5. God’s way of winning souls and raising them towards pure love. The fruits of full trust.
The next group can be made up of passages descriptive of the dealings adopted by God with a view to first winning souls as He finds them, and then raising them above mercenary hope or slavish fear; and of the childlike fearlessness inspired by perfect trust in God. As to the winning them, she says: “The selfishness of man is so contrary to God and rebellious against Him, that God Himself cannot induce the soul to do His will, except by certain stratagems (lusinghe): promising it things greater than those left, and giving it, even in this life, a certain consoling relish (gusto). And this He does, because He perceives the soul to love things visible so much, that it would never leave one, unless it saw four.”[248]
And, as to God’s raising of the soul, she propounds the deep doctrine, which only apparently contradicts the divine method just enunciated, as to the necessary dimness of the soul’s light with regard to the intrinsic consequences of its own acts, a dimness necessary, because alone truly purificatory, for the time that runs between its conversion, when, since it is still weak, it requires to see, and its condition of relative purity, when, since it is now strong, it can safely be again allowed to see.“ If a man were to see that which, in return for his good deeds, he will have in the life to come, he would cease to occupy himself with anything but heavenly things. But God, desiring that faith should have its merit, and that man should not do good from the motive of selfishness, gives him that knowledge little by little, though always sufficiently for the degree of faith of which the man is then capable. And God ends by leading him to so great a light as to things that are above, that faith seems to have no further place.—On the other hand, if man knew that which hereafter he will have to suffer if he die in the miserable state of sin, I feel sure that, for fear of it, he would let himself be killed rather than commit one single sin. But God, unwilling as He is that man should avoid doing evil from the motive of fear, does not allow him to see so terrifying a spectacle, although He shows it in part to such souls as are so clothed and occupied by His pure love that fear can no more enter in.”[249]
And as to the full trust of pure love, we have the following: “God let her hear interiorly: ‘I do not want thee henceforward to turn thine eyes except towards Love; and here I would have thee stay and not to move, whatever happens to thee or to others, within or without’; ‘he who trusts in Me, should not doubt about himself.’”[250]
And this Love gives of itself so fully to those that give themselves fully to It, that when asked by such souls to impetrate some grace for them she would say: “I see this tender Love to be so courteously attentive to these my spiritual children, that I cannot ask of It anything for them, but can only present them before His face.” In other cases, as in those of beginners when sick and dying, she would be “drawn to pray for” a soul, and would “impetrate” some special “grace for it.” “Lord, give me this soul,” she would at times pray aloud, “I beg Thee to give it me, for indeed Thou canst do so.” And “when she was drawn to pray for something, she would be told in her mind: ‘Command, for love is free to do so.’”[251]
III. The Three Categories and the Two Ways.
The next set of sayings so eminently constitutes the aggregation, if not the system, of categories under and with which Catherine habitually sees her types and pictures, and thinks and feels her experiences of divine things, that it will require careful discrimination and grouping.
1. The Three Categories: “In” Concentration; “Out” Liberation; “Over,” Elevation.
There is, first, the great category of in, within, down into; that is, recollection, concentration. “The love which I have within my heart.” “Since I began to love It, never again has that Love diminished; indeed It has ever grown to Its own fulness, within my innermost heart.” Hence she would say to those who dwelt in admiration of her psycho-physical peculiarities: “If you but had experience (sapeste) of another thing which I feel within me!” And again,“If we would esteem (aright) the operations of God, we must attend more to interior than to exterior things.” And, with regard to the Holy Eucharist, she would whisper, when seeing at Mass the Priest about to communicate: “O swiftly, swiftly speed It down to the heart, since it is the heart’s own food ”; and she would declare, with regard to her own Communion: “In the same instant in which I had It in my mouth, I felt It in my heart.”[252]