Thus it is that these sensations of burning which, during her years of health, were themselves so pleasurable and peaceful, helped, as we shall find when we come to consider her doctrine, to suggest and illustrate for her the joys and health-giving influence of the presence of God, both here and in Paradise, and of the soul’s apprehension of God, as light for the understanding and warmth for the affections and the will. And when, with her failing health, these sensations turned into painful, in part seemingly physical attacks,—attacks which, however, left the mind in an increased and ever-increasing peace and contentment,—they again helped her to gain and develop her doctrine concerning Purgatory.
In both cases her teaching gained thus a vividness of quasi-directly sensible experience, of something in a manner actually seen and felt, since it was built up out of suggestions derived from direct sensations and psycho-physical states. And yet in both cases not all such sensations, of themselves quite valueless and uninstructive from an ethical and religious point of view, could have helped towards anything of spiritual significance, had they not been sifted, taken up, organized and transformed in and into a large and deep spiritual experience and personality. There is absolutely nothing automatic or necessary in the crowning, ethically significant stages of this whole process, however rapid and instinctive and effortless, and simply of a piece with the psycho-physical occasions, these utilizations and grace-impelled and grace-informed creations may appear. We shall, in proof of this, soon see how physical and literal and spiritually insignificant remained, during the last four months of her life, the apprehensions of her disciples as to these heats and piercing sensations: these good, indeed devoted, people seem incapable of measuring spiritual love by anything higher than thermometer-readings or other physical tangibilities. And we shall also have to record one or two momentary instances when this heat-feeling and apprehension clearly assumed a maladif character in Catherine herself.
5. Impressions connected with taste and smell.
The unusual sense-perceptions which were the next to be aroused were apparently those of taste and smell: although the one certain indication I can find of such an unusual psycho-physical taste-and-smell impression, of a pleasurable and not clearly maladif character, is not earlier than 1499.[160] It came to her in connection with the one great devotion of her whole convert life,—the Holy Eucharist. “Having on one occasion received Holy Communion, so much odour and sweetness came to her, that she seemed to be in Paradise. Whence, feeling this, she straightway turned towards her Love and said: ‘O Love, dost Thou perhaps intend to draw me to Thyself with these savours? I want them not, since I want nothing but Thee alone, and all of Thee.’”[161] Here, then, she turns away from and transcends, precisely as St. John of the Cross was soon to insist so strongly that we should do, the sensible and immediate, and reaches on to the spiritual, ultimate, and personal. And similarly some such psycho-physical experience seems presupposed in her declaration: “If a Consecrated Host and unconsecrated ones were to be given to me, I should distinguish the former from the latter as I do wine from water.”[162] Yet her biographer can truthfully insist upon love being the original cause of such recognition: “She said this, because the Consecrated Host sent forth a certain ray of love which pierced her heart.” And she herself gives a still more spiritual parallel instance and explanation of such recognition: “If I were to be shown the Court of Heaven, with all its members robed in one and the same manner, in suchwise that there would, so far, be no perceptible difference between God and the Angels: the love which I have in my heart would still recognize God, as readily as the dog recognizes his master.” This love indeed would move out to Him even more swiftly and easily, because “love, which is God Himself, finds in an instant, without any means, its own end and ultimate repose.”[163]
Clearly maladif over-sensitiveness and shiftingness of the senses of taste and scent will appear presently, during the last months of her life.
6. Hearing and Sight.
The most important and mental of the senses, hearing and sight, appear, on the contrary, with little or nothing particularly unusual about them, throughout her life.
For as to her sense of hearing, the inner voices already described as heard by her at different times, cannot fairly be classed under this or any other sense-perception, healthy or otherwise; since they appear to have been most vivid and clear thoughts presented to her mind, with in each case the consciousness that they were the suggestions of Mind,—of a Spirit other than her own. They appear to have always been described by herself as “words spoken to the mind,” “words as it were heard.”[164] Traces of any maladif affection of this sense will be difficult or impossible to find, even during her last illness.
And as to sight, always so closely akin to mental processes, anything at all really exceptional cannot, I think, be found in her life so far at all. For her evidently great impressionableness to certain religious pictures,—so as a child, in regard to the “Pietà,” and now again apparently with the “Maestà,”—and to certain sights of nature, cannot fairly be considered abnormal. And as to Visions, the only one recorded so far, that of the Bleeding Christ, was primarily a mentally mediated experience: “the Lord showed Himself to her in the spirit,” says the account, no doubt in full accordance with her own analysis of such experiences.[165] Some few disturbances of this sense will, however, appear during the course of her last illness.