And she practices and illustrates this doctrine in detail. “One day, after Communion, God gave her so great a consolation that she remained in ecstasy. When she had returned to her usual state, she prayed: ‘O Love, I do not wish to follow Thee for the sake of these delights, but solely from the motive of true love.’” On another similar occasion she prays: “I do not want that which proceedeth from Thee; I want Thyself alone, O tender Love.” And again, “on one occasion, after Communion, there came to her so much odour and so much sweetness that she seemed to herself to be in Paradise. But instantly she turned towards her Lord and said: ‘O Love, art Thou perhaps intending to draw me to Thee by means of these sensible consolations (sapori)? I want them not; I want nothing except Thee alone.’”[269]
IV. The Other Worlds.
We have now gone through Catherine’s contemplations and conceptions as regards the soul’s relations with its true Life and Love, here and now, on this side the veil. We have, in conclusion, to try and reproduce and illustrate her teaching as to these relations on the other side of death.
1. No absolute break in the spirit’s life at the body’s death.
Now here especially is it necessary ever to bear in mind her own presupposition, which runs throughout and sustains all her doctrine. For she is sure, beyond ever even raising a question concerning the point, that her soul and God, her two great realities and experiences, remain substantially the same behind the veil as before it, and hence that the most fundamental and universal of the soul’s experiences here can safely be trusted to obtain there also. Hence, too, only such points in the Beyond are dwelt on as she can thus experimentally forecast; but these few points are, on the other hand, developed with an extraordinary vividness and fearless, rich variety of illustration. And it is abundantly clear that this assumption of the essential unity and continuity of the soul’s life here and hereafter, is itself already a doctrine, and a most important one. We will then take it as such, and begin with it as the first of her teachings as to the Beyond.
“This holy soul,” says the highly authoritative prologue to the Trattato, in close conformity with her constant assumptions and declarations, “finding herself, whilst still in the flesh, placed in the Purgatory of God’s burning love,—a love which consumed (burnt, abbrucciava) and purified her from whatever she had to purify, in order that, on passing out of this life, she might enter at once into the immediate presence (cospetto) of her tender Love, God: understood, by means of this furnace of love, how the souls of the faithful abide in the place of Purgatory, to purge themselves of every stain of sin that, in this life, had been left unpurged. And as she, placed in the loving Purgatory of the divine fire, abode united to the divine Love, and content with all that It wrought within her, so she understood it to be with the souls in Purgatory.”[270]
2. Hell.
The details of her doctrine as to the Beyond we can group under three heads: the unique, momentary experience and solitary, instantaneous act of the soul, at its passing hence and beginning its purgation there; the particular dispositions, joys and sufferings of the soul during the process of purification, as well as the cause and manner of the cessation of that process; and (generally treated by her as a simple contrast to this her direct and favourite purgatorial contemplation) the particular dispositions, sufferings, and alleviations of lost souls. Since her teachings on the last-named subject are more of an incidental character, I shall take them first, and make them serve, as they do with her, as a foil to her doctrine of the Intermediate State: whilst her conception of Heaven, already indicated throughout her descriptions of Pure Love, is too much of a universal implication, and too little a special department of her teaching, to be capable of presentation here.
As to the cause of Hell, she says: “It is the will’s opposition to the Will of God which causes guilt; and as long as this evil will continues, so long does the guilt continue. For those, then, who have departed this life with an evil will there is no remission of the guilt, neither can there be, because there can be no more change of will.” “In passing out of this life, the soul is established for good or evil, according to its deliberate purpose at the time; as it is written, ‘where I shall find thee,’ that is, at the hour of death, with a will either determined to sin, or sorry for sin and penitent, ‘there will I judge thee.’” Or, in a more characteristic form: “There is no doubt that our spirit was created to love and enjoy: and it is this that it goes seeking in all things. But it never finds satiety in things of time; and yet it goes on hoping, on and on, to be at last able to find it. And this experience it is that helps me to understand what kind of a thing is Hell. For I see that man, by love, makes himself one single thing with God, and finds there every good; and, on the other hand, that when he is bereft of love, he remains full of as many woes as are the blessings he would have been capable of, had he not been so mad.”[271]