 300, 303, 310 _n._ 1, 311, 317, 325-327, 377, 380,
      395, 401, 407; II. 9, 10, 17, 27, 33, 62
    Books, of the, I. 143 _n._ 2, 208
    Cartulary, of, I. 202 _n._ 2, 313
    Church, of the, I. 98 _n._ 1, 152, 202 and _n._ 3, 296, 297 _n._ 1,
      300, 302, 309, 321, 332, 382
    House surgeon, of the, I. 200; II. 14
    Protectors, of the, I. 175, 187, 216, 297, 299, 307
    Book of the Acts of the, I. 172 _n._ 1, 175 _n._ 1

  Pantheism in Middle Ages, II. 314-318
    useful preliminary, of Inclusive Mystics, II. =329-334=
    escaped by full development of scientific habit within shallower
      level of a deep spiritual life, II. =374-386=
    in Spinoza, secret of its power, II. =326-329=
    ultimate, not Christian, nor generally religious, II. =334=, =335=

  Paracelsus, I. 7

  Paris, II. 389
    University of, I. 62

  Parker, Rev. James, I. 250, 266 _n._ 3

  Parmenides, I. 11; II. 188
    his doctrine, I. 11

  _Parousia_, the, II. 380

  Parpera, Giacinto, P., Oratorian, I. 92, 390

  Pascal, I. 78; II. 261, 331

  Pascoli, Giovanni, II. 199

  Passivity, _see_ Quietism

  Pattison, A. S. Pringle, II. 329, 330, 333, 370

  Paul, Saint, I. 111, 256, 265, 320, 363, 361, 373, 453; II. 43, 44, 47,
      80, 82, 87, 122, 124, 125, 129, 131, 142, 181, 186, 209, 237, 253,
      298, 324, 333, 356
    and Joannine writings, II. 84-88
    and Synoptic Gospels, II. 65, =122-125=, =157=, =158=
    anthropology of, II. =64-67=
    his conceptions of God, II. =69-71=
    of Spirit, II. =67-69=, =320-322=
    of reconciliation, justification and sanctification, II. 71-74
    ecstasies and psycho-physical peculiarities of, II. 43-44
    Epistles of, I. 162, 234, 235, 258, 353, 374; II. 62, 63, 116,
      202, 205
    Eschatology of, II. 76-79, =209=, =210=
    Judaic conceptions of, II. 69, 71, 72
    Platonic influences in, II. 64, =66=, =67=, 69, 122, 123
    and the Risen Christ, II. 71
    Sacramental teachings of, II. 75-76
    Social ethics of, II. =74-75=
    IV, Pope (Caraffa), I. 322, 327

  Pazzi, Maria Magdalena dei, St., II. 42, 56

  Peasants’ War, I. 10, 311, 340

  Personality, its purification, II. =377-387=
    Spiritual, II. =336-340=

  Petau, Denys, S.J., II. 225

  Peter, St., I. 67, 374
    Epistles of, II. 116

  Peters, Margarethe, Lutheran Quietist, II. 139

  Petrone, Igino, Prof., II. 282, 370

  Petrucci, Pietro M., Cardinal, II. 140, 141
    his writings, II. 144, 145

  Pharisees, I. 61, 68; II. 388

  Philo, I. 61; II. 63, 69, 93, 131, 196, 233
    and the Joannine writings, II. 80, 81
    and St. Paul, II. 69, 70

  Physicians, and St. Catherine, I. 200, 201, 208, 211, 212

  Physicists, the ancient Greek, II. 379

  Pico della Mirandoia, I. 7

  “Pietà,” picture, I. 181, 209, 239, 460; II. 28

  Pietism, Protestant, I. 10

  Pindar, II. 188, 189, 271

  Pius IV, Pope (Medici), I. 123
    VII, Pope (Chiaramonti), II. 226

  Plague, in Genoa, 1493, I. 143
    St. Catherine and the, I. 143-145
    Ettore Vernazza and the, I. 330-332

  Plant-life, Catherine’s sympathy for, I. 163, 164
    probably dimly conscious, II. 281, 304

  Plato, I. 12, 14, 19, 20, 21, 23, 28, 234, 257, 266 _n._ 3, 353;
      II. =66=, =124=, 185 _n._ 2, 186, 188, 192, 193, 196, 199, =202=,
      =203=, =204=, 249, 252, 253, 268, 282, 311, 357
    on amelioration by suffering, II. 208, 209
    his earlier and later beliefs as to place of contemplation in
      complete life, II. =306-309=
      Immortality, II. 186
    his abidingly fruitful combination of four characteristics,
      I. =17-19=
    on the Heavenly Eros, I. 17; II. 101, 203, 251
    God, how far concrete and ethical in, II. 311, 312
    on God’s goodness as cause of His framing this universe, I. 24;
      II. =334=
    on the Noûs, II. 319-320
    the Orphic strain in, II. 66, 67, =123-126=, 235, 236
    his five preformations of St. Catherine’s _Trattato_ teachings,
      II. =205-211=
    his _Republic_, Catherine’s purgatorial picturings compared with,
      II. 200, 201
    on the soul’s determinedness and liberty, II. 210, 211
    the soul’s nakedness, II. 209, 210
    the soul’s “places,” II. 205-207
    the soul’s plunge, II. 207, 208
    on Science and Mysticism, respectively, II. 368
    on _Thumos_, II. 203

  Plotinus, I. 6, 234, 257, 266 _n._ 3; II. 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 109, 120,
      196, 202, 204, 212, 213, 248, 268, 282, 298, 324, 326, 327, 329, 356
    his doctrine generally, I. =23-25=
    on Ecstasy, II. 322, 323
    places Godhead above all multiplicity, II. 312, 313
    on the Henad, the Noûs and the Soul, II. 322, 323
    and Spinoza, II. 325-328

  Plunge, voluntary of the Soul, I. 249, 250, =284=, =285=; II. 89, =207=,
      =208=, =385-386=

  Plutarch, II. 236

  Poor, Catherine’s love for the, I. 225-226

  Positivist, Epistemology, II. =275-283=

  Possession, Persons in state of, I. 161, 162 _n._ 3

  Possessions, Catherine’s, at her death, I. 297-299

  Poveri, Albergo dei, Genoa, I. 332

  Prà, near Genoa, I. 102, 103, 128, 129, 186, 313

  Prayers for the Dead, Jewish, II. 233-234

  Presbyterianism, II. 388

  Pre-Socratics, their doctrines, I. 11-12

  Priestly code, Moses in, I. 373

  Proclus, I. 234, 257; II. 91, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 109, 120, 196, 204,
      205, 211, 294, 356
    doctrine of, I. =23-25=; II. 313, 329, 356
    the Areopagite reproduces directly, not Plotinus but, II. 91,
      96-101, 205

  Prophets, Hebrew, I. 353

  Protestantism, II. 273
    continental, I. 8, =62=, =63=
    English, I. =8-9=
    German, I. 9

  Proverbs, Book of, Individual retribution in, II. 189

  Psalms, Book of, St. Catherine and, I. 258
    Future life in, II. 189-191
    David in, I. 373

  Psycho-physical and temperamental characteristics of St. Catherine during
      1447-1477, II. 28-32
    1477-1499, II. 32-40
    1497-1510, II. 9-21
    Aug. 10-27, 1510, I. 204-209
    occasions or expressions, not causes, of Catherine’s doctrine,
      I. 211, 212, 260; II. =14-20=

  Psycho-physical and temperamental characteristics of St. Catherine,
      inquiry into, difficulty of, II. 7-9
    organism, of St. Catherine, I. 176-181
    peculiarities of great men, II. 41, 42
    peculiarities of ecstatic saints, II. =42-47=, =52-56=
    abidingly sure spiritual tests of, applied by great mystical
      saints, II. =48-51=
    theory, defects and value of ancient, II. 3-6, 47, 48

  Purgatory, I. 190, 249, 382
    Alexandrine Fathers on, II. 234-236
    Catherine’s conceptions of, harbour two currents of thought, II. 232
    Catherine’s doctrine concerning, I. 179. 189, =283-294=;
      II. =230-246=
      the three sets of theological “corrections” of, traceable in
      Trattato’s text, I. =434-449=
    and the New Testament, II. 233, 239, 240
    initial experience and act of the soul in, I. 283-285
    subsequent state of the soul in, I. 285-294
    change of feeling among Protestant thinkers concerning, II. 230-232
    fire of, II. 215-218
    Judaeo-Roman conceptions of, II. 239-245
    Luther’s theses concerning, I. 311, 448
    Orphic conception and, II. 237, 238
    Platonic conception of, II. =206-211=
    a truly purging, and Suarez’ simple _Satisfactorium_, II. =240-245=

  “Purità,” I. 266 _n._ 3

  Puritan excesses, I. 10

  Pusey, Dr. Edward B., I. 63

  Pythagoras, II. 188, 192


  Quietism, II. 130, 131, 133, 135, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148,
      160, 168
    four aberrations of, II. =136-139=
    Rome’s condemnation of, II. 139-143
    distinct from Pure Love question, II. 152, 193
    four needs recognized by, II. =148-150=
    Rome’s alleged change of front concerning, II. 143-148


  Rabbinism, II. 63, 213, 214, 233, 234, 268, 388

  Rafael Sanzio, the painter, II. 132, 165

  Ranke, Leopold von, II. 271

  Rationalism, I. 8, 9; II. =260-263=, 275, 276, =382-387=, 389, 390

  Rauwenhoff, Prof. L. W. E., on Mysticism as a necessary form of
      religion, II. 268, 269

  Realism, I. 61, 62
    advantages of, II. =318-319=
    Pantheistic trend of strict, II. =314-319=

  Reason, goddess of, II. 389

  Redactor of _Conversione_-booklet, I. 464
    of _Dicchiarazione_-booklet, I. 464
    1 of _Vita_-proper, I. 162 _n._ 3, 188 _n._ 1, 372, 414
    2 of _Vita_-proper, I. 159, 162 _n._ 3, 372
    of _Vita-Dicchiarazione-Dialogo_, I. 464

  Reformation, Protestant, I. 62, 282, 339-341, 448; II. 232, 388

  Reform, Franciscan, I. 341

  Regio, Clerk Regular, criticizes Molinos, II. 144

  Reinach Salomon, on beginnings of Jewish prayers for the dead, II. 233,
      234

  Religion and morality, II. =272-275=
    apprehension by man of, I. =50-55=
      through sense and memory, I. 51
      through Mysticism, I. 53
      through speculation, I. 51-52
      apprehension by St. Catherine of, I. 247
    conflicts between its elements, I. =70-77=; II. 392-393
    difficulties of the subjective element of, II. 112-114
    disinterested, _see_ Love, Pure
    emotional-volitional element, its exclusiveness, I. 73-77
    historical, relations with Mysticism, II. 266-268
    institutional element, its exclusiveness, I. 71-73
    relation to Science of, I. 45-48; II. =367-386=
    Social, and Mysticism, II. 351-366
    Subjective and Objective elements of, II. 118-120, =263-266=, 270
    the three elements of, I. 50-55; II. =387-396=
      and their due proportions, II. 387-388
      continuous concomitance of, I. 53-55
      distribution among men of, I. 58-59
      distribution among religions of, I. 60-65
      multiplicity of each of them, I. 85, 86
      succession in history of, I. 59-60

  Religious temper, its longing for simplification, I. 65-66

  Renaissance, humanist, I. 62

  Renté, Baron de, I. 89

  Rhode, Erwin, on the Dionysian and Orphic movements, II. 191, 192
    on Plato’s later teaching as to contemplation, II. 356, 357

  Ribet, Abbé, and question as to true Mysticism, II. 305

  Riccordo, Padre, da Lucca, I. 136

  Richelieu, Cardinal, II. 41

  Rickert, H., his building up an Organon of the Historical Sciences,
      II. 370

  Rig-Veda, II. 183

  Rigorism among pre-Reformation devoted Catholics, I. 339-342
    touches of, in V. Battista Vernazza, I. 400-407, 422, 431
    St. Catherine, I. 342

  Rites, Sacred Congregation of, Rome, I. 126, 253, 305, 306

  Ritschl, Albrecht, and his school; their excessive reaction against
      Hegel, II. 263, 269

  Ritschlian school, II. 263

  Robespierre, II. 292

  Rodriguez, Alfonso, Fr., S.J., I. 89

  Romans, the ancient, I. 93; II. 185, 239, 240

  Rome, I. 98, 99 _n._ ; 156, 203, 305, 322; II. 185
    Arch-Hospital in, I. 322
    Church of, I. 8, 9, 10, 63; II. 273
    condemns some propositions of Fénelon, II. 160, 162
    condemns Quietism, II. =139-143=
    sack of, I. 311

  Rosmini, Antonio, I. 65, 78

  Rothe, Richard, II. 229, 332, 333

  Royce, Josiah, Professor, II. 370

  Ruysbroek, Johannes, Augustinian Canon-Regular, on the two-fold unity
      of our spirit with God, II. 323


  Sabatier, Paul, his critical labours in early Franciscan history, I. 372

  Saccheri, Notary, Genoa, I. 213

  Sacraments and St. Catherine:
    Baptism, I. 436; II. 76, 87
    Holy Eucharist, I. 113-116, 204, 208, 240, 241; II. 19, 87, 88
    Penance, I. 117-123
    Extreme Unction, I. 195, 197, 204, 206

  Sadducees, I. 61; II. 389

  Saint-Jure, de, S.J., I. 89

  Saint-Simon, Duc de, II. 271

  Saints, canonized, Catholic principles concerning the teaching of,
      I. 253-255
    invocation of, Catherine’s, I. 240

  Samaria, Woman of, I. 188, 189, 406; II. 17

  Samaritans, I. 27, 38

  Samuel, Books of, David in, I. 373

  Sandreau, Abbé A., his sober Mystical doctrine, II. 307

  Sauli, Cardinal, of Genoa, I. 322, 327

  Savonarola, Fra Girolamo, contrasted with Luther and Calvin, II. 118

  Sceptical schools, the, of ancient Greece, I. 23

  Schelling, W. S. von, II. 335, 371, 392

  Schiller, Friedrich, his “Fiesco,” I. 96

  Schism, Papal, I. 95

  Schlegel, Friedrich von, I. 89, 424; II. 371

  Schleiermacher, Friedrich, II. 231, 296, 371, 392

  Scholastics, the, I. 61, 62; II. 162-168, 214, 215, 217, 222-225, 236,
      242, 244, 245, =252-254=, 294, 301, =316=, =317=

  Schopenhauer, Arthur, II. 271, 291, 371
    his appreciation of Asceticism, II. 341, 342

  Schram, Dom, _Institutiones Theologiae Mysticae_, the Preternatural in,
      II. 305

  Schwab, J. B., on Mysticism requiring the Immanence of God, II. 325

  Science, character and motives of spirit’s occupation with, I. 40-43
    historical and physical sciences have each their specific method
      and level, II. 370, 382, 384
    historical, Religion’s present, but not ultimate, problem,
      II. =382-385=
    occupation with, three kinds, II. 381-382
    its place and function in man’s spiritual life, I. 43-45, 369, 370;
      II. =330=, =331=, =376=, =377=
    and Religion, each autonomous at its own level, I. 45-48; II. 368,
      369
    Religion and Metaphysics, I. 39-40
    Religion, and Philosophy, their respective functions, II. 369-372
    to be taken throughout life in a double sense and way, I. 45-47;
      II. =374-379=
    and Things, and Religious Doctrine and Sacraments, as variously
      deep, parallel helps and necessities in man’s spiritual life,
      II. =372-379=
    novelty of this position very limited, II. =379-381=, 385, 386

  “Scintilla,” experience of St Catherine, I. 187-190, 451; II. 19

  Scotland, I. 72

  Scott, Thomas, the Evangelical, I. 63
    Walter, Sir, his _Anne of Geierstein_, I. 96

  Scotus, John Duns, I. 64, 78
    Proclus’ indirect influence upon, II. 315, 316

  Scotus, John, Eriugena, II. 252
    Proclus’ influence upon, II. 314, 315

  Segneri, Paolo, S.J., I. 89; II. 144
    his critiques of Molinos, II. 144

  Self-knowledge, persistent in St. Catherine, I. 206-207; II. 14, 15

  Semeria, --, _Secoli Cristiani della Liguria_, I. 337

  Sensitiveness, extreme, of Catherine, I. 176-181

  Sensuousness, lack of, in Catherine, I. 246

  Shakespeare, _Romeo and Juliet_, I. 101

  Siegwart, Professor Christian, II. 282

  Sight, Catherine’s impressions connected with, I. 181

  Silvestro, Convent of S., Genoa, I. 457

  Simmel, Georg, Dr., on the specifically religious sense, II. 260, 261
    on religion as _requiring_ that man should seek his own beatitude,
      II. 179

  Simon, the Just, Rabbi, II. 153

  Simon, Richard, I. 63, 64

  Simplicity, causes of, Quietists’ inadequate analysis of, II. 134-136
    longing of religious temper for, I. 65-66
    all living, ever constituted in multiplicity, I. =66-70=

  Sin, and the body, according to St. Catherine, I. 230, 235, 236, 264,
      265, 298; II. =123-125=
      the Orphics, II. 192, 237
      St. Paul, II. 66, =68=, =69=, 122, 123
      Proclus, II. 98
      the Synoptists, II. 69, =122=
    as purely negative, in Ps.-Dionysius, Eckhart, Spinoza, II. 294
    as positive in Kant, Eucken, II. 294-296
    as positive and negative in St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Mother
      Juliana, II. 293, 294
      in St. Catherine, II. 235, 294
    original, according to Neo-Platonists, II. =298=
      St. Augustine, II. 298, 299
      Tridentine definition concerning, II. 300, 301
      difficulty in doctrine of, and Tennant’s interpretation,
      II. =298-300=
      value of Mystics’ attitude towards, II. =301=, =302=

