The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Freiherr von Friedrich Hügel

But if apparently none of Catherine’s contemplations are derived directly from things learnt during these times of absorption; those contemplations are, none the less, all indirectly influenced, in the most powerful and multiform manner, by these absorptions. For these absorptions constituted the moments of the soul’s feeding and harmonization, and they enriched and concentrated it, for the service of its fellows, the occasion of further self-enlargement. And these absorptions, with their combination of experienced fruitfulness and undeniable obscurity, for the very soul that has passed through them, when this soul has returned to ordinary consciousness, give to all, even to the most lucid of her sayings, a beautiful margin of mist and mystery, a never-ceasing sense of the incomprehensibility, and yet of the soul’s capacity for an intellectual adumbration, of the realities and truths in which our whole spiritual life is rooted,—realities and truths which she is thus, without even a touch of inconsistency, ever struggling to apprehend and to communicate a little less inadequately than before.

5. Catherine’s teaching.

Catherine’s teaching, as we have it, is, at first sight, strangely abstract and impersonal. God nowhere appears in it, at least in so many words, either as Father, or as Friend, or as Bridegroom of the soul. This comes no doubt, in part, from the circumstance that she had never known the joys of maternity, and had never, for one moment, experienced the soul-entrancing power of full conjugal union. It comes, perhaps, even more, from her somewhat abnormal temperament, the (in some respects) exclusive mentality which we have already noted. But it certainly springs at its deepest from one of the central requirements and experiences of her spiritual life; and must be interpreted by the place and the function which this apparently abstract teaching occupies within this large experimental life of hers which stimulates, utilizes, and transcends it all. For here again we are brought back to her rare thirst, her imperious need, for unification; to the fact that she was a living, closely knit, ever-increasing spiritual organism, if there ever was one.

This unification tended, in its reasoned, theoretic presentation, even to overshoot the mark: for it would be impossible to press those of her sayings in which her true self appears as literally God, or her state of quiet as a complete motionlessness or even immovability. Yet in practice this unification ever remained admirably balanced and fruitful, since, in and for her actual life, it was being ever conceived and applied as but a whole-hearted, constantly renewed, continuously necessary, costing and yet enriching, endeavour to harmonize and integrate the ever-increasing elements and explications of her nature and experience. And even on the two points mentioned, her theory gives an admirably vivid presentment of the prima facie impression produced by its deepest experiences upon every devoted soul.

And on other points her theory is, even as such, admirably sober, closely knit, and stimulating. For, as to the cause of Evil, she ever restricts herself to finding it in her own nature, and to fighting it there: hence the personality of Evil, though nowhere denied, yet rarely if ever concerns her, and never does so directly in her strenuous and practical life. Yet, on the other hand, this fight takes, with her, the form not primarily of a conflict with this or that particular fault, these several conflicts then summing themselves up into a more or less interconnected warfare; but it makes straight for the very root-centre of all the particular faults, and, by constantly checking and starving that, suppresses these. And hence the Positive, Radical character of Evil is, in practice, continuously emphasized by her.

Yet this root-centre of Evil within her was most certainly not conceived by her as a merely general and abstract false self or self-seeking. Her biographers, mostly over-anxious to prove the innocence of her nature, even at the expense of the heroism of her life and of the reasonableness and truthfulness of her statements, are no doubt responsible for the constant air of would-be devout and amiable (!) exaggeration which she wears on all this self-fighting side of her. Yet we have, I think, but to take the simplest and most authentic of the rival accounts,—those which give us the smallest quantity of self-denunciation, and we can understand the quality of this self-blame, and can fix its special, entirely concrete and pressing, occasion and object. For considering the immense claimfulness, the cruel jealousy, the tyrannous fancifulness, the brooding inventiveness, the at last incurable absoluteness of the weak and bad side and tendency of a temperament and natural character such as hers, had it been allowed to have its way, there is, I think, nothing really excessive or morbid, nothing that is not most healthy and humble, and hence sensible and admirably self-cognitive and truthful, about this heroic strenuousness, this ever-watchful, courageous fear of self, and those declarations of hers that this false self was as bad as any devil. To such a temperament and attrait as hers only one master could be deliberately taken, or could be long borne, as centre of the soul: God or Self;—not two: God and Self. And hence all practice on even tolerance of, as it were, separate compartments of the soul; all “a little of this, and not too much of that” spirit; all “making the best of both worlds” temper; all treatment of religion as a means to other ends, or as so much uninterpreted inheritance and dead furniture or fixed and frozen possession of the mind, or as a respectable concomitant and condiment or tolerable parasite to other interests: all such things must have been more really impossible to her than would have been the lapse into self-sufficiency and self-idolatry, and the attempt to find happiness in such a downward unification.

