And thirdly, if there is an unusual rarity in Confession there is an almost as rare frequency of Communion; and authentic anecdotes show us how she scandalized some good souls as truly-by this frequency as by that rarity. Indeed throughout her convert life, an ardent devotion to the Holy Eucharist forms the very centre of her daily life; during probably thirty-five years she only quite exceptionally misses daily Communion; and she has the deepest attraction to the Mass, and a holy envy of priests for their close relation to the Blessed Sacrament. And though there are no contemplations of hers directly occupied with the Holy Eucharist, yet we shall find this experience and doctrine to have profoundly shaped and coloured teachings and apprehensions which, at first sight, are quite disconnected with It. We can already see how all-inclusive a symbol and stimulation of her other special attractions and conceptions this central devotion could not fail to be. She found here the Infinite first condescending to the finite; so that the finite may then rise towards the Infinite; the soul’s life, a hunger and a satisfaction of that hunger, through the taste of feeling rather than through the sight of reason; God giving Himself through such apparently slight vehicles, in such short moments, and under such bewilderingly humble veils; and our poor a priori notions and a posteriori analyses thus proved inadequate to the living soul and the living God.—Extreme Unction also was highly esteemed: she spontaneously demanded it some four times and finally received it with great fervour. Church hymns too—witness the “Veni, Creator,” chanted on her death-bed—and liturgical lights are spontaneously used.
And lastly, her practice in the matter of Confession and of priestly advice became, during her last thirteen years identical in frequency with that of her devout contemporaries; and thus her life ended with the practice, on all the chief points, of the average, ordinary devotional acts and habits of her time. And this final practice of the ordinary means, together with her life-long dislike of singularity and of notice; her humble misgivings in the midst of her most peaceful originalities, and the utter absence of any tendency to think her way, inasmuch as it was at all singular, the only way or even the best way, except just now and here for her own self alone; her complete freedom from the spirit of comparing self with others, of dividing off the sheep from the goats, or of having some short, sure, and universal means or test for holiness: all this shows us plainly how Catholic and unsectarian, how truly free, not only from slavish fear and pusillanimous conformity, but also from all enthralment to merely subjective fancies, from all solipsism or conceit was her strong soul.
8. Three stages of the Spiritual Life; Catherine represents the third.
It has been well said that there are three stages of the spiritual life, and three corresponding classes of souls.
There are the souls that are characterized, even to the end of their earthly lives, by that, more or less complete, naturalistic Individualism, with which we all in various degrees begin. Catherine’s own time and country were full of such thoroughly Individualistic, unmoral or even anti-moral men, who, however gifted and cultivated as artists, scholars, philosophers, and statesmen, must yet be counted as essentially childish and as clever animals rather than as spiritual men. And she herself had, during the five years which had preceded her conversion, tended, on the surface of her being, towards something of this kind.
Next come the souls that have recognized and have accepted Duty and Obligation, that are now striving to serve God as God, and that are attempting, with a preponderant sincerity, to live the common and universal life of the Spirit. These of necessity tend to suspect, or even to suppress and sacrifice, whatever appears to be peculiar to themselves, as so much individualistic subjectivity and insidious high treason to the objective law of Him who made their souls, and who now bids them save those souls at any cost. The large majority of the souls that were striving to serve God in Catherine’s times belonged, as souls belong in these our days, and will necessarily and rightly belong up to the end, to this second, universalistic, uniformative type and class. And Catherine herself evidently belonged prominently to this type and class, during her first four convert years.
And there are, finally, an ever relatively small number of souls that are called, and a still smaller number that attain, to a state in which the Universality, Obligation, Uniformity, and Objectivity, of the second stage and class, take the form of a Spiritual Individuality, Liberty, Variety, and Subjectivity: Personality in the fullest sense of the term has now appeared. And this fullest Spiritual Personality is the profoundest opposite and foe of its naturalistic counterfeit, of those spontaneous animal liberalisms which reigned, all but unrecognized as such because all but uncontrasted by the true ideal and test of life, prior to that prostration before absolute obligation, that poignant sense of weakness and impurity, and that gain of strength and purity from beyond its furthest reaches, experienced by the soul at its conversion.
Yet that merely subjective, liberalistic Individualism of the first stage can only be kept out, even at the third stage, by retaining within the soul all the essential characteristics of the second stage,—by a continuous passing and re-passing under the Caudine Forks of the willed defeat of wayward, self-pleasing wilfulness, and of the deliberate acceptance of an objective system of ideas and experiences as interiorly binding upon the self. For if the second stage excludes the first, the third stage does not exclude the second. Yet now all this, in these rare souls, leads up to and produces a living reality bafflingly simple in its paradoxical, mysterious richness. For now the universality, obligation, and objectivity of the Law become and appear greater, not less, because incarnated in an eminently unique and unreproduceable, in a fully personal form. And at this stage only do we find a full persuasiveness.
Catherine attained unmistakably, after her four years of special penitence, to this rare third stage. For not only is she essentially as individual and unique as if she were not universal and uniform; and essentially as universal and uniform as if she were not individual: but she is indefinitely more truly original and subjective, because of her voluntary boundness and objectivity. Indeed she is solidly and really free and personal, because the continuous renunciation and expulsion of all naturalistic individuality remains, to the very end, one of the essential functions of her soul.