  Sixtus IV. (Della Rovere), Pope, I. 94

  Sixtus V. (Peretti), Pope, I. 366

  Smell, Catherine’s impressions connected with, I. 180-181

  Socinianism, I. 9, 342; II. 390

  Socino, Fausto and Lelio, I. 63, 342

  Socrates, I. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 41, 60; II. 64, 186
    doctrine of, I. =12-13=

  Socratic school, I. 23

  Sophists, I. 12

  Sophocles, II. 189

  Sorbonne, the, Paris, II. 325 _n._ 3

  Soul, according to Aristotle, I. 20, 22
      Plato, I. 16, 17
      Plotinus, I. 24
    and the _Noûs_ in Eckhart, II. 323
      St. Paul, II. 64, 65
      Plotinus, II. 322, 323
    and the spirit in V. Battista, I. 353, 354, 399, 431
      St. Catherine, I. 189; II. 68
      St. Paul, II. =67-69=, =320-322=
      St. Teresa, II. 324
    the three forces of, I. 50-53; II. 387-396
    Immanence of God in the, II. 324-325, =336-338=
    life of, according to St. Catherine, I. 266-270
      usual succession in, I. 50-55
    its relation to its fellows, II. =353-355=

  Soul, its unity in multiplicity, I. 66

  Sources, literary of Catherine’s conceptions I. 254, 255, 258-260;
      II. =62-110=
      difficulties in their utilization, I. 251-253

  Space, and the soul and spirit, in St. Augustine, II. =212=, =213=
      St. Catherine. I. =277=, =278=; II. 69, 70, 77-81, =212=, =213=
      Plato, II. 205-207
      Plotinus, II. 248
      St. Thomas, II. 214
      recent writers, II. 247

  Spain, I. 62, 64, 72, 95, 96, 305; II. 388

  Spencer, Herbert, II. 271

  Speyer, Diet of, I. 340

  Spinola, Archbishop of Genoa, I. 305
    family, and members of, I. 96, 146, 175

  Spinoza, I. 7, 40-42; II. 169, 197, 198, 271, 296, 315, 326, 327, 375,
      376, 392
    compared with Plotinus, II. 325-328
    on disinterested Religion, II. 175, 176
    doctrine of, I. 41-43
    errors of his speculation, greatness of his intuitions, II. =376=,
      =377=
    greatest Pure Pantheist, II. 325-327
    Reality and Perfection identical for, II. 294

  Spirit, Christ as, II. 70, 84, =320=, =321=
    God as, II. 84, 322
    the soul as, _see_ under Soul
    visitations of the, their suddenness and vehemence, I. 105, 107;
      II. 30, 96, 97
    and Space, II. 212, 213
    and Time and Duration, II. =247-249=

  Stanley, Arthur P., Dean, I. 63

  Stein, Freiherr von, II. 271

  Stigmata “Spiritual,” legend of St. Catherine’s, the, I. 209 _n._ 1,
      210 _n._ 1, =452=, =453=

  Stoics, I. 23

  Strata, Battista, Notary, I. 155, 308, 379

  Strauss, David F., on Purgatory, II. 231

  Suarez, Francis, Father, S.J., I. 121; II. =241=

  Subconsciousness, late full recognition of, II. 47, 48, 265, =338-340=
    often described by Plotinus and St. Augustine, II. 91, 92, 248
    its deepest equivalent in St. Thomas’s “confused knowledge,”
      II. =288-289=, 337

  Sulze, Emile, fails to recognize necessity of Thing-element in religion,
      II. =372-374=

  Surin, Jean Joseph, S.J., I. 64, 89; II. 141

  Suso, Henry, Blessed, Dominican, I. 64, 94

  Sylvius, Francis, II. 162

  Synoptic Gospels and St. Catherine, II. 69, 84, 87, 89, =122-126=,
      153-158
    and Joannine writings, II. 84-88
    and St. Paul, II. 65, 122-125, =157-158=
    on forgiveness as of single acts, II. 245, 246
    God’s direct interest in world, II. =254=, =255=
    Pure Love, II. =153-158=
    present most manifold picture of Jesus’ life and teaching,
      II. =116-120=


  Tacitus, II. 271

  Taigi, Anna Maria, Venerable, I. 78

  Tarsus, II. 63, 66

  Tasso, Torquato, I. 341

  Taste, Catherine’s impressions connected with, I. 180

  Tauler, John, Dominican, I. 64, 94

  Taylor, Prof. A. E., his criticism of Kant’s doctrine of Pure Love,
      II. 179-180

  Tennant, Rev. F. R., on Original Sin, II. 299, 300

  Tennyson, Alfred, I. 112; II. 227, 247

  Teresa, St., I. 64, 68, 87, 247; II. 5, 27 _n._ 1, 42, 45, 47, 48, 59,
      137, 142, 143, 336, 363, 365
    and Direction, II. 363
    on occupation with our Lord’s Humanity, II. 169, =365=
    God’s immanence in the soul, II. =324=, =325=
    nerves and muscles, II. 5
    her psycho-physical peculiarities, II. notes to pp. 14-18, 20, 21,
      27, 43, 44
    on soul and spirit, II. 324
    her tests for locutions and visions, =II. 47=, =50=
    and social Religion, II. 365

  Tertullian, on St. Paul’s “thorn,” “stake” in the flesh, II. 43
    prayer for the dead, II. 233, 234

  Thales, I. 12

  Theatines, I. 322, 340

  Thibet, II. 392

  Thing-element, its necessity in Religion, I. 245-247; II. =372-374=,
      =377-381=, 385, 386

  Thing, three relations of, with thought. II. =374-377=

  Thobia, I. 129, 151, 153, 154, 223, 225, 378, 380; II. 26, 29, 169, 172

  Thobia’s Mother, I. 151, 153, 154, 172, 176, 225; II. 29

  Thomas, St., Aquinas, I. 7, 61, 78, 120, 121; II. 142, 162, 181, 217,
      218, 245, 253, 288, 315, 317, 325, 333
    on God as _Actus Purus_, II. 132, 250
    on God’s Being as distinct from His Essence, II. 316, 317
    on the soul’s direct dim knowledge of God, II. =288=, =289=, 337
    on obligation of Confession, I. 120
    on the dispositions of the Lost, II. 222, 223
    on the fire of Purgatory and Hell, II. 217
    on God’s _ecstacy_ and creative acts, as His supreme
      self-expression, II. =252-254=
    on every soul’s individuality, II. =255=, =256=
    on Pure Love, II. =162-168=
    on man’s natural exigency of the vision of God, II. =337=, =338=
    on term “person” as applicable to God, II. 257, 258
    on the other-world “places,” II. 214
    on Purgatory as truly purgative, II. 244, 245
    on simultaneity of soul’s vision of all things in future life,
      II. 248
    St., of Canterbury, I. 372

  Thomassin, Louis, Oratorian, I. 64

  Thucydides, II. 271

  Tiele, C. P., Professor, on the Infinite as present within man, II. 268,
      =339=, =340=
    necessity for Ecclesiastical Institutions, II. 352
    for metaphysical convictions in Religion, II. 270

  Tobit, Book of, the Eminent Good Works in, II. 154

  Toleto, Gaspare, Father, Inquisitor, I. 464

  Toqueville, Alexis de, II. 271

  Touch, St. Catherine’s impressions connected with, I. 178-180

  _Tracts for the Times_, I. 63

  Transcendence of God, attitude towards, of V. Battista Vennazza, II. 289
    St. Catherine, I. 276, 280; II. =346=, =347=

  Transcendence of God, attitude towards, of St. John of the Cross,
      II. =257=, =258=, 343-345
    Sören Kierkegaard, II. 287, 288, =345=, =346=
    St. Thomas, II. =257=
    recent thinkers, II. 270, 271, 339, 340, =358=, =359=

  Translations of St. Catherine’s relics, I. 300-302, 381 _n._

  _Trattato_, see _Vita_ (_Dic._ or _T._).

  Trendelenburg, Adolf, on blind Force and conscious Thought, their only
      possible relations, II. =375=

  Trent, Council of, on abuses connected with purgatorial doctrines and
      practices, II. 232
    on Purgatory, II. =242=
    on Original Sin, II. 300

  Troeltsch, Prof. Ernst, II. 282, 333, 370
    on Christianity as Inner-worldly and Super-worldly, II. =358-360=
    abiding individuality of all things historical, II. 256, 257
    Kant’s actual conceptions as more religious than his theory of
      religion, II. 261, 262
    the testimony involved in our religious requirements, II. =339=

  Tyrrell, Rev. G., on the possibly _Totum-Simul_ consciousness of the
      Lost, II. 230
    the relations between love of God and love of creatures,
      II. 354, 355
    purely natural religion, what might have been but never was,
      II. =288=


  Unity, constituted by multiplicity, I. =66-70=
    needful for all spiritual life, II. 150

  Universe, conditions of its power upon human will, I. 3

  _Upanishads_, the, II. 183

  Upton, Prof., II. 330

  Urban VIII, Pope (Barberini), I. 98, 304
    Bull on Cultus of Saints, I. 98 _n._ i (99), 304, 305


  Varni, Santo, sculptor, I. 332

  Vaughan, Diana, II. 305

  Venice, I. 93, 203
    Hospital in, I. 322

  Vergil, II. 271
    on the burning out of the soul’s stains, II. 236

  Vernaccia (Vernazza) Family, I. 146

  Vernazza, Venerable Battista (Tommasa), I. 91, 117 _n._ 1, 146 _n._ 2,
      217, 252, 253, 316, 321, 322, 325, 327 _n._ 1, 328, 329, 330, 331,
      372, 381, 384, 395, 403, 407, 410, 413, 414, 429, 432, 447, 451,
      453, 454, 457, 461, 462; II. 27, 38 _n._ 1, 48
    and Tommaso Moro, I. 339-344
    author of Dialogo I, I. =407-410=
      II, III, I. =429-433=
      _Preface_ (ancient) of _Vita_ (probably), I. 416
    birth of, I. 419
    character of, I. 365, 366
    death of, I. =366=, =367=, 366 _n._ 2, 381
    _Colloquies_, I. =344-358=, 416, 433
      compared with Catherine’s doctrine, I. 346-358
      the _Dialogo_, I. 399, 403, 408, 431
    compared to St. Catherine and E. Vernazza, I. 336, 337
    _Dialogo della Beata Caterina_ based practically throughout upon
      _Vita-Dicchiarazione_ yet shows everywhere thought, feeling, aims,
      information of, I. 397-410, =417-433=
    _Letters of_, I. 345
      to Donna Anguisola, I. 359-364
      to Padre Collino (1), I. 316-318, 321-324, 327-331 (2), I. 366
      to Tommaso Moro, I. 342-344
    portrait, I. 366 _n._ 2
    final redactor of _Vita_, _Dicchiarazione_, _Dialogo_, I. 464
    her youth, I. 337-339
    her writings, I. 344, 345
    Catetta (Daniela), I. 166, 321, 325, 339
    Ettore, I. 90, 91, 105 _n._ 1, 114 _n._ 2, 121 _n._ 3, 127,
      140 _n._ 4, 145 _n._ 1, 147 _n._ 1, 150 _n._ 1, 154, 159, 166,
      167, 169, 174, 175, 183 _n._ 1, 187, 191, 193, 202, 213, 216,
      217, 246, 252, 256, 279, 299, 308, 337, 338, 339, 340, 371, 384,
      415, 430, 444, 449, 450, 451, 456, 463, 464; II. 9, 16, 26, 27, 29
    his philanthropic work, its character, I. 319-321, 323, 327
      its effects, I. 364, 365
      in Genoa, _Chronici_, I. 173, 316, 317
        Lazaretto, I. 330, 331
        _Mandiletto_, I. 154, 332
        Prisons, I. 327-329
    his wills, ii, I. 318-321
      iii, I. 166, =324-327=
    Ven. Battista and, in general, I. 314-316, 336, 337
      in June 1524, I. =330-332=
      traces of their intercourse in _Dialogo_, I. =406=, =407=,
      =429-431=
    St. Catherine and his absence from her death-bed, I. 202-204, 226
    his authorization to write about her, I. =191-192=
    her influence with him, I. 314, 315, 320, 321, 331, 332
    his influence with her, I. 159-161, 191-193
      upon her memory, I. 145, 146, 453-457
    their mutual likeness and unlikeness, I. 314, 315
    his character, I. =146=, =147=
    his contributions to St. Catherine’s biography in _Vita_-proper,
      I. 166, =453-455=, 464
      in _Trattato_, I. 447, 448
        their general character, I. 147
    daughters of, I. 149, 166, 299, 300, 325, 326
    his death, I. =331=, 381
    his posthumous fame, its unlikeness to Catherine’s, I. 332, 333
    Leo X, Pope, and, I. 322
    Lunga, Señora, and, I. 329, 330
    Manuscript C wrongly attributed to, I. 395, 396
    married life of, I. 316-318, 330
    monuments to, I. 332, 333
    Ginevrina (Maria Archangela), I. 166, 325, 326, 339
    Tommasa, _see_ Vernazza Battista
    village, I. 318

  Vernazzi, clan of, I. 318, 320

  Vincent, St., de Paul, I. 306

  Vinci, Leonardo da, School of, I. 98 _n._ 1 (99)

  Visions of St. Catherine’s, I. 181

  _Vita e Dottrina di S. Caterina_, as in Thirteenth, Ninth Genoese, ed.,
      _Sordi Muti_, and its three parts, _Vita_-proper, _Dicchiarazione_
      or _Trattato_, _Dialogo_, I. 90, 91
    its additions to MSS. A and B in _Vita_-proper, I. 389, 390, 394,
      451-453
      in _Trattato_, I. 442
      of entire _Dialogo_ I. 389, 395
    its additions to MS. C in _Vita_-proper, I. 396
      of _Dialogo_, Parts II, III, I. 396, 397
      to MSS. A, B, C of Title, Approbation, Preface, Subscription,
      I. 411-417
    its changes since first printed edition, 1551, I. 464-466
    final redaction for printing of entire corpus, I. 464
      booklets, evidence for _Conversione-_, _Dicchiarazione-_,
      _Passione-_, in about 1512, I. 394, 434, =447-449=, 450, 451, 464
        the _Dialogo_, Part I, I. 396, 397
          its author (Battista Vernazza), I. 407, 410
          compared with _Vita_-proper, I. =399-407=
          its authentic contributions, I. 406, 407
        the _Dialogo_, Parts II, III, their author and character,
      I. 418, 419, =427-433=
        compared with _Vita_-proper, I. 419-424, =424-427=
        the _Trattato_ (_Dicchiarazione_), earlier and later part
      of, I. 439, 440
        earlier part, its theological glosses, I. =440-442=
        later part, its secondary expansions, I. =435-440=
        upbuilding of whole, and authorship (predominantly Ettore
      Vernazza), I. 447-449
        the _Vita_-proper, original tripartite scheme of, become
      quadripartite, I. =390-394=
        its great divisions and secondary constituents, I. 453
        age and authorship of retained constituents, I. =453-463=
        three tests for discriminating authentic from secondary
      sayings, I. 462, 463

  Volkelt, Johannes, Prof., on immanental inter-relatedness of History and
      Philosophy, II. =279=, =280=
    dualism in Kant’s Epistemology, II. 278
    fallacy of Positivistic Epistemology, II. =275-278=
    ultimate Power in world, alive in analogy to a willing individual,
      II. 277, 278


  Wagner, Richard, II. 165

  Waldensian movement, II. 391

  Ward, James, Prof., II. 265, 287, 370
    on receptivity as activity; experience as wider than knowledge; and
      our own experience, the only one immediately accessible to us,
      II. =277-280=

  Weinel, Heinrich, on visions and psycho-physical peculiarities in
      sub-apostolic times, II. 42, 43, 308

  White, Edward, on Conditional Immortality, II. 229 _n._ 2

  Will, the things and conditions that move the human, I. 3, 367-370;
      II. 375-385

  Wilson, Archdeacon Andrew, on the Fall of Man, II. 299-300

  Windelband, W., Prof., on religion’s various elements including
      metaphysical life, II. 262

  Wisdom, Book of, I. 61
    attitude towards the body in, and St. Paul, I. 234; II. 227

  Wittenberg, I. 9, 95, 311

  Wordsworth, William, II. 271

  Wycliffe, I. 94


  Xenophon, I. 28

  Ximenes, Cardinal Francis, O.S.F., I. 62


  Youth, its apprehension of religion, I. 51-52


  Zaccaria, F. A., S.J., II. 225 _n._ 2

  Zedakah, II. 153

  Zeller, Edward, _Philosophie der Griechen_, I. 11 _n._ 1; II. 320

  Zeus, II. 93, 187

  Zwingli, I. 62, 63; II. 119 _n._ 1, 388, 392

  Zwinglianism, I. 9


II. OF LITERARY REFERENCES

(_The more general literary references given under names of authors in
Part I_)


HOLY SCRIPTURE--OLD TESTAMENT

  Daniel ix. 24; I. 408
    xii. 2; II. 190

  Ecclesiasticus vii. 17; II. 224

  Ezekiel i. 1-28, etc.; II. 45 _n._
    iv. 1-3, 7, etc.; II. 45 _n._
    iv. 4-8; II. 45, 46 _n._
    viii. i-ix. 11, etc.; II. 45 _n._
    viii. 16, xi. 13, xxiv. 1; II. 45 _n._

