(1) Now it is precisely in the latter case that his doctrine attains its fullest depth and its greatest difficulty. For here the Spirit, the Pneuma, is, strictly speaking, only one—the Spirit of God, God Himself, in His action either outside or inside the human mind, Noûs. And in such passages of St. Paul, where man seems to possess a distinct pneuma of his own, by far the greater number only apparently contradict this doctrine. For in some, so in 1 Cor. ii, the context is dominated by a comparison between the divine and the human consciousness, so that, in v. 11, man’s Noûs is designated Pneuma, and in v. 16, and Rom. xi, 34, the Lord’s Pneuma is called His Noûs. And the “spirit of the world” contrasted here, in v. 11, with the “Spirit of God,” is a still further deliberate laxity of expression, similar to that of Satan as “the God of this world,” 2 Cor. iv, 4. In other passages,—so Rom. viii, 16; i, 9; viii, 10, and even in 1 Cor. v, 5 (the “spirit” of the incestuous Corinthian which is to be saved),—we seem to have “spirit” either as the mind in so far as the object of the Spirit’s communications, or as the mind transformed by the Spirit’s influence. And if we can hear of a “defilement of the spirit,” 2 Cor. vii, 1, we are also told that we can forget the fact of the body being the temple of the holy Spirit, 1 Cor. vi, 19; and that this temple’s profanation “grieves the holy Spirit,” Eph. iv, 30. Very few, sporadic, and short passages remain in which “the spirit of man” cannot clearly be shown to have a deliberately derivative sense.
Catherine, in this great matter, completely follows St. Paul. For she too has loosely-knit moods and passages, in which “spirito” appears as a natural endowment of her own, parallel to, or identical with, the “mente.” But when speaking strictly, and in her intense moods, she means by “spirito,” the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, a Power which, though in its nature profoundly distinct and different from her entire self-seeking self, can and does come to dwell within, and to supplant, this self. Indeed her highly characteristic saying, “my Me is God,” with her own explanations of it, expresses, if pressed, even more than this. In these moods, the term “mente” is usually absent, just as in St. Paul.
Now in his formally doctrinal Loci, St. Paul defines the Divine Pneuma and the human sarx, not merely as ontologically contrary substances, but as keenly conflicting, ethically contradictory principles. An anti-spiritual power, lust, possesses the flesh and the whole outer man, whilst, in an indefinitely higher degree and manner, the Spirit, which finds an echo in the mind, the inner man, is a spontaneous, counter-working force; and these two energies fight out the battle in man, and for his complete domination, Rom. vi, 12-14; vii, 22, 23; viii, 4-13. And this dualistic conception is in close affinity to all that was noblest in the Hellenistic world of St. Paul’s own day; but is in marked contrast to the pre-exilic, specifically Jewish Old Testament view, where we have but the contrast between the visible and transitory, and the Invisible and Eternal; and the consciousness of the weakness and fallibility of “flesh and blood.” And this latter is the temper of mind that dominates the Synoptic Gospels: “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak”; and “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” are here the divinely serene and infinitely fruitful leading notes.—And Catherine, on this point, is habitually on the Synoptist side: man is, for her, far more weak and ignorant than forcibly and deliberately wicked. Yet her detailed intensity towards the successive cloaks of self-love is still, as it were, a shadow and echo of the fierce, and far more massive, flesh-and-spirit struggle in St. Paul.
3. The Angry and the Loving God.
And, as against the intense wickedness of man, we find in St. Paul an emphatic insistence—although this is directly derived from the Old Testament and Rabbinical tradition—upon the anger and indignation of God, Rom. ii, 8, and frequently.—Here Catherine is in explicit contrast with him, in so far as the anger would be held to stand for an emotion not proceeding from love and not ameliorative in its aim and operation. This attitude sprang no doubt, in part, from the strong influence upon her of the Dionysian teaching concerning the negative character of evil; possibly still more from her continuous pondering of the text, “As a father hath compassion upon his children, so hath the Lord compassion on them that fear Him; for He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust,” Ps. ciii, 13, 14,—where she dwells upon the fact that we are all His children rather than upon the fact that we do not all fear Him; but certainly, most of all, from her habitual dwelling upon the other side of St. Paul’s teaching, that concerning the Love of God.
Now the depth and glow of Paul’s faith and love goes clearly back to his conversion, an event which colours and influences all his feeling and teaching for some thirty-four years, up to the end. And similarly Catherine’s conversion-experience has been found by us to determine the sequence and all the chief points of her Purgatorial teaching, some thirty-seven years after that supreme event.
Already Philo had, under Platonic influence, believed in an Ideal Man, a Heavenly Man; had identified him with the Logos, the Word or Wisdom of God; and had held him to be in some way ethereal and luminous,—never arriving at either a definitely personal or a simply impersonal conception of this at one time intermediate Being, at another time this supreme attribute of God. St. Paul, under the profound impression of the Historic Christ and the great experience on the road to Damascus, perceives the Risen, Heavenly Jesus as possessed of a luminous, ethereal body, a body of “glory,” Acts xxii, 11. And this Christ is, for St. Paul, identical with “the Spirit”: “the Lord is the Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; and “to be in Christ” and “Christ is in us” are parallel terms to those of “to be in the Spirit” and “the Spirit is within us” respectively. In all four cases we get Christ or the Spirit conceived as an element, as it were an ocean of ethereal light, in which souls are plunged and which penetrates them. In Catherine we have, at her conversion, this same perception and conception of Spirit as an ethereal light, and of Christ as Spirit; and up to the end she more and more appears to herself to bathe, to be submerged in, an ocean of light, which, at the same time, fills her within and penetrates her through and through.
But again, and specially since his conversion, St. Paul thinks of God as loving, as Love, and this conception henceforth largely supplants the Old Testament conception of the angry God. This loving God is chiefly manifested through the loving Christ: indeed the love of Christ and the love of God are the same thing. And this Christ-Love dwells within us.[66] And Catherine, since her mind has perceived Love to be the central character of God, and has adopted fire as love’s fullest image, cannot but hold,—God and Love and Christ and Spirit being all one and the same thing,—that Christ-Spirit-Fire is in her and she in It. The yellow light-image, which all but alone typifies God’s friendliness in the Bible, is thus turned into a red fire-image. And yet this latter in so far retains with Catherine something of its older connotation of anger, that the Fire and Heat appear in her teaching more as symbols of the suffering caused by the opposition of man’s at least partial impurity to the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, and of the pain attendant upon that Spirit’s action, even where it can still purify; whereas the Light and Illumination mostly express the peaceful penetration of man’s spirit by God’s Spirit, and the blissful gain accruing from such penetration.