And the one true divine root-centre of her individual soul is ever, at the same time, experienced and conceived as present, in various degrees and ways, simply everywhere, and in everything. All the world of spirits is thus linked together; and a certain slightest remnant of a union exists even between Heaven and Hell, between the lost and the saved. For there is no absolute or really infinite Evil existent anywhere; whilst everywhere there are some traces of and communications from the Absolute Good, the Source and Creator of the substantial being of all things that are. And to possess even God, and all of God, herself alone exclusively, would have been to her, we can say it boldly, a truly intolerable state, if this state were conceived as accompanied by any consciousness of the existence of other rational creatures entirely excluded from any and every degree or kind of such possession. It is, on the contrary, the apprehension of how she, as but one of the countless creatures of God, is allowed to share in the effluence of the one Light and Life and Love, an effluence which, identical in essential character everywhere, is not entirely absent anywhere: it is the abounding consciousness of this universal bond and brotherhood, this complete freedom from all sectarian exclusiveness and from all exhaustive appropriation of God, the Sun of the Universe, by any or all of the just or unjust, upon all of whom He shines: it is all this that constitutes her element of unity, saneness, and breadth, the one half of her faith, and the greater part of her spiritual joy.

And the other half of her faith constitutes her element of difference, multiplicity and depth, and is itself made up of two distinct convictions. No two creatures have been created by God with the same capacities; and, although they are each called by Him to possess Him to the full of their respective capability, they will necessarily, even if they all be fully faithful to their call, possess Him in indefinitely and innumerably various degrees and ways. And, so far, there is still nothing but joy in her soul. Indeed we can say that the previous element of unity and breadth calls for this second element of diversity and depth; and that only in and with the other can each element attain to its own full development and significance, and thus the two together can constitute a living whole.

But the second conviction as to difference is a sombre and saddening one. For she holds further that the diversity is not only one of degrees of goodness and a universal fulness of variously sized living vessels of life and joy; but that there is also a diversity in the degree of self-making or self-marring on the part of the free-willing, self-determining creatures of God. Here too she still, it is true, finds the omnipresent divine Goodness at work, and in a double fashion and degree. The self-marring of some, probably, in her view, of most souls, gets slowly and blissfully albeit painfully unmade by the voluntary acceptance, on the part of these souls, of the suffering rightly attaching, in a quite determinist manner, to all direct, deliberate, and detached pleasure-seeking of the false self. And this is Purgatory, which is essentially the same whether thus willed and suffered in this world or in the next. And the self-marring of other, probably the minority of, sinful souls, though no longer capable of any essential unmaking, is yet in so far overruled by the divine Goodness (which, here as everywhere, is greater than the creature’s badness), that even here there ever remains a certain residue of moral goodness, and that a certain mitigation of the suffering which necessarily accompanies the remaining and indeed preponderant evil is mercifully effected by God. And this is Hell, which is essentially the same, whether thus, as to its pain, not willed but suffered here or hereafter. Thus she neither holds an Apocatastasis, a Final Restitution of all things,—what might be called a Universal Purgatory, nor a Gradual Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost; but the eventual complete purgation and restitution applies only to some, though probably to most, souls, and the mitigation of this suffering, in the case of the lost, is not gradual but instantaneous.

Here again, then, we find her thirst for unification strikingly at work. For she discovers one single divine Goodness as active and efficient throughout the universe; and she everywhere finds spiritual pain to consist in the discordance felt by the rational creature between its actual contingent condition and its own indestructible ideal, and such pain to be everywhere automatically consequent upon deliberate acts of self-will. Hence the suffering is nowhere separately willed or separately sent by God; and, in all cases of restoration, the suffering, in proportion as it is freely willed by the sufferer, is ever medicinal and curative and never vindictive. It is these considerations which make her able to endure this sombre side of reality.