  Genesis i. 5, iii. 18; II. 89
    xv. 1; I. 348

  Isaiah vi. 3; I. 352
    xxvi. 1-19; II. 190
    xliii. 10, xliv. 1, xlviii. 10; I. 349
    xlix. 6; I. 351

  Job xix. 25, 26; II. 190

  Maccabees, Book of, ii. 43-45; II. 233

  Psalms lxxiii. (lxxii.) 25; II. 159
    ci. 13; I. 362
    ciii. 13, 14; II. 69
    cix. 31; I. 358

  Solomon, Cant. v. 10; I. 349
    Prov. viii. 31; I. 360
    Wisd. of., ix. 15; II. 66, 123

  Tobit, Book of, xii. 8, 9; II. 154


NEW TESTAMENT

  Acts of the Apostles xxvi. 9-10; I. 33

  John, St., Apocalypse, v. 11; I. 349
    vii. 9; II. 254
    1 Ep., i. 1; I. 36
      i. 2; I. 37
      iii. 2; II. 82, 257
      iii. 14; I. 39; II. 89
      v. 10; I. 37
      v. 20; I. 39; II. 84
    Gospel according to, i. 4, 5; II. 82
      i. 9-11; II. 79
      i. 14; I. 36
      i. 17; II. 79
      i. 18; I. 358; II. 81
      i. 29; II. 85
      ii. 11; I. 37; II. 86
      ii. 23, 24; I. 38
      iii. 2-5; I. 38
      iii. 16; II. 79-80, 83
      iii. 18; II. 89
      iii. 19; II. 82
      iii. 21; I. 37; II. 79-83, 82
      iii. 31; II. 82
      iii. 34; II. 84
      iii. 36; I. 39
      iv. 18; II. 160
      iv. 24; I. 37; II. 80, 88
      iv. 31; II. 81
      iv. 42; I. 38; II. 79-80
      v. 6; I. 38
      v. 24; II. 88-89, 90
      v. 28-29; I. 36
      vi. 27; II. 88
      vi. 35; I. 37; II. 90
      vi. 44; I. 37; II. 87
      vi. 61, 63; II. 88
      vi. 69; II. 86, 88
      viii. 21; II. 80
      viii. 23; II. 81
      viii. 44; II. 80
      ix. 41; II. 80
      x. 8; II. 80
      x. 38; I. 360
      xiii. 23; I. 358
      xiv. 6; I. 37
      xiv. 10; II. 80
      xiv. 11; I. 38
      xiv. 20-21; I. 39
      xiv. 23; I. 360
      xvii. 1-13; I. 210 _n._ 1
      xvii. 3; II. 82, 90
      xvii. 6; II. 90
      xvii. 8, etc.; II. 82
      xvii. 18; I. 37
      xvii. 21; II. 83
      xviii. 9; I. 362
      xviii. 37; II. 79
      xix. 24; II. 83
      xx. 8; II. 86
      xx. 29; I. 38; II. 86

  Luke, St., Gospel according to, ii. 32; I. 351
    vi. 33, 34; II. 158
    vi. 38; II. 155
    vii. 47; II. 157
    ix. 23-24; I. 31
    ix. 51-56; I. 27-28
    x. 7; II. 154
    xii. 6; II. 254
    xiv. 27; I. 31
    xvi. 23; I. 358
    xvii. 10; II. 157
    xvii. 33; I. 31
    xx. 34-38; I. 32
    xxii. 3-11; I. 33
    xxii. 15-19; I. 31
    xxvi. 9-18; I. 33

  Mark, St., Gospel according to, i. 13; II. 122
    iv. 27-28; I. 30
    vii. 14, 15; I. 31
    viii. 34; I. 31
    ix. 30-32;  I. 27-28
    ix. 35-36; I. 32
    ix. 38-41 (& Par.); II. 84
    ix. 41; II. 154
    x. 13-16; I. 27-28
    x. 14, 15; I. 32
    x. 21; II. 154
    x. 23; II. 155
    xii. 28-34 (& Par.); II. 254
    xii. 36; II. 322
    xiv. 22-25; I. 31
    xiv. 25; II. 254
    xiv. 38 (& Par.); II. 122

  Matth., St., Gospel according to, iii. 13-19; I. 31
    v. 3; I. 31
    v. 5; II. 155
    v. 7; II. 154
    v. 8; I. 31; II. 154, 155
    v. 12; II. 154
    v. 17; I. 30
    v. 23; I. 30
    v. 44, 45, 48; II. 157
    vi. 4, 6; II. 154
    vi. 16; I. 30
    vi. 14, 18, 20; II. 154
    vi. 23, 26, 28; I. 30
    vi. 33; II. 157
    x. 29; II. 254
    xii. 24-27; I. 32
    xiii. 30-32; II. 122
    xvi. 24, 25; I. 31
    xvii. 12-14; II. 255
    xviii. 32; II. 154
    xxii. 3; II. 155
    xxii. 11; II. 156
    xxii. 12; II. 155-156
    xxii. 29-33; I. 32
    xxiv. 47; II. 155
    xxv. 10; II. 254
    xxv. 14-30; II. 157
    xxv. 21; II. 155
    xxvi. 26-29; I. 31
    xxxiv. 42; II. 122
    xxxvi. 51, 52; II. 27-28

  Paul, St., Ep. to Col. i. 15-17; I. 35
      i. 26; I. 34
      ii. 2; I. 34
      iii. 1; I. 35
      iii. 3-4; I. 34
      iii. 4; II. 322
    1 Ep. to Cor. i. 18; I. 33
      i. 22-25; I. 33
      ii. 6; I. 34
      ii. 10; I. 34
      ii. 11; I. 34; II. 321
      ii. 14, 15; I. 33; II. 321
      iii. 1; I. 34
      iii. 10-15; II. 239
      v. 5; II. 68
      v. 11; II. 67
      vi. 19; II. 72, 321
      vii. 7; II. 43
      x. 3; II. 76
      x. 4; I. 35
      xi. 7; II. 75
      xi. 11; I. 32; II. 75
      xi. 23, 26; I. 32
      xii.; I. 33; II. 65-66
      xiii. 7; II. 160
      xiv.; I. 33
      xiv. 25; II. 65
      xv. 3-8; I. 32
      xv. 19, 32; II. 158
      xv. 35, 53; II. 64
    2 Ep. to Cor. i. 22; II. 65
      ii. 4; II. 65
      iii. 17; II. 70, 88
      iii. 18; I. 35
      iv. 4; II. 68, 321
      iv. 16; II. 64, 159
      v. 1-4; II. 66, 77, 123
      v. 4; II. 66
      v. 11; II. 73
      vi. 14; II. 73, 77
      vii. 1; II. 68, 73, 321
      x. 10; II. 43
      xii. 9; II. 159
      xiii. 4; II. 78
      xviii. 7-8; II. 43
    Ep. to Eph. i. 10; I. 35
      i. 18; II. 65
      iii. 5; I. 35
      iv. 13; I. 35
    Ep. to Gal. ii. 20; I. 35; II. 322
      iv. 6; II. 65
      iv. 14-15; II. 43
      iv. 30; II. 160
    Ep. to Phil. i. 23; II. 77
      iii. 12; II. 257
      iv. 1; I. 361
    Ep. to Rom. ii. 5; II. 65
      ii. 6; II. 158
      iii.-xi.; I. 32
      v. 5; I. 360; II. 65, 72
      v. 15-19; I. 352
      vi. 6, 8; I. 35
      vi. 12-13; II. 68, 73
      vi. 14; II. 68-69
      vii. 18; II. 123
      vii. 23; II. 65, 68
      vii. 24; II. 123
      viii. 4-13; II. 68-69
      viii. 10; II. 68
      viii. 11; I. 35; II. 321
      viii. 16; II. 68
      viii. 19; II. 74
      viii. 31; II. 159
      viii. 35, 37-39; II. 159
      x. 9; II. 65
      xii. 2; II. 65
      xiii. 11-14; II. 73
      xiv. 14-20; II. 74
    1 Ep. to Thess. iv. 15, 16; II. 77
      v. 4-8; II. 73

  Peter, St., 2 Ep. of, iii. 12; II. 239


  Abbott, Dr. E. A., _St. Thomas of Canterbury, his Death and Miracles_,
      2 vols., 1898; I. 372

  Alizieri, Federico, “Vita di Suor Tommasa Fieschi,” in _Atti della Soc.
      di Storia Patria_, Vol. VIII., 1868; II. 381 _n._ 2

  Ambrose, St., _In Lucam_, VII. 205; II. 216

  Anrich, G., “Clemens und Origenes als Begründer, etc.,” in _Theol.
      Abhandlungen für H. J. Holtzmann_, 1892; II. 236, 244 _n._ 1

  Aristotle, _de Anima_, III. 5, 430_a_; II. 320
    _Gen. animal_, II. 3, 736_b_; II. 320
    _Metaph._ VII. 1072_b_, IX. 1074_b_; II. 334
      XII. 7-10; II. 320
      XII. 1072_b_-1074_b_; II. 251

  Pseudo-Aristotle, _Liber de Causis_, ed. Bardenhewer, 1882, §§ 2, 4;
      II. 315

  Arnold, Matthew, _Culture and Anarchy_, 1869; II. 57

  Atzberger, Dr. L., continuation of Dr. J. Scheeben’s _Dogmatik_,
      Vol. IV., 1903; II. 227

  Augustine, St., ed. Ben. Reprint Gaume, _Confessiones_, I. c. 2; II. 213
      VI. c. 15, VII. c. 12, VIII. cc. 5, 11; II. 293
      X. c. 26, XIII. c. 17; II. 213
      XI. cc. 11, 20; II. 248
      XI. c. 23 § 1; II. 306
      XI. c. 27 § 3; II. 248
    _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xxi. c. 26 _n._ 4; II. 211
    _Contra Julianum_, IV. 58 (Vol. X. col. 1073 _c_); II. 128
    _De Nuptiis et concupisc._, I. 8 (Vol. X. col. 613 _a_); II. 128
      I. 23; II. 293
    _De Octo Dulcitii quaest._, 12, 13; II. 217, 244
    _De Trinitate_, L. XV. c. 16; II. 248
    _Enarratio_ in Ps. xxxvi. § i _n._ 10; II. 211
    _Enchiridion_, CX. CXII; II. 225
    _Liber de Fide_, I. 27, 29; II. 317
    _Opus imperfectum_, III. 56; II. 293
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      Vol. I., Anhang; II. 274
    Vol. II., bk. iv., ch. 48; II. 342

  Schwab, J. B., _Johannes Gerson_, 1858; II. 325

  Schweizer, Albert, _Die Religions-Philosophie Kants_; 1899, II. 177

  Scotus, John, Eriugena, _De divisione naturae_; II. 314
    _De rerum principio_; II. 316, 317

  Seneca, L. Annaeus, _Natur. Quaest._, Bk. III. ch. xx. 7, ch. xxx. 7, 8;
      II. 240

  Seth, James, _A Study of Ethical Principles_, 1894; II. 57 _n._ 1,
      180 _n._ 3

  Simmel, Prof. Georg, _Kant_, 1904; II. 179, 260, 261

  Smith, W. Robertson, Prof., _The Prophets of Israel_, ed. 1882; II. 267

  Spinoza, ed. Van Vloten and Land, 1895, _Ethica_, Part II., Defin.
      vi., 75; II. 294
      Part IV., Prop. lxiv., Coroll., 225; II. 294
      Part V., Prop. xix., 251; II. 175, 176
        Prop. xli., 264; II. 175, 176
        Prop. xli., Scholion, 265; II. 175, 176
    _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, Cap. IV., Vol. II. 3, 4;
      II. 175-176

  Stade, B., Prof., _Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments_, 1905,
      Vol. I.; II. 191

  Sticker, Fr., Urban, Bollandist, _Life of St. Catherine_, in Acta
      Sanctorum, Sept., Vol. V., ed. 1866, 123-195; I. 94, 167
    183 _b-e_; I. 466 _n._ 2
    192-196; I. 342 _n._ 1

  Strata Battista, _Atti Notarili_, in “Archivio di Stato,” Genova;
      I. 379 _n._ 1

  Suarez, Francesco, Fr., S.J., Opera, Vol. IV., Disp. XI., sec. iv.,
      art. 2; II. 241
      XLVII., sec. 1, art. 6; II. 241

  Sulze, Emile, _Wie ist der Kampf um die Bedeutung … Jesu zu beendigen?_
      1901; II. 372, 373


  Taylor, A. E., _The Problem of Conduct_, 1901; II. 169, 179-181, 274

  Tennant, Rev. F. R., _The Origin and Propagation of Sin_, 1902; II. 296,
      299-300

  Teresa, St., _Life Written by Herself_, Eng. tr., D. Lewis, 1888, Ch.
      iv. 17; II. 11
    Ch. v. 23, 27, 28, 29; II. 14; 5, 11; 13, 20; 13
    Ch. vi. 30, 31; II. 10, 11
    Ch. vii. 40, 41; II. 21, 50
    Ch. ix. 57, 58; II. 18 _n._ 1
    Ch. xiii. 86; II. 15
    Ch. xviii. 124, 130; II. 324, 325
    Ch. xix. 136; II. 44
    Ch. xx. 146, 149; II. 324, 44
    Ch. xxii. 162-174: II. 169
    Ch. xxiii. 174; II. 325
    Ch. xxv. 190 _b_, _c_, 192 _c_, 193 _a_, 196 _b_; II. 48-49
    Ch. xxvii. 206; II. 50
    Ch. xxviii. 224; II. 48-49
    Ch. xxix. 231, 234, 235; II. 18; 10; 11, 20, 44
    Ch. xxx. 247; II. 18
    Ch. xxxi. 248, 249, 251; II. 21
    Ch. xxxii. 263; II. 11
    Ch. xxxv. 295; II. 48-49
    Ch. xxxviii. 335; II. 325
    Rel. vii. 408; II. 16 _n._ 1(2), 50
    Rel. viii. 420, 421, 423; II. 5, 44; 324; 20
    Rel. ix. 430, 431; II. 325; 48, 49

  Thomas Aquinas, St., _De Beatitudine_, ch. iii. 3; II. 151-152
      _De Ente et Essentia_, c. 11; II. 316
      _In libr. Boetii de Trinitate_, ed. Ven. 2, ch. viii. 291 _a_,
      341 _b_, 342 _a_; II. 289, 337
      _In libros Sententiarum_, Sent. II., dist. 30, qu. 1, art. 2;
      II. 163
      Sent. III., dist. 30, art. 5; II. 164
    _Summa contra Gentiles_, I. 1-3, c. 70 in fine; I. 81
      Lib. II. c. xciv. inst.; c. xciii; II. 256
      Lib. III. c. xxi. in fine; II. 253
    _Summa Theologica_, I. qu. 4, art. 1 concl.; II. 250
      I. qu. 8, art. 2; II. 338
      I. qu. 12, art. 1 in corp.; II. 257, 338
      I. qu. 12, art. 6 ad 1; II. 257
      I. qu. 12, art. 7, in corp.; II. 257
      I. qu. 12, art. 8 ad 4; II. 253
      I. qu. 12, art. 10, in corp.; II. 248
      I. qu. 13, art. 5, concl., et in corp.; II. 337
      I. qu. 14, art. 2 ad 2; II. 253
      I. qu. 14, art. 4, in corp.; II. 252
      I. qu. 14, art. 8, concl.; II. 253
      I. qu. 14, art. 11 ad. 3 contra et concl.; II. 253
      I. qu. 19, art. 1, concl.; II. 252
      I. qu. 19, art. 2, in corp.; II. 254
      I. qu. 20, art. 1 ad 1 ad 3; II. 254
      I. qu. 20, art. 1, concl.; II. 252
      I. qu. 20, art. 2 ad 1; II. 254
      I. qu. 25, art. 1 ad 2, and concl.; II. 250
      I. qu. 28, art 1, in corp. and ad 2; II. 163
      I. qu. 29, art. 3 ad 2 ad 4, and in corp.; II. 256
      I. qu. 47, art. 1, in corp.; II. 256
      I. ii. qu. 3, art. 2 ad 4; II. 253
      I. ii. qu. 3, art. 2 ad 4, and concl.; II. 252
      I. ii. qu. 28, art. 1 ad 2, and in corp.; II. 163
      I. ii. qu. 86, art. 1 ad 3, and concl.; II. 236, 294
      I. ii. qu. 114, art. 4, in corp.; II. 164
      II. ii. qu. 3, art. 4 ad 4; II. 254
      II. ii. qu. 17, art. 8, in corp.; II. 162
      II. ii. qu. 23, art. 6, concl. and in corp.; II. 163
      III. qu. 85, art. 2 ad 1; II. 164
      III. suppl., qu. 6, art. 3; I. 120, 121
      Suppl., qu. 62, art. 2; II. 127, 128
      Suppl., qu. 69, art. 1 ad 3, and in corp.; II. 214
      Suppl., qu. 69, art. 6, in corp.; _ib._
      Suppl., qu. 69, art. 7, concl.; _ib._
      Suppl., qu. 69, art. 7 ad 9; II. 223
      Append.; qu. 2, art 4, in corp. and ad 4; II. 244
      _App. de Purg._, art. 2, in corp.; II. 214

  Tiele, C. P., Prof., _Elements of the Science of Religion_, 1897,
      Vol. I.; II. 262-263
      Vol. II.; II. 268-270, 340

