(1) There is, in general, “the outer” and “the inner” man, 2 Cor. iv, 16; and the latter is not the exclusive privilege of the redeemed,—the contrast is that between the merely natural individual and the moral personality. And this contrast, foreign to the ancient Hebrews, is first worked out, with clear consciousness, by Plato, who, e.g., in his Banquet, causes one of the characters to say: “Socrates has thrown this Silenus-like form around himself externally, as in the case of those Silenus-statues which enclose a statuette of Apollo; but, when he is opened, how full is he found to be of temperance within”; and who treats this contrast as typical of the dualism inherent to all human life here on earth.[63]—This contrast exists throughout Catherine’s teaching as regards the thing itself, although her terms are different. She has, for reasons which will appear presently, no one constant term for “the inner man,” but “the outer man” is continuously styled “la umanità.”
(2) The “outer man” consists for St. Paul of the body’s earthly material, “the flesh”; and of the animating principle of the flesh, “the psyche,” which is inseparably connected with that flesh, and which dies for good and all at the death of the latter; whereas the form of “the body” is capable of resuscitation, and is then filled out by a finer material, “glory.”[64]—Here Catherine has no precise or constant word for the “psyche”; her “umanità” generally stands for the “psyche” plus body and flesh, all in one; and her “anima” practically always means part or the whole of “the inner man,” and mostly stands for “mind.” And there is no occasion for her to reflect upon any distinction between the form and the matter of the body, since she nowhere directly busies herself with the resurrection.
The “inner man” consists for St. Paul in the Mind, the Heart, and the Conscience. The Mind (noûs), corresponding roughly to our theoretical and practical Reason, has a certain tendency towards God: “The invisible things of God are seen by the mind in the works of creation,” Rom. i, 20; and there is “a law of the mind” which is fought by “the law of sin,” Rom. vii, 23; and this, although there is also a “mind of the flesh,” Col. ii, 18; “a reprobate mind,” Rom. i, 28; and a “renovation of the mind,” Rom. xii, 2.—Catherine clings throughout most closely to the Pauline use of the term, as far as that use is favourable: note how she perceives invisible things “colla mente mia.”
The Heart is even more accessible to the divine influence,—at least, it is to it that God gives “the first fruits of the Spirit” and “the Spirit of His Son, crying Abba, Father,” Gal. iv, 6; 2 Cor. i, 22. As an organ of immediate perception it is so parallel to the Mind, that we can hear of “eyes of the heart”; yet it is also the seat of feeling, of will, and of moral consciousness, Eph. i, 18; 2 Cor. ii, 4; 1 Cor. iv, 5; Rom. ii, 15. It can stand for the inner life generally; or, like the Mind, it can become darkened and impenitent; whilst again, over the heart God’s love is poured out, God’s peace keeps guard, and we believe with the heart, 1 Cor. xiv, 25; Rom. i, 21; ii, 5; v, 5; Phil. iv, 7; Rom. x, 9.—All this again, as far as it is favourable, is closely followed by Catherine; indeed the persistence with which she comes back to certain effects wrought upon her heart by the Spirit, Christ,—effects which some of her followers readily interpreted as so many physical miracles,—was no doubt occasioned or stimulated by 2 Cor. iii, 3, “Be ye an epistle of Christ, written by the Spirit of the living God … upon the fleshly tables of the heart.”
And Conscience, “Syneidēsis”—that late Greek word introduced by St. Paul as a technical term into the Christian vocabulary—includes our “conscience,” but is as comprehensive as our “consciousness.”—Catherine practically never uses the term: no doubt because, in the narrower of the two senses which had become the ordinary one, it was too predominantly ethical to satisfy her overwhelmingly religious preoccupations.
(3) Now, with regard to this whole dualism of the “outer” and the “inner man,” its application to the resurrection of the body in St. Paul and in St. Catherine shall occupy us in connection with her Eschatology; here I would but indicate the two Pauline moods or attitudes towards the earthly body, and Catherine’s continuous reproduction of but one of these. For his magnificent conception of the Christian society, in which each person, by a different specific gift and duty, co-operates towards the production of an organic whole, a whole which in return develops and dignifies those its constituents, is worked out by means of the image of the human earthly body, in which each member is a necessary part and constituent of the complete organism, which is greater than, and which gives full dignity to, each and all these its factors (1 Cor. xii). And he thus, in his most deliberate and systematic mood, shows very clearly how deeply he has realized the dignity of the human body, as the instrument both for the development of the soul itself and for the work of that soul in and upon the visible world.
But in his other mood, which remains secondary and sporadic throughout his writings, his attitude is acutely dualistic. His one direct expression of it occurs in 2 Cor. v, 1-4: “For we know that, if our earthly house of this tent be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this also we groan, desiring to be clothed upon with our habitation that is from heaven. We who are in this tabernacle do groan, being burthened.” Now this passage is undoubtedly modelled by St. Paul upon the Book of Wisdom, ix, 15: “For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presseth down the mind that museth upon many things.” And this latter saying again is as certainly formed upon Plato (Phaedo, 81 c): “It behoves us to think of the body as oppressive and heavy and earthlike and visible. And hence the soul, being of such a nature as we have seen, when possessing such a body, is both burthened and dragged down again into the visible world.”[65] And it is this conception of the Hellenic Athenian Plato (about 380 B.C.) which, passing through the Hellenistic Alexandrian Jewish Wisdom-writer (80 B.C.?) and then through the Hellenistically tinctured ex-Rabbi, Paul of Tarsus (52 A.D.), still powerfully, indeed all but continuously, influences the mind of the Genoese Christian Catherine, especially during the years from A.D. 1496 to 1510.
Catherine’s still more pessimistic figure of the body as a prison-house and furnace of purification for the soul, is no doubt the resultant of suggestions received, probably in part through intermediary literature, from the following three passages:—(1) Plato, in his Cratylus (400 B.C.), makes Socrates say: “Some declare that the body (sōma) is the grave (sēma) of the soul, as she finds herself at present. The Orphite poets seem to have invented the appellation: they held that the soul is thus paying the penalty of sin, and that the body is an enclosure which may be likened to a prison, in which the soul is enclosed until the penalty is paid.” (2) St. Matt. v, 25, 26, gives Our Lord’s words: “Be thou reconciled with thine adversary whilst he is still with thee on the way … lest the Judge hand thee over to the prison-warder, and thou be cast into prison.… Thou shalt not go forth thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” And (3) St. Paul declares, 1 Cor. iii, 15: “Every man’s work shall be tested by fire. If a man’s work be burnt, he shall suffer loss; yet he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” These three passages combined will readily suggest, to a soul thirsting for purification and possessed of an extremely sensitive psycho-physical organization with its attendant liability to fever heats, the picture of the body as a flame-full prison-house,—a purgatory of the soul.
2. St. Paul’s conception of “Spirit.”
A very difficult complication and varying element is introduced into St. Paul’s Anthropology by the term into which he has poured all that is most original, deepest, most deliberate and abiding in his teaching,—the Spirit, “Pneuma.” For somewhat as he uses the term “Sarx,” the flesh, both in its loose popular signification of “mankind in general”; and in a precise, technical sense of “the matter which composes the earthly body”; so also he has, occasionally, a loose popular use of the term “spirit,” when it figures as but a fourth parallel to “mind,” “heart,” and “conscience”; and, usually, a very strict and technical use of it, when it designates the Spirit, God Himself.