[229] Vita, p. 11c.
[230] Ibid. p. 11b.
[231] Vita, pp. 22b; 25c; 26b.—105c.—25c, 26a, 80b.
[232] Ibid. pp. 15c, 16a.—9b; 53b; 67c.
[233] Vita, pp. 26b; 50b.—36b; 36c.—36b.
[234] Ibid. p. 48b.
[235] Ibid. pp. 23c; 27a. The fact of “Nettezza” remaining at last her only term for the perfection of God shows plainly how comprehensive, definite, and characteristic must have been the meaning she attached to the word. The history of this conception no doubt begins with Plato’s “the Same”; and this, through Plotinus and Victorinus Afer’s Latin translation of him, reappears as “the Idipsum, the Self-Same,” as one of the names of God in St. Augustine; a term which in Dionysius (largely based as he is upon Plotinus’s disciple Proclus) occurs continually, and can there be still everywhere translated as “Identity” or “Self-Identity” (so also Parker). But with Catherine the idea seems to have been approximated more to that of Purity, although I take it that, with her, “Purità” means the absence of all excess (of anything foreign to the true nature of God’s or the soul’s essence); and “Netezza,” the absence of all defect, in the shape of any failure fully to actualize all the possibilities of this same true nature. I have had to resign myself, as the least inadequate suggestions of the rich meaning of “Netezza” and “Netto,” to alternating between the sadly general terms “fulness” and “full,” and the pedantic-sounding “self-adequation,” with here and there “clear fulness.”
[236] Vita, pp. 15b, 22c; 23b; 49a; 69a.
[237] Vita, pp. 31c, 32a.—66a, 66b, 87c, 107a.
[238] Ibid. pp. 75b, 66b.