  Touzard, Abbé J., “Le Développement de la Doctrine del Immortalité,”
      _Revue Biblique_, 1898, pp. 207-241; II. 189

  Trendelenburg, A., “Ueber den letzten Unterschied d. philos. Systeme,”
      _Beiträge z. Philos._ 1855, II. 10; II. 375

  Troeltsch, Prof. Ernst, “Das Historische in Kant’s
      Religions-philosophie,” _Kant Studien_, 1904; II. 261, 262
    “Religions-philosophie,” in _Die Philosophie im Beginn des XXten
      Jahrh._, 1904, Vol. I; II. 327, 376 _n._ 1
    “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion,” _Zeitschr. f. Theologie u.
      Kirche_, 1895; II. 399
    “Grundprobleme der Ethik,” in _Zeitschr. f. Theologie u. Kirche_,
      1902; II. 127 _n._ 1, 273, 274, 358, 359
    “Geschichts philosophie,” _Theol. Rundschau_, 1893, II. 256, 257
    “Was heisst Wesen des Christenthums?” _Christliche Welt_, 1903;
      II. 359, 360

  Turmel, Abbé Joseph, “Le Dogme du Pêché Originel dans S. Augustin,”
      _Rev. d’Hist. et de Litt. Rel._, 1901, 1902; II. 29 _n._ 1

  Tyrrell, Rev. George, _Hard Sayings_, 1898; I. 89; II. 230
    _Lex Orandi_, 1903; II. 268, 337 _n._ 1
    _The faith of the Millions_, 1901, Vol. II.; II. 353, 354


  Ueberweg-Heinze, _Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Philosophie_, Part II., ed.
      1898; II. 314, 316, 317


  Vallebona, Sebastiano, _La Perla dei Fieschi_, ed. 1887, I. 129 _n._ 3,
      144, 145 _n._ 1, 337, 338 _n._ 1

  Vernazza Battista, Ven., _Opere Spirituali, Genova_, 1755, Vol. I.
      Preface; I. 100, 117, 344 _n._ 2
      Vol. V. 218-227, _Colloquii_; I. 346-358
      Vol. VI. 192-248, _Letters_; I. 343-344, 359-364, 409 _n._ 1, 2

  _Vita e Dottrina di S. Caterina da Genova._ Nona Ed. Genovese. Sordi-Muti
      (no date). Preface, vii_c_; I. 413, 414
      viii_a_, _b_; _ibid._
      viii_b_; I. 281

  _Vita_-proper, Cap. I. 3; I. 104 _n._ 1
      3_c_; I. 127
    Cap. II. 4_a_, _b_, _c_; I. 105
      4_a_-5_b_; I. 404-406
      4_a_-5_c_; I. 458-460
      4_c_-5_a_; I. 107, 108
      4_c_; I. 108 _n._ 1
      5_a-c_; _ibid._
      5_b_; I. 181-412
      5_b-c_; I. 108 _n._ 2
      5_c_-6; I. 112, 121 _n._ 3
      6; I. 118-119
      6_a_; I. 334 _n._ 1
      6_b_; I. 118, 412
      6_c_; I. 397
    Cap. III. 7_a_;  I. 114 _n._ 2
      7_b_; I. 116
      8_a_; I. 280
      8-9; I. 115
      8_c_; I. 263, 273, 280
      9_b_; I. 180 _n._ 3, 263, 265, 273
    Cap. IV. 10_a_; I. 135 _n._ 1, 136 _n._ 2
      10_b_; I. 180 _n._ 1
      11_b_; I. 273
      11_b-c_; I. 264
      11_c_; I. 137 _n._ 1
    Cap. V. 12_b_-13_b_; I. 121 _n._ 3
      13_c_; I. 401
      14_b_; I. 134 _n._ 2
    Cap. VI. 14_c_; I. 121 _n._ 3, 393
      15_b_; I. 139, 267, 273, 280
      15_c_-16_a_; I. 140, 265
      16_b_; I. 118 _n._ 2, 139
    Cap. VII. 17_b_; I. 140
      19_b_; I. 274
    Cap. VIII. 20_a_; I. 401
      20_b_; I. 142 _n._ 2
      20_c_; I. 143
      21_a_; I. 407
      21_a-b_; I. 401
      21_b_; I. 144, 145 _n._ 1
      21_c_; I. 143 _n._ 2
      22_b_; I. 265
    Cap. IX. 22_c_; I. 267, 277
      23_a_; I. 139, 279
      23_b_; I. 267, 274
      23_c_; I. 263, 277
      24_a_; I. 277, 279
      24_b_; I. 274
    Cap. X. 25_c_-26_a_; I. 265
      26_b_; I. 266
    Cap. XI. 27_a_; I. 280
      28_c_-29_b_; I. 269
      29_c_; I. 262, 278
      30_a_; I. 278
    Cap. XII. 30_b_; I. 262
      31_b_; I. 271
      31_c_-32_a_; I. 268
    Cap. XIII. 32_c_; I. 409 _n._ 1
      33_c_-33_b_; I. 261
      33_b_; I. 283; II. 222
    Cap. XIV. 34_c_; I. 277
      36_b_; I. 263, 266
      36_c_; I. 266
      37; I. 259
      38_b_-39_a_; I. 282
      39_b_; I. 162 _n._ 3
    Cap. XV. 39_b_-116_b_; II. 294
    Cap. XVI. 42_a_; I. 270
      42_b_; I. 269
      43_c_; I. 269, 278
    Cap. XVII. 47_b_; I. 139, 161, 162
      47_c_-48_a_; II. 92
    Cap. XVIII. 48_b_; I. 266
      49_a_; I. 139, 267
      50_a_; I. 161, 162
      50_b_; I. 266
    Cap. XIX. 51-52; I. 140 _n._ 4, 141 _n._ 1
      51_a_-53_b_; I. 390 _n._ 2, 451
      51_b_; I. 279
      52_a_; I. 279
      52_c_-53_a_; I. 272
      53_b_; I. 265, 276
    Cap. XX. 54_b-c_; I. 272
      55_c_-56_a_; I. 262
      56_b_, _c_; I. 123, 124 _n._ 1
    Cap. XXII. 59_c_; I. 274, 275
    Cap. XXIII. 60_c_; I. 280
      61_a_; I. 262
      61_c_; I. 277
      62_a_; I. 259, 387
    Cap. XXIV. 64_b_; I. 287
    Cap. XXV. 66_a_; I. 268
      66_b_; I. 268
      67_c_; I. 265
    Cap. XXVI. 69_a_; I. 267
    Cap. XXVII. 71_c_; I. 198 _n._ 1
      72_b_; I. 162, 163. 164
    Cap. XXIX. 74_b_; I. 263
      75_b_; I. 268
      76; I. 387
      76_a_; I. 272
      76_c_; I. 262, 275
      77_a_; I. 275
      77_b_; I. 277; II. 50
    Cap. XXX. 78_c_; I. 284
    Cap. XXXI. 79_c_; I. 262
      80_b_; I. 265
      80_c_-81_a_; I. 263
      81_b-c_; I. 271
      82_a_: I. 271
      82_b_-83_a_; I. 394-395
      83_a_; I. 259
    Cap. XXXII. 83_c_-84_a_; I. 270
      86_b_; _ibid._
      87_a_; _ibid._
      87_c_; I. 268, 276; II. 50
    Cap. XXXIV. 91_c_; I. 262
      92_a_; I. 259
    Cap. XXXVI. 94_b_-95_c_; I. 160
      94_a_; I. 276
      94_b_-95_c_; I. 455
      94_c_; I. 159 _n._ 1, 279
      95_b_; I. 279
      95_c_; I. 127, 272
      96_b_; I. 148 _n._ 1
    Cap. XXXVII. 97_b_; I. 140, 148 _n._ 1, 160, 161, 409 _n._ 2
      97_c_; I. 388
    Cap. XXXVIII. 98-99; I. 166, 183 _n._ 1
      98_a-b_; I. 183, 454
      98_a_-99_b_; I. 454-455
      98_c_; I. 192 _n._ 1
      99_a_; I. 192 _n._ 1
    Cap. XXXIX. 100_c_-101_b_; I. 455
      101_a-b_; I. 262
      103_b_; I. 271
    Cap. XL. 105_c_; I. 147 _n._ 1, 265
    Cap. XLI. 106_a_, _c_; I. 268
      107_a_; I. 268
      107_b_; I. 274
      108_b_; I. 270
      109_b_; I. 276
    Cap. XLII. 113_b_; I. 164 _n._ 2; II. 10
      113_c_; I. 274
      114_a_; I. 269
    Cap. XLIII. 115_a_, _b_; I. 162 _n._ 3, 457
      115_c_; I. 457
    Cap. XLIV. 116_c_; I. 117 _n._ 2, 118 _n._ 1
      116_c_-121_b_; I. 390 _n._ 4, 455-456
      117_b_; I. 118 _n._ 1
      117_b_-121_b_; I. 451, 455-457
      118_a_, _b_; I. 158 _n._ 1
      119_b_; I. 185 _n._ 1
      119_c_; I. 118, 195 _n._ 1, 391
      120_a_, _b_; I. 195 _n._ 1
    Cap. XLV. 122_b_, _c_-123_a_; I. 150 _n._ 1
      122_c_; I. 272, 388
      123, 124; I. 132 _n._ 3
      123_b_; I. 167, 402
      123_b_-124_b_; I. 390 _n._ 3, 457
      124_b_; I. 387
    Cap. XLVI. 124_b_-125; I. 169-171
      124_c_; I. 388
      125_a_; I. 272
      125_b_; I. 402 _n._ 2
    Cap. XLVII. 127-132; I. 166
      127_a_, _c_; I. 420
      129_b_; I. 119 _n._ 2
      129_c_; I. 164 _n._ 2; II. 4
      130_a_; I. 164 _n._ 2
      132_a_; I. 188 _n._ 1
    Cap. XLVIII. 132_b_; 188 _n._ 1
      133_b_; I. 187 _n._ 1, 188, 450
      134_a_; I. 164 _n._ 2
      135_a_; I. 189 _n._ 1
      135_c_-136_a_; I. 189 _n._ 2
      136_b_; I. 274
      138_b_; II. 10
      138_c_; I. 193
    Cap. XLIX. 139_a_; I. 388 _n._ 1
      139_a_-140_c_; I. 390 _n._ 4
      139_c_-140_b_; I. 388 _n._ 1
      140_a_; I. 194 _n._ 1
      140_b_, _c_; I. 119-120
      141_b_-145_b_; I. 204 _n._ 1
      142_a_, _b_, _c_; I. 197 _n._ 2, 3
      143_b_; I. 197 n, 4; II. 10
      144_a_; I. 198 _n._ 2
      144_b_; I. 281
      144_c_; I. 434
      145_c_-146_a_; I. 198 _n._ 3
      146_c_-147_c_; I. 201 _n._ 3 (202), 390, 451
    Cap. L. 148_c_; I. 204 _n._ 2
      149_b_; I. 205 _n._ 1; II. 10
      149_c_; I. 205 _n._ 1
      151_a_, _b_; I. 205 _n._ 4
      152_b_-153_c_; I. 204 _n._ 1
      152_c_; II. 10
      153_a_; I. 209 _n._ 1
      154_b_; I. 208 _n._ 3, 390, 451
      155_a_; I. 209 _n._ 1, 273; II. 10
      155_b_-156_a_; I. 210 _n._ 1, 389, 412, 452
      156_b_, _c_; I. 210 _n._ 1
      157_c_; I. 209 _n._ 1
      158_a_; I. 209 _n._ 1
      158_b_; I. 210 _n._ 3
      158_c_-159_a_; I. 211
      159_c_; I. 213 _n._ 1
      160_a_, _b_; I. 214
      160_c_; I. 215
      161; I. 387
      161_a_; I. 215
    Cap. LI. 161_c_-163_a_; I. 216-218
      162_a_; I. 162 _n._ 3
    Cap. LII. 163_b_-164_a_; I. 218 _n._ 2
      164_b_, _c_; I. 300
      165_a_; I. 454-455
      165_c_; I. 300, 454, 455

  _Vita-Trattato_, Cap. I. 169_b_; I. 281
      169_b_-175_c_; I. 435
      169_b_-184_c_; I. 435-438
      169_c_-170_a_; I. 286
      169_c_-170_b_; I. 417
      169_c_-170_c_; I. 440-442
      170_b_; I. 283
    Cap. II. 170_c_; I. 287, 291
      170_c_-171_b_; I. 442-444
      171_b_; I. 287
    Cap. III. 171_c_; I. 278
      172_a_; I. 278, 288
      172_b_; I. 287, 444-445
    Cap. IV. 172_c_; I. 282
      173_a_; I. 445
      173_a_, _b_; I. 283
      173_b_; I. 226; II. 222
    Cap. V. 173_c_, 174_a_; I. 287, 446-447
    Cap. VI. 174_b_; I. 288, 289
    Cap. VII. 175_a_; I. 277, 285
      175_b_; I. 284
    Cap. IX. 176_a_; I. 284, 285
    Cap. X. 177_b_; I. 284, 287
    Cap. XI. 178_a-b_; I. 438-439
      178_b_; I. 292, 293
    Cap. XIII. 180_a_-181_c_; I. 437
      180_b_-181_c_; I. 438-439
    Cap. XVI. 181_c_, 182_b_; I. 438-439
      182_b_; I. 286, 290
    Cap. XVII. 183_c_; I. 274

  _Vita-Dialogo_, Part I. 185-225; I. 396-397
      185_c_-190_c_, 191_a_-198_a_; I. 397 _n._ 1
      Cap. VI. 197_a_; I. 400
        198_b_-206_b_; I. 398 _n._ 1
      Cap. VIII. 199_c_-202_c_; I. 404
        201_b_; I. 409 _n._ 2
        202_c_-208_b_; I. 404-406
        203_a_; I. 124
      Cap. XI. 208_c_-209_b_; I. 404, 405
      Cap. XII. 209_c_-211_b_; I. 409 _n._ 1
        207_c_-212_a_; I. 398 _n._ 4
        211_a_; I. 404-406, 409 _n._ 2
        211_b_; I. 400, 404-406, 409 _n._ 1, 412
        211_c_; I. 409 _n._ 1
      Cap. XIII. 212_b_, _c_; I. 398 _n._ 5
        212_c_; I. 146, 429
        212_c_-213_a_; I. 406-407
      Cap. XIV. 213_c_-225_c_; I. 398 _n._ 6, 420-421
      Cap. XV. 215_c_-216_a_; I. 399 _n._ 2, 408 _n._ 5
      Cap. XVIII. 220_c_; I. 401, 406-407
        221_b_; I. 431
      Cap. XIX. 221_c_; 400, 406-407
        221, 222_a_; I. 402
        222_b_; I. 406-407
      Cap. XX. 222_c_; I. 401
        223_c_; I. 400
    Part II. 226_b_-242_b_; I. 419
        226_c_-241_b_; I. 420
        227_a_-241_b_; I. 420-421
      Cap. III. 231_a_; I. 430
        232_b_-245_c_; I. 419
        232_b_; I. 431
      Cap. V. 234_b_: I. 427
      Cap. IX. 241_b_; I. 427-428
        241_c_-245_c_; I. 491
      Cap. X. 242_b_; I. 430, 431
      Cap. XI. 245_c_; I. 417
    Part III. Cap. I. 247_b_; I. 432
        248_c_; I. 430, 432
        249_a_; I. 430
      Cap. II. 250_a_, _b_; I. 160, 161
        250_a_-263_c_; I. 422
        250_b_; I. 430
      Cap. VI. 259_c_; I. 432
        260_b_; I. 428
        264_a_-271_a_; I. 423
      Cap. VIII. 264_b_; I. 412, 433
      Cap. IX. 266_a_, _c_; I. 425, 426
        266_b_; I. 432
        Cap. X. 268_c_; I. 428
      Cap. XI. 269_c_; I. 428
        270_b_; I. 428
      C. XII. XIII. 271_b_-275_a_; I. 424
      Cap. XIII. 273_a_; I. 429
        275_a_; I. 429

  _Vita-Brevi Notizie_ (Maineri), _Traslazione_, 278-282;
      I. 306 _n._ 1
      278_b_, _c_; I. 304
    _Miracoli_, 282_b_; I. 302

  _Vita Venerabilis Lukardis_, in “Analecta Bollandiana,” XVIII.
      1899; II. 52-55

  Volkelt, J., Prof., _Erfahrung u. Denken_, 1886; II. 280
    _Kant’s Erkenntnisstheorie_, 1879; I. 56 _n._ 1; II. 276-278
    _Schopenhauer_, 1900; II. 370, 371


  Ward, James, Prof., _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, ed. 1905;
      II. 196 _n._ 1
    “Mechanism and Morals,” _Hibbert Journal_, Oct. 1905;
      II. 197 _n._ 1
    “On the Definition of Psychology,” _Journal of Psych._, Vol. I.,
      1904; II. 280
    “Present Problems of Psychology,” (American) _Philosophical Review_,
      1904; II. 277-278

  Weinel, Prof. H., _Die Wirkungen des Geistes u. der Geister_, 1899, 309;
      II. 43 _n._ 1

  Wesley, John, _Journal_, ed. Parker, 1903; II. 4 _n._ 4

  Windelband, Prof. W., “Das Heilige,” in _Präludien_, 1903; II. 262


  Zeller, Prof. Edward, _Philosophie der Griechen_, Part II. ed. 1879;
      I. 312
    Part III., Div. 2, ed. 1881; II. 313




FOOTNOTES


[1] _Vita_, pp. 143_b_; 149_b_, 159_b_; 153_a_.

[2] _Ibid._ p. 153_c_.

[3] _Ibid._ pp. 129_c_, 134_a_.

[4] I have already traced the steps in the growth of this legend. It
is no doubt this element in the biography which irritated John Wesley,
the man of absolute judgments; although he himself, with shrewd good
sense, indicates its possible secondary origin. “I am sure this was a
fool of a Saint; that is, if it was not the folly of her historian, who
has aggrandized her into a mere idiot” (_Journal_, ed. P. L. Parker,
London, 1903).

[5] _Vita_, pp. 127_c_, 143_b_, 144_b_.

[6] _Life_, tr. by D. Lewis, London, ed. 1888, pp. 27, 420.

[7] _Existence de Dieu_, I, 1, 31: _Œuvres_, ed. Versailles, 1820, Vol.
I, p. 51.

[8] Pierre Janet, _Automatisme Psychologique_, ed. 1903; _Etat Mental
des Hysteriques_, 2 vols., 1892, 1893. Hermann Gunkel, _Die Wirkungen
des heiligen Geistes_, Göttingen, 1899. Heinrich Weinel, _Die Wirkungen
des Geistes und der Geister_, Freiburg, 1899. William James, _The
Varieties of Religious Experience_, London, 1902.

[9] Pierre Janet, _op. cit._ Alfred Binet, _Les Altérations de la
Personnalité_, Paris, 1902. M. Th. Coconnier, _L’Hypnotisme Franc_,
Paris, 1897.

[10] W. James, _op. cit._, especially pp. 1-25. H. Weinel, _op.
cit._, especially pp. 128-137; 161-208. Bernouilli, _Die Heiligen der
Merowinger_, Tübingen, 1900, pp. 2-6. B. Duhm, _Das Geheimniss in der
Religion_, Tübingen, 1896.

[11] H. Bergson, _Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience_,
ed. 1898. H. Jones, _The Philosophy of Lotze_, 1895. J. Ward,
_Naturalism and Agnosticism_, 2 vols., 1899. M. Blondel, _l’Action_,
1893. J. Volkelt, _Kant’s Erkenntnisstheorie_, 1879; _Erfahrung und
Denken_, 1886. H. Münsterberg, _Psychology and Life_, 1899. D. Mercier
_Critériologie Générale_, ed. 1900.

[12] _Vita_, pp. 96_c_; 117_b_; 127_a_; 97_c_, 133_b_ (dated November
11, 1509, in MSS.); 146_b_; 148_a_.

[13] From my authenticated copies of the original wills in the Archivio
di Stato, Genoa.

[14] _Vita_, pp. 113_b_, 149_c_; 143_b_, 152_c_; 138_b_, 155_a_. Note
the parallels in St. Teresa’s _Life_, written by herself, tr. D.
Lewis, ed. 1888. P. 234: “When these (spiritual) impetuosities are
not very violent, the soul seeks relief through certain penances; the
painfulness of which, and even the shedding of blood, are no more felt
than if the body were dead.” P. 30: “I was unable to move either arm or
foot, or hand or head, unless others moved me. I could move, however,
I think, one finger of my right hand.” P. 31: “I was paralytic, though
getting better, for about three years.”

[15] Hyper-aesthesia and sensation of heat: _Vita_, pp. 142_a_, 153_a_.
Increase of movement: _ibid._, and pp. 145_b_, 143_a_, 153_c_, 141_a_.
Loss of speech and sight: pp. 141_b_, 141_c_, 159_c_. Localization of
heat: p. 157_b_. Haemorrhages: 138_c_, 159_c_, 160_a_. Concavities
and jaundice: pp. 144_a_, 153_a_. Spasms: pp. 143_c_, 71_c_, 141_c_,
142_b_. Cf. St. Teresa, _loc. cit._ p. 30: “As to touching me, that was
impossible, for I was so bruised that I could not endure it. They used
to move me in a sheet, one holding one end, and another the other.” P.
31: “I began to crawl on my hands and feet.” P. 263: “I felt myself on
fire: this inward fire and despair.…” P. 17: “The fainting fits began
to be more frequent; and my heart was so seriously affected, that those
who saw it were alarmed.” P. 27: “It seemed to me as if my heart had
been seized by sharp teeth.” P. 235: “I saw, in the Angel’s hand, a
long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little
fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and
to pierce my very entrails.… The pain is not bodily, but spiritual.”

[16] Swallow: _Vita_, pp. 149_c_, 150_a_; 159_b_; 159_c_; 150_a_.
Odours and colours: 153_c_, 154_b_. Cf. St. Teresa, _loc. cit._ p. 27:
“I could eat nothing whatever, only drink. I had a great loathing for
food.” P. 43: “I have been suffering for twenty years from sickness
every morning.” P. 30: “There was a choking in my throat … I could
not swallow even a drop of water.” P. 263: “A sense of oppression, of
stifling.”

[17] Exclamations: _Vita_, pp. 144_a_, 148_b_, 155_a_. Laughter:
_ibid._ 145_c_, 148_b_, 149_b_, 157_c_. Sudden changes of condition:
135_b_, 138_c_, 159_b_. Cf. St. Teresa, _loc. cit._ pp. 28, 29: “That
very night,” Feast of the Assumption, 1537, “my sickness became so
acute that, for about four days, I remained insensible. For a day and a
half the grave was open, waiting for my body. But it pleased Our Lord I
should come to myself. I wished to go to confession at once. Though my
sufferings were unendurable, and my perceptions dull, yet my confession
was, I believe, complete. I communicated with many tears.”

[18] _Vita_, pp. 71_c_; 145_c_; 147_b_; 159_c_, 159_a_; 127_a_. Cf.
St. Teresa, _loc. cit._ p. 23: “I was in my sister’s house, for the
purpose of undergoing medical treatment--they took the utmost care of
my comfort.” P. 27: “In two months, so strong were the medicines, my
life was nearly worn out.” “The physicians gave me up: they said I was
consumptive.”

[19] Self-knowledge as to “quietudes”: _Vita_, pp. 153_b_, 157_a_.
Marabotto’s attitude: 139_b_; 141_c_, 143_c_, 149_a_. Relations with
Boerio: 147_c_, 147_b_. Cf. St. Teresa, _loc. cit._ p. 86: “My health
has been much better since I have ceased to look after my ease and
comforts.”

[20] Remark to Vernazza: _Vita_, pp. 98_c_, 99_a_. Persistence of
intelligence: 141_c_; 159_b_, _c_; 143_a_; 143_c_; 145_b_. Cf. St.
Teresa, _loc. cit._ p. 408: “She” (Teresa herself) “never saw anything
with her bodily eyes, nor heard anything with her bodily ears.” P.
189: “The words of the divine locutions are very distinctly formed;
but by the bodily ear they are not heard.” P. 191: “In ecstasy, the
memory can hardly do anything at all, and the imagination is, as it
were, suspended.” P. 142: “You see and feel yourself carried away, you
know not whither.” P. 187: “I fell into a trance; I was carried out of
myself. It was most plain.”

[21] Picture: _Vita_, p. 135_a_;. Red and black robes: 154_b_, 156_c_.
Suggestions of odour: 118_c_, 119_a_; 9_c_, 8_a_, 9_b_. Cf. St. Teresa,
_loc. cit_. pp. 57, 58: “One day, I saw a picture of Christ most
grievously wounded: the very sight of it moved me.” P. 247: “I used to
pray much to Our Lord for that living water of which He spoke to the
Samaritan woman: I had always a picture of it with this inscription:
‘Domine, da mihi aquam.’” P. 231: “Once when I was holding in my
hand the cross of my rosary, He took it from me into His own hand.
He returned it; but it was then four large stones incomparably more
precious than diamonds: the five wounds were delineated on them with
the most admirable art. He said to me that for the future that cross
would appear so to me always, and so it did. The precious stones were
seen, however, only by myself.”

[22] Synchronisms: _Vita_, pp. 148_b_; 150_b_; 152_a_, 160_c_, 161_b_.
Communion and ordinary food: 154_a_, 154_c_, 138_c_; 154_c_. Heats:
“Assalto,” _e.g._ 138_b_, _c_; 143_a_, _c_; “ferita” and “saetta,”
_e.g._ 141_a_, _c_; 145_a_. Their localization: 135_a_, 141_c_; 153_a_;
142_a_, 158_a_. Their psycho-physical character: 135_b_, 144_b_. Thirst
and its suggestion: 149_c_, 159_c_; 76_c_; 152_b_, 135_a_. Paralyses:
134_b_; 149_c_. Cf. St. Teresa, _op. cit._ p. 28: her death-swoon
occurs on evening of the Assumption. P. 235: Heat, piercing of the
heart as by a spear, and a spiritual (not bodily) pain, are all united
in the experience of the heart-piercing Angel. P. 423: “Another prayer
very common is a certain kind of wounding; for 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, nor is the wound physical; it is in
the interior of the soul.”

[23] _Vita_, pp. 158_a_; 160_a_. Cf. St. Teresa, _op. cit._ p. 41: “We
saw something like a great toad crawling towards us.… The impression
it made on me was such, that I think it must have had a meaning.”
Contrast, with this naïvely sensible sight and the absence of all
interior assurance, such a spiritual vision as “Christ stood before me,
stern and grave. I saw Him with the eyes of the soul. The impression
remained with me that the vision was from God, and not an imagination”
(pp. 40, 41). Another quasi-sensible sight, with no interior assurance,
or question as to its provenance and value, is given on pp. 248, 249:
“Once Satan, in an abominable shape, appeared on my left hand. I looked
at his mouth in particular, because he spoke, and it was horrible. A
huge flame seemed to issue out of his body, perfectly bright without
any shadow.” Another such impression is recorded on p. 252: “I thought
the evil spirits would have suffocated me one night.… I saw a great
troop of them rush away as if tumbling over a precipice.”

[24] _Lives of the Saints_, ed. 1898, Vol. X, September 15.

[25] Pierre Janet, _Etat Mental des Hysteriques_, 2 vols., Paris, 1892,
1894: Vol. II, pp. 260, 261; 280; Vol. I, pp. 225, 63.

[26] _Ibid._ Vol. I, pp. 63, 225, 226.

[27] Pierre Janet, _Etat Mental_, Vol. I, pp. 226, 227.

[28] _Ibid._ Vol. II, pp. 253, 257.

[29] Pierre Janet, _Etat Mental_, Vol. I, pp. 7, 8, 11, 12, 57, 21.

[30] _Ibid._ Vol. II, pp. 82, 91; 70, 71.

[31] _Ibid._ Vol. II. Troubles of movement, pp. 105, 106; of nutrition,
pp. 285, 70, 71; strangulation, heart palpitation, fever heats, p. 282;
haemorrhages and red patches, p. 283; jaundice (_ictère emotionnel_),
p. 287; and note the “ischurie,” p. 283, top, compared with _Vita_, p.
12_a_.

[32] Pierre Janet, _Etat Mental_, Vol I, p. 140; Vol. II, pp. 14, 72,
165.

[33] _Ibid._ Vol. I, pp. 218, 219; 158, 159.

[34] The biographical chapters of Volume I give all the facts and
references alluded to in this paragraph. It would be easy to find
parallels for most of these peripheral disturbances and great central
normalities in St. Teresa’s life.

[35] Prof. W. James has got some very sensible considerations on the
pace of a conversion (as distinct from its spiritual significance,
depth, persistence, and fruitfulness) being primarily a matter of
temperament: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902, pp. 227-240.

[36] By the term “visionless,” I do not mean to affirm anything as to
the presence or absence of ideas or mental images during the times so
described, but to register the simple fact, that, for her own memory
after the event, she was, at the time, without any one persistent,
external-seeming image.--Note how St. Ignatius Loyola in his
_Testament_, ed. London, 1900, pp. 91, 92, considered the profoundest
spiritual experience of his life to have been one unaccompanied or
expressed by any vision: “On his way” to a Church near Manresa, “he sat
down facing the stream, which was running deep. While he was sitting
there, the eyes of his mind were opened,” not so as to see any kind of
vision, but “so as to understand and comprehend spiritual things … with
such clearness that for him all these things were made new. If all the
enlightenment and help he had received from God in the whole course of
his life … were gathered together in one heap, these all would appear
less than he had been given at this one time.”

[37] I would draw the reader’s attention to the very interesting
parallels to many of the above-mentioned peculiarities furnished both
by St. Teresa in her _Life_, _passim_, and by Battista Vernazza in the
Autobiographical statements which I have given here in Chapter VIII.

[38] The omnipresence of neural conditions and consequences for all and
every mental and volitional activity has been admirably brought out by
Prof. W. James, in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902, Vol.
I, pp. 1-25.

[39] H. Weinel’s _Die Wirkungen des Geistes und der Geister im
nachapostolischen Zeitalter, bis auf Irenäus_, 1899, contains an
admirably careful investigation of these things.

[40] _Life_, written by herself, ed. cit. pp. 235, 423; 136.

[41] _Ibid._ pp. 149, 420.

[42] _Ibid._ pp. xxii, 28.

[43] It is to Dr. Lightfoot’s fine _Excursus in St. Paul’s Epistle to
the Galatians_, ed. 1881, pp. 186-191, that I owe all the Pauline texts
and most of the considerations reproduced above.

[44] Visions of Jahve’s glory: i, 1-28; iii, 22-27 xl, 1; xliv, 4. The
five other Ecstasies and Visions: viii, 1 foll.; xi, 1 foll.; xxiv,
1 foll.; xxxiii, 22; xxxvii, 1 foll. Second Sight: viii, 16; xi, 13;
xxiv, 1. Representative Actions: iv, 1-3, 7; iv, 4-6, 8; iv, 10; ix,
11-15; xii, 1-16; xii, 17-20; xxi, 11, 12; xxi, 23-32; xxiv, 1-14;
xxiv, 15-27; xxxiii, 22; xxxvii, 15-28.

[45] The above translation and interpretation is based upon
Krätzschmar’s admirably psychological commentary, _Das Buch Ezechiel_,
Göttingen, 1900, pp. v, vi; 45, 49. But I think he is wrong in taking
that six months’ abnormal condition to have given rise, in Ezekiel’s
mind, to a belief in a previous divine order and to an interpretation
of this order. All the strictly analogical cases of religious ecstasy,
not hysteria, point to a strong mental impression, such as that order
and belief having preceded and occasioned the peculiar psycho-physical
state.

[46] _Op. cit._ pp. 190_c_; 192_c_, 193_a_.

[47] See Prof. W. James’s admirable account of these irruptions in his
_Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902, pp. 231-237.

[48] _Life_, written by Herself, pp. 190_b_; 196_b_; 224_c_; 295_c_;
413_b_.

[49] _Vita_, passim; _Life_, ed. cit. pp. 40, 41; 408; 206. _Vita_, pp.
87_c_, 77_b_.

[50] _Ascent of Mount Carmel_, ed. cit. pp. 159, 163; 264, 265, 102,
195; _Spiritual Canticle_, ed. cit. p. 238; _Ascent_, pp. 26, 27;
_Canticle_, pp. 206, 207.

[51] Two Confessors of hers are mentioned by her, _Vita_, p. 352:
Fathers Henry of Mühlhausen, and Eberhard of the Friars Preachers.

[52] _Analecta_, _loc. cit._ p. 310.

[53] _Analecta_, pp. 311-313.

[54] _Analecta_, pp. 314, 315.

[55] _Vita_, _loc. cit._ pp. 317, 319.

[56] _Vita_, pp. 319, 320.

[57] _Ibid._, _loc. cit._ pp. 327, 334, 352.

[58] _The Life of Father Hecker_, by the Rev. Walter Elliott, New York,
1894, pp. 371, 372, 418.

[59] Robert Browning, in _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, viii; Matthew Arnold, in
_Culture and Anarchy_, 21; Prof. James Seth, in _A Study of Ethical
Principles_, 1894, pp. 260-262; and Prof. Percy Gardner, in _Oxford at
the Cross Roads_, 1903, pp. 12-14, have all admirably insisted upon
this most important point.

[60] I owe much clearness of conception as to the function of
auto-suggestion and mono-ideism to the very remarkable paper of Prof.
Emil Boutroux, “La Psychologie du Mysticisme,” in the _Bulletin de
l’Institut Psychologique International_, Paris, 1902, pp. 9-26: Engl.
tr. in the _International Journal of Ethics_, Philadelphia, Jan. 1908.
There are also many most useful facts and reflections in Prof. Henri
Joly’s _Psychology of the Saints_, Engl. tr., 1898, pp. 64-117.

[61] In Chapter XII, § iv, I shall show reason for strongly suspecting
that Catherine possessed some knowledge, probably derived from
an intermediate Christian source, of certain passages in Plato’s
Dialogues. But the influence of these passages can, in any case, only
be traced in her Purgatorial doctrine, and had better be discussed
together with this doctrine itself.

[62] My chief obligations are here to Prof. H. J. Holtzmann’s _Lehrbuch
der Neutestamentlichen Theologie_, 1897, Vol. II, pp. 1-225: “Der
Paulinismus”; but I have also learnt from Estius and Dr. Lightfoot, and
from my own direct studies in St. Paul, Philo, and Plato.

[63] _Symposium_, 216_e_.

[64] 1 Cor. xv, 35-53.

[65] E. Grafe, “Verhältniss der paulinischen Schriften zur Sapientia
Salomonis,” in _Theol. Abhandlungen Carl von Weizsäcker Gewidmet_,
1892, pp. 274-276.

[66] “The love of Christ,” Rom. viii, 35, is identical with “the love
of God which is in Christ Jesus,” Rom. viii, 39. “The Spirit of God
dwelleth in you,” Rom. viii, 9; 1 Cor. iii, 16. “I live, not I: but
Christ dwelleth in me,” Gal. ii, 20.

[67] H. J. Holtzmann, _op. cit._ Vol. II, p. 145.

[68] Holtzmann, _op. cit._ Vol. II, pp. 151, 152.

[69] My chief obligations are here again to Dr. H. J. Holtzmann’s
_Neutestamentliche Theologie_, 1897, Vol. II, pp. 354-390; 394-396;
399-401; 426-430; 447-466; 466-521.

[70] I am much indebted to the thorough and convincing monograph of
the Catholic Priest and Professor Dr. Hugo Koch, _Pseudo-Dionysius
Areopagita in seinen Beziehungen sum Neo-Platonismus und
Mysterienwesen_, Mainz, 1900, for a fuller understanding of the
relations between Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus. I have also
found much help in H. F. Müller’s admirable German translation of
Plotinus, a translation greatly superior to Thomas Taylor’s English
or to Bouillet’s French translation. And I have greatly benefited by
the admirable study of Plotinus in Dr. Edward Caird’s _Evolution of
Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, 1904, Vol. II, pp. 210-346.

[71] _The Divine Names_, iii, I; ix, 4: English translation by Parker,
1897, pp. 49, 50; 106.

[72] _Institutio Theologica_, c. 35; c. 31.

[73] _Enneads_, vi, ch. ix, 9.

[74] _Divine Names_, iii, 1; ix, 4: Parker, pp. 27, 104.

[75] _Enneads_, vi, ch. ix, 4.

[76] _Divine Names_, viii, 7: Parker, pp. 98, 99.

[77] _Vita_, pp. 47_c_, 48_a_.

[78] _Divine Names_, iii, 1: Parker, pp. 27, 28.

[79] _In Platonis Alcibiadem_, ii, 78 _seq._

[80] _Divine Names_, iv, 1; iv, 5: Parker, pp. 32, 33; 38.

[81] _In Parmenidem_, iv, 34. _In Cratylum_, pp. 103; 107.

[82] _Republic_, VI, 508_c_. _Theaetetus_, 153_c_.

[83] _Heavenly Hierarchy_, xv, 2: Parker, pp. 56, 57.

[84] _Divine Names_, xi, 1; iv, 2: Parker, pp. 113, 34. _Ad Magnesios_,
viii, 2.

[85] _Mystic Theology_, iii: Parker, p. 135.

[86] _Platonic Theology_, III, p. 132.

[87] _Enneads_, v, ch. v, 8; vi, ch. ix, 11.

[88] _Divine Names_, iv, 8-10: Parker, pp. 42-45. _In Parmenidem_, vi,
52 (see Koch, p. 152).

[89] _Divine Names_, i, 1; vii, 3; vii, 1; Mystic Theology, 1; _Divine
Names_, vii, 3: Parker, pp. 2; 91, 92; 87; 130; 91, 92.

[90] _Divine Names_, iv, 13: Parker, p. 48.

[91] _Enneads_ vi, ch. ix, 9.

[92] _Ibid._ vi, ch. ix, 8; ch. vi, 11.

[93] Parker, p. 142.

[94] _Enneads_, vi, ch. vii, 36; v, ch. iii, 17; v, ch. v, 7.

[95] _Symposium_, 210 E. See the admirable elucidations in Rhode’s
_Psyche_, ed. 1898, Vol. I, p. 298; Vol. II, pp. 279; 283, 284.

[96] _Divine Names_, i, 5: Parker, p. 8.

[97] _Divine Names_, iv, 6; _Mystic Theology_, i, iii: Parker, pp. 39,
132.

[98] _In Alcibiadem_, ii, 302.

[99] _Mystic Theology_, iv, v; _Divine Names_ i, 1: Parker, pp. 136,
137; 1; _In Alcibiadem_, ii, 302.

[100] _Heavenly Hierarchy_, ch. xv, s. 3: Parker, p. 60.

[101] _In Alcibiadem_, iii, 75.

[102] _Divine Names_, iii, 1: Parker, pp. 27, 28. _In Parmenidem_, iv,
68.

[103] _Divine Names_, i, 5; _Ecclesiastical Hierarchy_, i, 2; _Divine
Names_, ix, 5: Parker, pp. 8, 69, 104.

[104] _Institutio Theologica_, c. 129.

[105] _Ecclesiastical Hierarchy_, iii, 3, 7: Parker, p. 97.

[106] _Divine Names_, i, 6; viii, 3; 5: Parker, pp. 10, 95, 96.

[107] _In Parmenidem_, iv, 34; v.

[108] _Divine Names_ viii, 2; iv, 4; iv, 20: Parker, pp. 95, 84, 57.

[109] _Laude de lo contemplativo et extatico B. F. Jacopone de lo
Ordine de lo Seraphico S. Francesco.…_ In Firenze, per Ser Francesco
Bonaccorsi, MCCCCLXXXX. Only the sheets are numbered; and two Lode
have, by mistake, been both numbered LVIII: I have indicated them by
LVIII_a_ and LVIII_b_ respectively. I have much felt the absence of any
monograph on the sources and character of Jacopone’s doctrine.

[110] _Enneads_, vi, ch. ix, II.

[111] _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, XXXI.

[112] E. Caird, “St. Paul and the Idea of Evolution,” _Hibbert
Journal_, Vol. II, 1904, pp. 1-19. W. Dilthey has shown this by
implication, in his studies of Erasmus, Luther, and Zwingli: _Archiv
für Geschichte der Philosophie_, Vol. V, 1892, especially, pp. 381-385.

[113] Mark i, 13, and parallels; Matt. xix, 10-12.

[114] Mark vi, 8; Matt. x, 26-38; viii, 19-22; xiii, 30-32; xxxiv, 42,
and parallels.

[115] Matt. vii, 13, 14; xviii, 1-5; xvi, 24-28.

[116] Mark xiv, 38, and parallels.

[117] Rom. vii, 24, 18.

[118] 2 Cor. v, 1-4 = Wisd. of Sol. ix, 15.

[119] See Erwin Rhode’s _Psyche_, ed. 1898, Vol. II, p. 101, n. 2.

[120] I owe much help towards acquiring this very important conception,
and all the above similes, to Prof. Ernst Troeltsch’s admirable
exposition in his “Grundprobleme der Ethik,” _Zeitschrift f. Theologie
und Kirche_, 1902, pp. 163-178.

[121] _St. Augustine_, ed. Ben., Vol. X, 590_b_, 613_a_, 1973_c_, etc.
St. Thomas, _Summa Theol._, suppl., qu. 62, art. 2.

[122] My chief authorities throughout this section have been Bossuet’s
_Instruction sur les Etats d’Oraison_ of 1687, with the important
documents prefixed and appended to it (_Œuvres de Bossuet_, ed.
Versailles, 1817, Vol. XXVII); Fénelon’s chief apologetic works,
especially his _Instruction Pastorale_, his _Letteres en Réponse à
Divers Ecrits ou Mémoires_, his _Lettre sur l’Etat Passif_, and his two
Latin Letters to Pope Clement XI (_Œuvres de Fénelon_, ed. Versailles,
1820, Vols. IV, VI, VIII, and IX); and Abbé Gosselin’s admirably clear,
impartial, cautious, and authoritative _Analyse de la Controverse du
Quiétisme_. I have studied these works, and the condemned propositions
of the Beguards, of Molinos, and of Fénelon, very carefully, and
believe myself to have, in my text, taken up a position identical with
M. Gosselin’s.

[123] F. C. S. Schiller, Essay “Activity and Substance,” pp.
204-227,--an admirably thorough piece of work, in _Humanism_, 1903. See
his p. 208.

[124] See Heinrich Heppe, _Geschichte der Quietistischen Mystik_,
Berlin, 1875, p. 521. The obviously strong partisan bias of the author
against Rome,--of which more lower down,--does not destroy the great
value of the large collection of now, in many cases, most rare and
inaccessible documents given, often _in extenso_, in this interesting
book.

[125] Heppe, _op. cit._ pp. 130-133.

[126] There is a good article on Petrucci in the Catholic Freiburg
_Kirchenlexikon_, 2nd ed., 1895; and Heppe, in his _Geschichte_,
pp. 135-144, gives extracts from his chief book. Bossuet’s attack,
_Œuvres_, ed. 1817, Vol. XXIX.

[127] Reusch, _Der Index der verbotenen Bücher_, 1885, Vol. II, pp.
611; 622, 623; 625.

[128] Gosselin’s _Analyse, Œuvres de Fénelon_, ed. cit. Vol. IV, pp.
xci-xcv.

[129] Fénelon, _Explication … des Propositions de Molinos_ (_Œuvres_,
Vol. IV, pp. 25-86). Gosselin, _Analyse_ (_ibid._ pp. ccxvi-ccxxiii).

[130] _Œuvres de Fénelon_, Vol. VIII, pp. 6, 7.

[131] Heppe, _op. cit._ p. 62. Reusch, _op. cit._ Vol. II, pp. 619, 620.

[132] I write with these approbations before me, as reprinted in the
_Recueil de Diverses Pièces concernant le Quiétisme_, Amsterdam, 1688.

[133] _Œuvres de Bossuet_, ed. 1817, Vol. XXVII, pp. 497-502. Heppe,
_op. cit._ pp. 27_g_ n.; 273-281. Denzinger, _Encheiridion_, ed. 1888,
pp. 266-274.

[134] Reusch, _op. cit._ Vol. II, p. 618 _n._ 1.

[135] See Heppe, p. 264, n.

[136] _Recueil de Diverses Pièces_, pp. 61, 62.

[137] _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902, pp. 209, 211.

[138] _De Beatitudine_, c. 3, 3.

[139] I have been much helped in my own direct studies of the sources
by W. Bousset’s _Die Religion des Judenthums im Neutestamentlichen
Zeitalter_, 1903; by H. J. Holtzmann’s _Neutestamentliche Theologie_,
1897; and A. Jülicher’s _Gleichnissreden Jesu_, Theil 2, 1899.

[140] Bousset, pp. 395, 396.

[141] Ch. xii, 8, 9; see too ch. ii, 2, 7.

[142] Pirke Aboth, v, 23.

[143] Matt. v, 12; vi, 4, 6, 18, 20; Mark x, 21; ix, 41; Luke x, 7.

[144] Matt. v, 7; vi, 14; xviii, 32.

[145] Matt. v, 5; Luke xiv, 8-11; Matt. x, 39.

[146] Matt. v, 8.

[147] Matt. x, 41, 42.

[148] Matt. xix, 29; Mark x, 23; Luke vi, 38; Matt, xxii, 12; xxv, 21;
xxiv, 47; Luke xii, 37.

[149] Interesting reasons and parallels for holding the Wedding Garment
to have been the gift of the King, in Bugge’s _Die Haupt-Parabeln
Jesu_, 1900, pp. 316, 317.

[150] Jülicher, _op. cit._ p. 467. Bugge, _op. cit._ p. 277.

[151] Matt. vi, 1, 2, 5, 16.

[152] Matt. vi, 11; xx, 14; Luke xvii, 10; Matt. vi, 33; v, 48, 44, 45;
Luke vii, 47. It seems plain that the Parable of the Two Debtors, which
appears in this last passage, declares how pardon awakens love; and
that the sinful woman’s act and Our Lord’s direct comment on it, which
are now made to serve as that Parable’s frame, demonstrate how love
produces pardon. In my text I have been busy only with the second of
these twin truths.

[153] Luke vi, 33, 34.

[154] Rom. ii, 6; 2 Cor. v, 10.

[155] 1 Cor. xv, 19, 32.

[156] Gal. iii, 19; 2 Cor. iv, 16; xii, 9; Rom. viii, 31, 35, 37-39;
xiv, 8.

[157] Ps. lxxiii (lxii), v. 25. I follow Duhm’s restoration of the text.

[158] 1 Cor. xiii, 13; 8, 7.

[159] _Œuvres_, ed. Versailles, 1820, Vols. IV to IX.

[160] _Réponse: Œuvres_, Vol. IV, pp. 119-132; _Instruction: ibid._ pp.
181-308: _Lettre sur l’Oraison_, Vol. VIII, pp. 3-82; _Lettre sur la
Charité_, Vol IX, pp. 3-56; _Epistola II, ibid._ pp. 617-677.

[161] _The Spiritual Letters of Fénelon_, London, 1892, Vol. I, pp. xi,
xii.

[162] _Œuvres de Fénelon_, ed. 1820, Vol. IV, pp. lxxix-ccxxxiv.

[163] _Summa Theologica_, II, ii, qu. 17, art. 8, in corp.

[164] Comment in II, ii, qu. 23, art. 1.

[165] _Summa_, II, ii, qu. 23, art. 6, concl., et in corp.; I, ii, qu.
28, art. 1, in corp., et ad 2. See also II, ii, qu. 17, art. 6, in
corp.; qu. 28, art. 1 ad 3; I, ii, qu. 28, art. 1, in corp., et ad 2.

[166] In Libr. sent. II, dist. 30, qu. 1 ad 2.

[167] _Summa Theol._, III, qu. 85, art. 2 ad 1; I, ii, qu. 114, art. 4,
in corp. In Libr. sent. III, dist. 30, art. 5.

[168] Some of the finest descriptions of these profoundly organized
states common, in some degrees and forms, to all mankind, are to be
found in the tenth and eleventh books of St. Augustine’s _Confessions_,
A.D. 397, and in Henri Bergson’s _Essai sur les Données Immédiates de
la Conscience_, 1898.

[169] _Stromata_, Book IV, ch. vi, 30, 1; ch. iv, 15, 6.

[170] Proemium in _Reg. Fus. Tract._ n. 3, Vol. II, pp. 329, 330.

[171] _Summa Theol._, II, ii, qu. 27, art. 3.

[172] The obligation for all of acts of Pure Love is clearly taught
by the condemnations, passed by Popes Alexander VII and Innocent XI,
upon the opposite contention, in 1665 and 1679: “Homo nullo unquam
vitae suae tempore tenetur elicere actum Fidei, Spei et Charitatis,
ex vi praeceptorum divinorum ad eas virtutes pertinentium.” Note here
how “Charitas” necessarily means Pure Love, since Imperfect Love has
already been mentioned in “Spes.”--“Probabile est, ne singulis quidem
rigorose quinquenniis per se obligare praeceptum charitatis erga Deum.
Tune solum obligat, quando tenemur justificari et non habemus aliam
viam qua justificari possumus.” Here Pure Love is undoubtedly meant
by “Charitas,” since, outside of the use of the sacraments, Pure Love
alone justifies.

[173] _The Problem of Conduct_, 1901, p. 329, n.

[174] _Life, written by Herself_, ch. XXII, tr. by David Lewis, ed.
1888, pp. 162-174.

[175] Deharbe, _op. cit._ pp. 139-179, has an admirable exposition and
proof of this point, backed up by conclusive experiences and analyses
of Saints and Schoolmen.

[176] See Deharbe’s excellent remarks, _op. cit._ pp. 109, 110, n.

[177] _Analyse_, _loc. cit._ pp. cxxii, cxxiii, _Lettre sur l’Oraison
Passive_, _Œuvres_, Vol. VIII, p. 47.

[178] _Analyse_, p. cxxiii.

[179] _Lettre sur l’Oraison Passive_, _Œuvres_, Vol. VIII, pp. 10; 18,
11, 12; 14, 15; 74.

[180] _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, c. iv, opening of par. 4,
ed. Van Vloten et Land, 1895, Vol. II, p. 4; _ibid._ middle of par.
3, p. 3; _Ethica_, p. v, prop. xli, _ibid._ Vol. I, p. 264; _ibid._
_Scholion_, p. 265; _ibid._ prop. xix, p. 251; _ibid._ prop. xx, p.
251; _ibid._ prop. xlii, p. 265; _ibid._ prop. xxxvi, p. 261.

[181] _Die Philosophischen Schriften von Leibniz_, ed. Gebhardt, Vol.
VI, 1885, pp. 605, 606; and quotation in Gosselin’s _Analyse, Œuvres de
Fénelon_, 1820, Vol. IV, pp. clxxviii, clxxvii.

[182] It is to Schweizer’s admirable monograph, _Die
Religions-Philosophie Kant’s_, 1899, pp. 4-70, that I owe my clear
apprehension of this very interesting doubleness in Kant’s outlook.

[183] _Loc. cit._ pp. 611, 614, 615, 616.

[184] Kant’s _Werke_, ed. Berlin Academy, Vol. IV, 1903, pp. 393, 394;
396.

[185] Kant, 1904, p. 131.

[186] _The Problem of Conduct_, pp. 336, 337; 329.

[187] _Ibid._ p. 327.

[188] See James Seth, _A Study of Ethical Principles_, 1894, pp.
193-236, where this position, denominated there “Eudaemonism,” is
contrasted with “Hedonism,” uniquely or at least predominantly occupied
with the act’s sensational materials or concomitances, and “Rigorism,”
with its one-sided insistence upon the rational form and end of action.

[189] Taylor, _op. cit._ p. 901.

[190] _Seconde Lettre à Monsieur de Paris, Œuvres_, Vol. V, pp. 268,
269. _Lettres de M. de Cambrai à un de ses Amis, ibid._, Vol. IV, p.
168.

[191] Chantepie de la Saussaye, _Lehrbuch der Religions-Geschichte_,
ed. 1905, Vol. I, pp. 69, 73-83.

[192] Chantepie de la Saussaye, _Lehrbuch der Religions-Geschichte_,
ed. 1887, Vol. I, pp. 248, 249.

[193] _Ibid._ pp. 358, 373.

[194] Oldenberg, _Buddha_, ed. 1897, pp. 310-328; especially 313, 314;
316, 317; 327, 328.

[195] My chief authority here has been that astonishingly living and
many-sided book, Erwin Rhode’s _Psyche_, ed. 1898, especially Vol. II,
pp. 263-295 (Plato); Vol. I, pp. 14-90 (Homer); 91-110 (Hesiod); pp.
146-199 (the Heroes); pp. 279-319, and Vol. II, pp. 1-136 (Eleusinian
Mysteries, Dionysian Religion, the Orphics). The culminating interest
of this great work lies in this last treble section and in the Plato
part.

[196] _Psyche_, Vol. I, pp. 308, 312. _New Chapters in Greek History_,
1892, pp. 333, 334.

[197] See also the important study of the Abbé Touzard, _Le
Développement de la Doctrine de l’Immortalité, Revue Biblique_, 1898,
pp. 207-241.

[198] Charles, _op. cit._ pp. 52, 53; 58; 61; 84; 124, 125; 126-132;
68-77.

[199] B. Stade, _Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments_, Vol. I,
1905, p. 184.

[200] _L’Automatisme Psychologique_, ed. 1903, p. 5.

[201] W. James, _The Principles of Psychology_, 1891, Vol. II, pp.
442-467.

[202] See Prof. James Ward’s closely knit proof in his _Naturalism and
Agnosticism_, 2nd ed., 1905, and his striking address, “Mechanism and
Morals,” _Hibbert Journal_, October, 1905.

[203] “The Desire for Immortality,” in _Humanism_ 1903, pp. 228-249.

[204] _Op. cit._ Lib. XVIII, c. x, ed. 1559, fol. 3413.

[205] Neither she nor her friends can have derived these doctrines
from Ficino’s _Theologia Platonica_, Florence, 1482, since precisely
the points in question are quite curiously absent from, or barely
recognizable in, that book. See its cc. x and xi, Book XVIII, on
“the State of the Impure Soul” and “the State of the Imperfect Soul”
respectively: ed. 1559, fol. 340, _v. seq._ See also foll. 318_r_,
319_v_.

[206] _Phaedo_, 81_a_-82_a_.

[207] _Laws_, X, 904_a-e_.

[208] _Timaeus_, 41_d_, _e_; 42_b_, _d_, I have, for clearness’ sake,
turned Plato’s indirect sentences into direct ones; and have taken
the _Timaeus_ after the _Laws_, although it is chronologically prior
to them, because the full balance of his system, (which requires the
originally lofty “place” of each individual soul),--is, I think,
abandoned in the _Laws_: see 904_a_.

[209] These four passages are all within pp. 110_b_-114_d_ of the
_Phaedo_.

[210] _Gorgias_, pp. 525_b_, _c_; 526_c_, _d_.

[211] _Ibid._ p. 523_b-e_.

[212] 2 Cor. v, 2, 3.--_Vita_, pp. 109_b_, 66_a_, 171_a_.

[213] _Republic_, X, pp. 617_e_, 619_e_, 920_e_.

[214] _Phaedrus_, p. 249_b_.

[215] _Enneads_, III, 4, 5.

[216] Enarr. in Ps. xxxvi, § 1, n. 10, ed. Ben., col. 375_b_. See also
_Enchiridion_, CIX, _ibid._ col. 402_d_.

[217] So in the _De Civitate Dei_, Lib. XXI, c. xxvi, n. 4, _ibid._
col. 1037_d_.

[218] _Confess._, Lib. I, c. 2, n. 1; X, c. 26; XIII, c. 7.

[219] _De Genesi ad litt._, Lib. VIII, n. 39, ed. Ben. col. 387_b_; n.
43, col. 389_a_.

[220] _Ibid._ Lib. XII, n. 32, col. 507_c_. He soon after attempts
to decide in favour of “incorporeal places,” as the other-world
destination of all classes of human souls.

[221] Esra IV, iv, 35. See also iv, 41; vii, 32, 80, 95, 101.
Apocalypse of Baruch, xxx, 2.

[222] _Summa Theol._ suppl., qu. 69, art. 1, in corp. et ad 3; art. 6,
in corp.; Appendix de Purgat., art. 2, in corp.; suppl., qu. 69, art 7
concl.

[223] _De gratia primi hominis_, XIV.

[224] Clemens, _Stromata_, VII, 6. Origen, _De Princ._, II, 10, 4. St.
Greg. Nyss., _Orat._, XL, 36. St. Greg. Nazianz., _Poema de Seipso_, I,
546. St. Joann. Damasc., _De Fide Orthod._, cap. ult.

[225] St. Ambros., _In Lucam_, VII, 205. St. Hieron., Ep. 124, 7;
_Apol. contra Ruf._, II; in Isa. lxv, 24.

[226] _Liber de Fide_ (413 A.D.), 27, 29; ed. Ben., coll. 313_b_,
314_c_. _De octo Dulcit. quaestm_ (422 A.D.) 12, 13; _ibid._ coll.
219_d_, 220_a_. Repeated in _Enchiridion_ (423 A.D.?), LXIX; _ibid._
col. 382_b_, _c_.

[227] _De Purgatorio_, II, 11.

[228] Denzinger, _Enchiridion_, ed. 1888, No. LXXIII.

[229] _Theol. Dogm._, Vol. II, num. 206.

[230] _Œuvres_, ed. Versailles, 1816, Vol. XI, p. 376.

[231] _Le feu du Purgatoire est-il un feu corporel? op. cit._, 1902,
pp. 263-282; 270. I owe most of my references on this point to this
paper.

[232] _Sixteen Revelations of Mother Juliana of Norwich_, 1373, ed.
1902, pp. 73, 74, 78.

[233] _Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life_, 1899, pp.
63, 64.

[234] _Divine Names_, ch. iv, secs, xxiii, xxiv: Parker, pp. 61-64.

[235] _Vita_, pp. 173_b_; 33_b_.

[236] _Summa Theol._, suppl., qu. 69, art. 7 ad 9.

[237] Dionysius, _Divine Names_, ch. iv, sec. xxiii: Parker, p. 63. St.
Thomas, _Summa Theol._, suppl., qu. 98, art. 1, in corp.

[238] _Enchiridion_, CX, ed. Ben., col. 403_c_; CXII, col. 404_c_.

[239] The passages here referred to will be found carefully quoted and
discussed in Petavius’s great _Dogmata Theologica, De Angelis_, III,
viii, 16, 17, with Zaccaria’s important note (ed. Fournials, 1866, Vol.
IV, pp. 119-121).

[240] _Dogmata Theologica_, Vol. IV, p. 120_b_. See also the
interesting note in the Benedictine Edition of _St. Augustine_, Vol.
VI, col. 403.

[241] _Vie de M. Emery_, by M. Gosselin, Paris, 1862, Vol. II, pp.
322-324.

[242] _Vita_ (_Trattato_), p. 173_b_.

[243] So Atzberger, in Scheeben’s _Dogmatik_, Vol. IV (1903), p. 826.

[244] _Enigmas of Life_, ed. 1892, p. 255.

[245] _Divine Names_, ch. iv, secs. 23, 24: Parker, pp, 70, 71.

[246] 2 Cor. iv, 16.

[247] See H. J. Holtzmann, Richard Rothe’s _Speculatives System_, 1899,
pp. 110, 111; 123, 124;--Georg Class, _Phänomenologie und Ontologie des
Menschlichen Geistes_, 1896, pp. 220, 221;--and that strange mixture of
stimulating thought, deep earnestness, and fantastic prejudice, Edward
White’s _Life of Christ_, ed. 1876.

[248] _Grammar of Assent_, 1870, p. 417. _Hard Sayings_, 1898, p. 113.

[249] G. E. Lessing, “Leibniz von den Ewigen Strafen,” in Lessing’s
_Sämmtliche Werke_, ed. Lachmann-Muncker, 1895, Vol. XI, p. 486. D. F.
Strauss, _Die christliche Glaubenslehre_, 1841, Vol. II, pp. 684, 685.
Carl von Hase, _Handbuch der protestantischen Polemik_, ed. 1864, p.
422. G. T. Fechner, _Die drei Gründe und Motive des Glaubens_, 1863,
pp. 146, 147, 177. G. Anrich, “Clemens und Origenes, als Begründer
der Lehre vom Fegfeuer,” in _Theologische Abhandlungen für H. J.
Holtzmann_, 1902, p. 120.

[250] W. R. Greg, _Enigmas of Life_, ed. 1892, pp. 256, 257, 259. J. S.
Mill, _Three Essays on Religion_, ed. 1874, p. 211.

[251] Sess. XXV, Decret. de Purgatorio, med.

[252] N. Paulus, _Johann Tetzel_ 1899. Brieger’s review, _Theologische
Literatur-Zeitung_, 1900, coll. 117, 118.

[253] 1 Cor. xv, 29.

[254] _De Corona_, III, IV. See M. Salomon Reinach’s interesting
paper, “l’Origine des Prières pour les Morts,” in _Cultes, Mythes, et
Religions_, 1905, pp. 316-331.

[255] W. Bacher, _Die Agada der palästinensischen Amoräer_, Vol. I,
1892, p. 331.

[256] _Strom._, VII, 26 (Migne, _Ser. Graec_, Vol. IX, col. 541); I, 26
(_ibid._ Vol. VIII, col. 916); VII, 26 (_ibid._ Vol. IX, col. 540).

[257] _De Princ._, II, 10, 6. _De Orat._, XXIX, p. 263.

[258] _Paedag._, I, 8, p. 51; and Plato, _Gorgias_, p. 477_a_.

[259] I owe here almost everything to the truly classical account in
Rhode’s _Psyche_, ed. 1898, Vol. II, pp. 1-136.

[260] _Republic_ II, p. 364_b_, _c_, _e_.

[261] I take these passages from Anrich’s _Clemens und Origenes, op.
cit._ p. 102, n. 5.

[262] Clemens, _Strom._, V, 3, p. 236. Origen, _Contra Cels._, VII, 13.
Clemens, _Strom._, IV, 24. Origen, _Contra Cels._, IV, 13.

[263] Dionysius, _Divine Names_, ch. iv, sec. 24: Parker, p. 64. St.
Thomas, _Summa Theol._ I, ii, qu. 86, art. 1 ad 3 et concl.

[264] _Treatise on Purgatory_, by St. Catherine of Genoa, ed. 1880, p.
31.

[265] Plato, _Cratylus_, p. 400_c_. _Republic_, II, p. 364_e_.
Euripides, _Orestes_ XXX, _seq._, with Schol. Rhode, _op. cit._ Vol.
II, p. 101, n. 2.

[266] _Natur. quaest._ III, 28, 7; 30, 7, 8.

[267] Disp. XI, Sec. iv, art. 2, §§ 13, 10; Disp. XLVII, Sec. i, art 6.

[268] Scheeben’s _Dogmatik_ Vol. IV, 1903, pp. 856 (No. 93), 723.

[269] See Abbé Boudhinon’s careful article, “Sur l’Histoire des
Indulgences,” _Revue d’Histoire et de Littérature Religieuses_, 1898,
pp. 435-455, for a vivid illustration of the necessity of explaining
the details of this doctrine and practice by history of the most
patient kind.

[270] Denzinger, _Enchiridion_, ed. 1888, Nos. 387, 588, 859.

[271] Denzinger, _ibid._, Hurter, _op. cit._ ed. 1893, Vol. III, p. 591.

[272] Denzinger, Nos. 778, 951.

[273] Cardinal Manning in _Treatise_, ed. cit. p. 31.

[274] _Op. cit._ pp. 119, 120: “The Purgatory of the Catholic Church,
in strictness, bears its name without warrant.”

[275] _Cat._, cc. viii, 35.

[276] _De octo Dulcitii quaest._ 12, 13.

[277] _Summa Theol._, app., qu. 2, art. 4, in corp. et ad 4.

[278] _Divina Commedia_, Purg. II, 40-42. See Faber, _All for Jesus_,
ed. 1889, p. 361.

[279] _De Purgatorio_, Lib. I, c. iv, 6; c. xiv, 22.

[280] _Les Controverses_, Pt. III, ch. ii, art. 1 (end); _Œuvres_,
Annecy, 1892 _seq._, Vol. I, p. 365.

[281] Faber’s _All for Jesus_, 1853, ch. ix, sec. 4; Cardinal Manning’s
Appendix (B) to Engl. tr. of St. Catherine’s _Treatise on Purgatory_,
1858; Cardinal Newman’s _Dream of Gerontius_, 1865.

[282] _In Rom._, Tom. II, i, p. 477.

[283] _Richard Rothe’s Spekulatives System_, 1899, pp. 123, 124.

[284] _Richard Rothe’s Spekulatives System_, 1899, pp. 69; 74, 75.

[285] St. Augustine, _Confessions_, Lib. XI, ch. xxvii, 3; ch. xx; ch.
xi. _De Trinit._, Lib. XV, ch. 16, ed. Ben., col. 1492 D.--St. Thomas,
_Summa Theol._, I, qu. 12, art. 10, in corp.

[286] I am here but giving an abstract of Mr. F. C. S. Schiller’s
admirable essay, “Activity and Substance,” pp. 204-227 of his
_Humanism_, 1903, where all the Aristotelian passages are carefully
quoted and discussed. He is surely right in translating ἠρεμία by
“constancy,” not by “rest.”

[287] _Summa Theol._, I, qu. 4, art. 1, concl. qu. 25, art. 1 ad 2 et
concl.

[288] Matt. xxii, 32.

[289] _Metaphysic_, xii, 1072_b_, 1074_b_.

[290] E. Caird, _Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, 1904
Vol. II, pp. 12, 16. See here, too, the fine discussion of the other,
rightly immanental as well as transcendental, teaching of Aristotle,
pp. 15, 21.

[291] _Summa Theol._, I, ii, qu. 3, art. 2 ad 4; art. 4, concl.

[292] _Ibid._ I, qu. 14, art. 4, in corp.; qu. 19, art. I, concl.; qu.
20, art. I, concl.

[293] _Summa Theol._, I, qu. 14, art. 11, 3; qu. 14, art. 2, ad 2; I,
ii, qu. 3, art. 2 ad 4.

[294] _Ibid._ I, qu. 12, art. 8 ad 4; I, ii, qu. 4, art. 8 ad 3.

[295] _Ibid._ I, qu. 14, art. 8, in corp.; art. 11, contra et concl.;
art. 8, concl.; art. 11, concl.--_Contra Gent._, Lib. III, c. xxi, in
fine.

[296] _Summa Theol._, II, ii, qu. 3, art. 4, 4; I, qu. 19, art. 2, in
corp.; qu. 20, art. 1 ad 1; ad 3; art. 2 ad 1.

[297] Mark xii, 28-34 and parallels; Matt, x, 29; Luke xii, 6; Matt,
xxv, 10; Mark xiv, 25 and parallels, and elsewhere; Apoc. vii, 9.

[298] Matt. xviii, 12-14; Luke xv, 1-10; John x, 11-16 (Ezekiel xxxiv,
12-19).

[299] _Summa Theol._, I, qu. 47, art. 1, in corp.

[300] _Summa Theol._, I, qu. 29, art. 3 ad 4; ad 2; in corp. _Contra
Gent._, Lib. II, c. xciv, init.; c. xciii.

[301] _Excitationum_, Lib. VIII, 604.

[302] _The World and the Individual_, Vol. II, p. 430.

[303] G. E. Lessing: _Leibniz von den Ewigen Strafen, Werke_, ed.
Lachmann-Muncker, Vol. XI, 1895, p. 482. E. Troeltsch, _Theologische
Rundschau_, 1893, p. 72.

[304] _Summa Theol._, I, qu. 12, art. 1, in corp.; art. 7, in corp.;
art. 6 ad 1.

[305] “A Spiritual Canticle,” stanza vii, 10, in _Works_, transl. by D.
Lewis, ed. 1891, pp. 206, 207.

[306] _Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft_, Werke, ed.
Hartenstein, 1868, Vol. VI, pp. 252, 274.

[307] _Kant_, 1904, pp. 129-132.

[308] _Das Historische in Kant’s Religions-philosophie, Kant-Studien_,
1904, pp. 43, 44.

[309] “Das Heilige,” in _Präludien_, 1903, pp. 356, 357.

[310] _Elements of the Science of Religion_, 1897, Vol. I, pp. 274,
275; Vol. II, p. 23.

[311] _Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_, ed. 1892, p. 281.

[312] _Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_, ed. 1892, pp. 27, 28; 230,
231; 262; 23.

[313] E. Caird, _Development of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_,
Vol. I, pp, 367, 362. The whole chapter, “Does the Primacy belong to
Reason or to Will?” pp. 350-382, is admirable in its richness and
balance.

[314] _Verkehr des Christen_, pp. 15, 16.

[315] I. Kant, “Anthropologie,” in _Werke_, ed. Berlin Academy,
Vol. VII, 1907, pp. 135, 136. G. W. Leibniz, “Nouveaux Essais sur
l’Entendement,” in _Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. L._,” ed.
Gerhardt, Vol. V, 1882, pp. 8, 10; 45, 69, 100, 121, 122.

[316] All this first clearly formulated by Leibniz, _op. cit._ pp. 121,
122.

[317] See his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902, pp. 209-211;
242, 243; and elsewhere.

[318] _The Prophets of Israel_, 1882, pp. 11, 12; 10, 11.

[319] _Lex Orandi_, 1903, pp. xxix, xxxi.

[320] M. Jastrow, _The Study of Religion_, 1901, pp. 279-286. C. P.
Tiele, _Elements of the Science of Religion_, 1897, Vol. II, pp.
227-234; L. W. E. Rauwenhoff, _Religions-philosophie_, Germ. tr., ed.
1894, pp. 109-124. R. Eucken, _Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion_, 1901,
pp. 59-238; 303-399. There are important points in pp. 425-438, which I
do not accept.

[321] _Rothe’s Spekulatives System_, 1899, pp. 25, 26.

[322] _Elements of the Science of Religion_, 1897, Vol. II, pp. 61, 62.

[323] _Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt_, 1896, p. 309.

[324] _The Evolution of Religion_, 1893, Vol. II, p. 313.

[325] “Grundprobleme der Ethik,” in _Zeitschrift für Theologie und
Kirche_, 1902, pp. 164; 166, 167; 172.

[326] _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, I, Anhang, p. 653.

[327] A. E. Taylor’s _The Problem of Conduct_, 1901, contains, pp.
469-487, a very vigorous and suggestive study of the similarities and
differences between Morality and Religion, marred though it is by
paradox and impatience.

[328] J. Volkelt, _Immanuel Kant’s Erkenntnisstheorie_, 1879, pp. 258,
259.

[329] _Ibid._ pp. 206, 208, 209.

[330] J. Volkelt, _Immanuel Kant’s Erkenntnisstheorie_, 1879, p. 244.

[331] James Ward, “Present Problems of Psychology,” in (American)
_Philosophical Review_, 1904, p. 607. J. Volkelt, _Kant’s
Erkenntnisstheorie_, p. 241.

[332] In a Letter of 1772, _Briefe_, ed. Berlin Academy, Vol. I, 1900,
p. 126.

[333] H. Jones, _A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze_, 1895,
pp. 102-104; 106, 107; 108, 111.

[334] _The Present Problems_, pp. 606, 607.

[335] J. Volkelt, _Erfahrung und Denken_, 1886, p. 485.

[336] James Ward, “On the Definition of Psychology,” in _Journal of
Psychology_, Vol. I, 1904, p. 25.

[337] There is a good description of this doctrine in H. Höffding’s
_Sören Kierkegaard_, Stuttgart, 1896, pp. 100-104.

[338] Höffding’s _Kierkegaard_, pp. 119, 120.

[339] _Ibid._ p. 123.

[340] See _Works_, ed. London, 1898, Vol. II, pp. 299-306.

[341] _Quaestio Mystica_, at the end of the notes to Chapter V of
Dionysius’s _Mystical Theology_, ed. Migne, 1889, Vol. I, pp. 1050-1058.

[342] _In Librum Boetii de Trinitate_, in D. Thomae Aquinatis _Opera_,
ed. altera Veneta, Vol. VIII, 1776, pp. 341_b_, 342_a_; 291_a_.

[343] _Mystical Theology_, Dr. Parker, pp. 135, 136. I have somewhat
modified Parker’s rendering.

[344] _Religions-philosophie_, German tr. ed. 1894, p. 116. His scheme
finds three psychological forms and constituents in all religion,
Intellectualism, Mysticism, Moralism, each with its own advantages and
dangers.

[345] _Confessions_: “Evil, Negative,” VII, 12, etc. “Evil, Positive,”
VI, 15; VIII, 5, 11, etc.

[346] _Opus Imperfectum_, III, 56, ed. Ben., Vol. X, col. 1750_b_.
_De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia_, I, 23, _ibid._ col. 625_a_.--M. L.
Grandgeorge, in his memoir _St. Augustin et le Neo-Platonisme_,
1896, gives an interesting collection of such Negative and Positive
declarations, and traces the former to their precise sources in
Plotinus, pp. 126, 127; 130, 131.

[347] _Divine Names_, ch. iv, sec. xxiv.

[348] _Summa Theol._, I, ii, qu. 86, art. 1 ad 3.

[349] _Vita_, pp. 39_b_, 116_b_.

[350] _Sixteen Revelations_, ed. 1902, pp. 69, 70.

[351] Meister Ekhart’s “Lateinische Schriften,” published by Denifle,
_Archiv f. Litteratur u. Kirchengeschichte des M. A._, 1886, p. 662.

[352] _Ethica_, II, def. vi; IV, prop. lxiv et coroll.; ed. Van Vloten
et Land, 1895, Vol. I, pp. 73, 225.

[353] _Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten_, 1785, _Werke_, ed.
Berlin Academy, Vol. IV, 1903, p. 393. _Religion innerhalb der Grenzen
der reinen Vernunft_, 1793, _Werke_, ed. Hartenstein, Vol. VI, 1868,
pp. 127, 128.

[354] _The Origin and Propagation of Sin_, 1902, p. 125.

[355] _Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion_, 1901, pp. 271, 272.

[356] Prof. Höffding, in his _Sören Kierkegaard_, pp. 130, 131.

[357] “Le Dogme du Pêché Originel dans S. Augustin,” _Revue d’Histoire
et de Littérature Religieuses_, 1901, 1902. See too F. R. Tennant, _The
Sources of the Doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin_, 1903, which,
however, descends only to St. Ambrose inclusively.

[358] So F. R. Tennant, _The Origin and Propagation of Sin_, 1902, pp.
131, 110.

[359] F. R. Tennant, _The Origin and Propagation of Sin_, 1902, pp. 82,
95; 107, 108; 115.

[360] _Ibid._ p. 83.

[361] _Ibid._ p. 153.

[362] _Summa Theol._, II, ii, qu. 24, art. 7, in corp.

[363] _Psychology and Life_, 1899, pp. 267, 268. _Grundzüge der
Psychologie_, Vol. I, 1900, pp. 170, 171.

[364] Mr. W. R. Inge, in his useful _Christian Mysticism_, 1899, has
some sharp expressions of disgust against these long-lived survivals
within the Catholic Church. And though his own tone towards Rome in
general belongs also, surely, to a more or less barbaric past, he has
done good service in drawing forcible attention to the matter.

[365] _Sixteen Revelations_, ed. 1902, pp. 23, 84, 101.

[366] _Ascent of Mount Carmel_, tr. Lewis, 1891, pp. 159; 26, 27; 195,
265.

[367] _Confessions_, Bk. XI, ch. xxiii, 1. Tract in Joann. Ev., VIII,
1; XXIV, 1: ed. Ben., Vol. III, 2, coll. 1770 _b_, 1958 _d_.

[368] _Sixteen Revelations_, ed. cit. p. 210.

[369] J. N. Grou, _Méditations sur l’Amour de Dieu_, Nouvelle ed.
Perisse, pp. 268, 271.

[370] L. Laberthonnière, _Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne_, 1905,
1906. G. Tyrrell, _Hard Sayings_, 1898; _External Religion_, 1902. A.
Sandreau, _La Vie d’Union à Dieu_, 1900; _L’Etat Mystique_, 1903.

[371] M. D. Petre, _The Soul’s Orbit_, 1904, p. 113.

[372] _Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen_, 1901, p. 757.

[373] Zeller, _Philosophie der Griechen_, II, 2, ed. 1879, pp. 309, 312.

[374] _Ibid._ p. 348.

[375] Republic, VI, 508_e_; VII, 517_b_; and Zeller, _ibid._ II, 1, ed.
1889, pp. 707-710.

[376] _Philebus_, 22_c_; _Timaeus_, 28_a_, _c_; 29_e_, 92_c_ (with the
reading ὅδε ὁ κόσμος … εἰκὼν τοῦ ποιητοῦ).

[377] _Timaeus_, 29_e_.

[378] _Enneads_, I, vii, 1, 61_d_; I, viii, 2, 72_e_; VI, viii, 16,
end. See, for all this, Zeller, _Philosophie der Griechen_, III, ii,
ed. 1881, pp. 476-480; 483; 510-414.

[379] _Enneads_, VIII. ix, 350_b_; VI, 2317, 610_d_; III, ix, 3, 358_a,
b_.

[380] Zeller, _op. cit._ III, ii, pp. 787-789.

[381] _Divine Names_, ch. v, sec. 1: tr. Parker, pp. 73-75.

[382] _Mystical Theology_, ch. iii: Parker, pp. 135, 136.

[383] _Mystical Theology_, ch. iv, sec. 2: Parker, pp. 136, 137.

[384] _De Divisione Naturae_, III, 17; I, 78. Ueberweg-Heinze,
_Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie_, Vol. II, ed. 1898, p. 159.

[385] Secs. 2, 4, ed. Bardenhewer, 1882, pp. 163-166.

[386] Commentarius, in _Aristotelis Metaphysica_, Tract. VIII, cap. 6,
quoted by Denifle, _Archiv f. Litteratur-u-Kirchengeschichte_, 1886, p.
520.

[387] Ibn Gebirol, _Fons Vitae_, ed. Bäumker, 1895: IV, 6, pp. 225,
224; V, 22, p. 298; II, 20, pp. 60-61; V, 24, p. 301.

[388] _De Ente et Essentia_, c. vi. _Summa Theol._, I, qu. 3, art. 4 ad
1; and elsewhere.

[389] _De Ente et Essentia_, c. ii.

[390] See Ueberweg-Heinze, _op. cit._ pp. 280, 281.

[391] _De rerum Principio_, qu. viii. Ueberweg-Heinze, _op. cit._ pp.
295, 296.

[392] H. S. Denifle, _Meister Eckhart’s Lateinische Schriften_, _loc.
cit._ pp. 489, 490; 540, n. 6.

[393] _Ibid._ p. 519.

[394] _Meister Eckhart_, ed. Pfeiffer, 1857, pp. 158, 1; 99, 8; 180,
15; 532, 30; 320, 27; 288, 26; 207, 27.

[395] Denzinger, _Enchiridion Symbolorum_, ed. 1888, Nos. 437, 455.

[396] _Hegelianism and Personality_, ed. 1893, pp. 230, 231, and note.

[397] _Phaedrus_, 245 d; Zeller, _op. cit._ II, 1, ed. 1889, p. 830.

[398] _Ibid._ pp. 843, 844; 849, 850.

[399] Pre-existence of the Noûs: _Gen. Anim._, II, 3, 736_b_; _de
Anima_, III, 5, 430_a_; Zeller, _op. cit._ II, 2, ed. 1879, pp. 593,
595. The Supreme Noûs, purely transcendent: _Metaph._, XII, 7-10. But
see Dr. Edward Caird’s admirable pp. 1-30, Vol. II, of his _Evolution
of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, 1904.

[400] Rom. viii, 11. See too Rom. viii, 9, 14; 1 Cor. iii, 16; vi, 11;
vii, 40; xii, 3.

[401] H. J. Holtzmann, _Lehrbuch der N. T. Theology_, 1897, Vol. II,
pp. 9-12; 15-18.

[402] H. J. Holtzmann, _op. cit._ Vol. II, pp. 79, 80. Johannes Weiss,
_Dic Nachfolge Christi_, 1895, p. 95.

[403] Col. iii, 4; Phil. i, 21; Gal. ii, 20.

[404] _Enneads_, V, book 1, cc. 3 and 6.

[405] _Ibid._ VI, book 9, 9 and 11.

[406] _Eckhart_, ed. Pfeiffer, pp. 113, 33; 469, 40, 36.

[407] Denzinger, _op. cit._ No. 454.

[408] _Vier Schriften von Johannes Ruysbroek_, ed. Ullmann, 1848, pp.
106, 107.

[409] _Life, written by Herself_, tr. D. Lewis, ed. 1888, pp. 124, 421,
146.

[410] _Life, written by Herself_, tr. D. Lewis, ed. 1888, pp. 355, 130,
430; 174.

[411] J. B. Schwab, _Johannes Gerson_, 1858, pp. 361, 362.

[412] I can find but one, secondary Ecclesiastical Censure of the
doctrine of God’s substantial presence in the soul,--the censure passed
by the Paris Sorbonne on Peter Lombard. The same Sorbonne repeatedly
censured St. Thomas on other points.

[413] Vol. II, pp. 210, 211.

[414] _Ibid._ pp. 230, 231.

[415] _Ibid._ p. 231.

[416] _Ibid._ pp. 253-257. _Enneads_, V, book ii, i.

[417] Vol. II, pp. 232, 233.

[418] “Religions-philosophie,” in _Die Philosophie im Beginn des
zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts_, 1904, Vol. I, pp. 115, 117.

[419] _Religions-philosophie_, Germ. tr., ed. 1894, p. 140.

[420] “Martineau’s Philosophy,” _Hibbert Journal_, Vol. I, 1902, pp.
458, 457.

[421] _Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_, ed. 1892, pp. 27, 15, 28,
231.

[422] _Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_, ed. 1892, pp. 20; 19-25.

[423] _Timaeus_, 29_e_, _seq._

[424] _Metaph._, VII, 1072_b_; IX, 1074_b_.

[425] See Caird, _op. cit._ II, p. 337.

[426] _Summa Theol._, I, qu. 13, art. 5, concl. et in corp. (See the
interesting note, “The Meaning of Analogy,” in Fr. Tyrrell’s _Lex
Orandi_, 1903, pp. 80-83.) _In Librum Boetii de Trinitate_: D. Thomae
Aquinatis _Opera_, ed. Veneta Altera, 1776, p. 341_b_, 342_a_.

[427] _Summa Theol._, I, qu. 8, art. 2; qu. 12, art. 1, in corp.

[428] For Leibniz, see especially his _Nouveaux Essais_, written in
1701-1709, but not published till 1765: _Die Philosophischen Schriften
van G. W. Leibniz_, ed. Gebhardt, Vol. V, 1882, especially pp. 45; 67;
69; 121, 122. For the date 1888, see W. James’s _Varieties of Religious
Experience_, 1902, p. 233.

[429] _Autobiography_, ed. 1875, pp. 133, 134.

[430] “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion”: _Zeitschrift f. Theologie u.
Kirche_, 1895, pp. 404, 405.

[431] _Elements of the Science of Religion_, 1897, Vol. II, pp. 227-231.

[432] _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, ed. Griesbach, Vol. II, pp.
725, 734, 736.

[433] _The Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902, pp. 362, 364.

[434] _Ascent of Mount Carmel_, tr. David Lewis, ed. 1889, pp. 94, 95,
97.

[435] _Ascent_, pp. 94; 350.

[436] _Ascent_, p. 353.

[437] _Sören Kierkegaard_, von Harald Höffding, Germ. tr. 1896, pp.
116, 118, 120.

[438] _Ibid._ pp. 122; 130, 131.

[439] _Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_, ed. 1888, Vol. II, pp. 413, 414;
417.

[440] _Das Wesen des Christenthums_, ed. 1902, pp. 180, 181.

[441] Höffding’s _Kierkegaard_, p. 119.

[442] _The Faith of the Million_, 1901, Vol. II, pp. 49, 50; 52, 53.

[443] _Works_, tr. David Lewis, ed. 1889, 1891, Vol. I, p. 308; Vol.
II, p. 541.

[444] _Op. cit._ p. 53.

[445] _Ibid._ pp. 55, 56.

[446] _Psyche_, ed. 1898, Vol. II, pp. 292, 293.

[447] “Grundprobleme der Ethik”: _Zeitschrift für Theologie und
Kirche_, 1902, pp. 164, 167.

[448] “Was heisst Wesen des Christenthums?” _Christliche Welt_,
1903, I, coll. 583, 584. The Abbé Loisy has also dwelt, with rare
impressiveness, upon the intensely Other-Worldly character of the first
Christian teaching.

[449] _Deutsche Mystiker des Mittelalters_, ed. Pfeiffer, Vol. I,
1845, pp. xli, xlii. Any Life of St. Jane F. de Chantal. A. Cadrès,
_Le P. Jean N. Grou_, 1866, pp. 13, 14. St. Teresa’s _Life, written by
Herself_, tr. David Lewis, ed. 1888, pp. 176, 177; 186. _Revelations of
Divine Love, showed to Mother Juliana of Norwich_, ed. 1902, p. 4.

[450] A. Gardner, “Confession and Direction,” in _The Conflict of
Duties_, 1903, pp. 223-229. P. Gardner, in _The Liberal Churchman_,
1905, p. 266.

[451] _Psyche_, ed. 1898, Vol. II, p. 289.

[452] “Christianity and Physical Science” (1855), in _Idea of a
University_, ed. 1873, pp. 432, 433. “University Teaching” (1852),
_ibid._ p. 222. See Mr. R. E. Froude’s interesting paper, “Scientific
Speculation and the Unity of Truth,” _Dublin Review_, Oct. 1900, pp.
353-368.

[453] W. Windelband, _Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft_, 1894. H.
Rickert, _Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft_, 1899. And,
above all, H. Rickert, _Die Grenzen der Naturwissenschaftlichen
Begriffsbildung_, 1902.

[454] _Schopenhauer_, 1900, pp. 344, 345.

[455] _Wie ist der Kampf um die Bedeutung … Jesu zu beendigen?_ 1901,
p. 9.

[456] _Wie ist der Kampf um die Bedeutung … Jesu zu beendigen?_ 1901,
p. 10.

[457] _Ibid._ pp. 10, 11.

[458] _Ibid._ pp. 26, 27.

[459] “Ueber den letzten Unterschied der philosophischen Systeme,”
1847, in _Beiträge zur Philosophie_, 1855, Vol. II, p. 10.

[460] See the admirably lucid analysis in Prof. Troeltsch’s
“Religions-philosophie,” in _Die Philosophie im Beginn des zwanzigsten
Jahrhunderts_, 1904, Vol. I, p. 116, already referred to further back.

[461] _Richard Rothe’s Spekulatives System_, 1899, pp. 205, 206.


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