As to Social Ethics, St. Paul’s worldward movement is strongly represented in Catherine’s teaching. Her great sayings as to God being servable not only in the married state, but in a camp of (mercenary) soldiers; and as to her determination violently to appropriate the monk’s cowl, should this his state be necessary to the attainment of the highest love of God, are full of the tone of Rom. xiv, 14, 20, “nothing is common in itself, but to him who considereth anything to be common, to him it is common,”—“all things are clean”; and of 1 Cor. x, 26, 28, “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” And her sense of her soul’s positive relation to nature, e.g. trees, was no doubt in part awakened by that striking passage, Rom. viii, 19, “the expectation of the creature awaiteth the revelation of the sons of God; for the creature was made subject to vanity not willingly.”
On the other hand, it would be impossible confidently to identify her own attitude concerning marriage with that of St. Paul, since, as we know, her peculiar health and her unhappiness with Giuliano make it impossible to speak here with any certainty of the mature woman’s deliberate judgment concerning continence and marriage. Yet her impulsive protestation, in the scene with the monk, against any idea of being debarred by her state from as perfect a love of God as his,—whilst, of course, not in contradiction with the Pauline and generally Catholic positions in the matter, seems to imply an emotional attitude somewhat different from that of some of the Apostle’s sayings. Indeed, in her whole general and unconscious position as to how a woman should hold herself in religious things it is interesting to note the absence of all influence from those Pauline sayings which, herein like Philo (and indeed the whole ancient world) treat man alone as “the (direct) image and glory (reflex) of God,” and the woman as but “the glory (reflex) of the man,” 1 Cor. xi, 7. Everywhere she appears full, on the contrary, of St. Paul’s other (more characteristic and deliberate) strain, according to which, as there is “neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free” before God, so “neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord,” 1 Cor. xi, 11.—And in social matters generally, Catherine’s convert life and practice shows, in the active mortifications of its first penitential part, in her persistent great aloofness from all things of sense as regards her own gratification, and in the ecstasies and love of solitude which marked the zenith of her power, a close sympathy with, and no doubt in part a direct imitation of, St. Paul’s Arabian retirement, chastisement of his body, and lonely concentration upon rapt communion with God. Yet she as strongly exemplifies St. Paul’s other, the outward movement, the love-impelled, whole-hearted service of the poorest, world-forgotten, sick and sorrowing brethren. And the whole resultant rhythmic life has got such fine spontaneity, emotional and efficacious fulness, and expansive joy about it, as to suggest at once those unfading teachings of St. Paul which had so largely occasioned it,—those hymns in praise of that love “which minds not high things but consenteth to the humble,” Rom. xii, 16; “becomes all things to all men,” 1 Cor. ix, 22; “weeps with those that weep and rejoices with those that rejoice,” ibid. xii, 26; and which, as the twin love of God and man, is not only the chief member of the central ethical triad, but, already here below, itself becomes the subject which exercises the other two virtues, for it is “love” that “believeth all things, hopeth all things,” even before that eternity in which love alone will never vanish away, ibid. xiii, 7, 8. Here Catherine with Paul triumphs completely over time: their actions and teaching are as completely fresh now, after well-nigh nineteen and four centuries, as when they first experienced, willed, and uttered them.
7. Sacramental Teachings.
In Sacramental matters it is interesting to note St. Paul’s close correlation of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist: “All (our fathers) were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink,” 1 Cor. x, 3; “in one Spirit we have all been baptized into one body, and we have all been made to drink one Spirit,” Christ, His blood, ibid. xii, 13. And Catherine is influenced by these passages, when she represents the soul as hungering for, and drowning itself in, the ocean of spiritual sustenance which is Love, Christ, God: but she attaches the similes, which are distributed by St. Paul among the two Rites, to the Holy Eucharist alone. Baptism had been a grown man’s deliberate act in Paul’s case,—an act immediately subsequent to, and directly expressive of, his conversion, the culminating experience of his life; and, as a great Church organizer, he could not but dwell with an equal insistence upon the two chief Sacraments.
Catherine had received baptism as an unconscious infant, and the event lay far back in that pre-conversion time, which was all but completely ousted from her memory by the great experience of some twenty-five years later. And in the latter experience it was (more or less from the first and soon all but exclusively) the sense of a divine encirclement and sustenance, of an addition of love, rather than a consciousness of the subtraction of sins or of a divine purification, that possessed her. In her late, though profoundly characteristic Purgatorial teaching, the soul again plunges into an ocean; but now, since the soul is rather defiled than hungry, and wills rather to be purified than to be fed, this plunge is indeed a kind of Baptism by Immersion. Yet we have no more the symbol of water, for the long state and effects to which that swift act leads, but we have, instead, fire and light, and, in one place, once again bread and the hunger for bread. And this is no doubt because, in these Purgatorial picturings, it is her conversion-experience of love under the symbols of light and of fire, and her forty years of daily hungering for the Holy Eucharist and Love Incarnate, which furnish the emotional colours and the intellectual outlines.
8. Eschatological matters.
In Eschatological matters the main points of contact and of contrast appear to be four; and three of the differences are occasioned by St. Paul’s preoccupation with Christ’s Second Coming, with the Resurrection of the body, and with the General Judgment, mostly as three events in close temporal correlation, and likely to occur soon; whilst Catherine abstracts entirely from all three.
(1) Thus St. Paul is naturally busy with the question as to the Time when he shall be with Christ. In 1 Thess. iv, 15, he speaks of “we who are now living, who have been left for the coming of the Lord,” i.e. he expects this event during his own lifetime; whilst in Phil. i, 23, he “desires to be dissolved and to be with Christ,” i.e. he has ceased confidently to expect this coming before his own death. But Catherine dwells exclusively, with this latter conception, upon the moment of death, as that when the soul shall see, and be finally confirmed in its union with, Love, Christ, God; for into her earthly lifetime Love, Christ, God, can and do come, but invisibly, and she may still lose full union with them for ever.
(2) As to the Place, it is notoriously obscure whether St. Paul thinks of it, as do the Old Testament and the Apocalypse, as the renovated earth, or as the sky, or as the intervening space. The risen faithful who “shall be caught in the clouds to meet Christ,” 1 Thess. iv, 16, seem clearly to be meeting Him, in mid-air, as He descends upon earth; and “Jerusalem above,” Gal. iv, 26, may well, as in Apoc. iii, 12; xxi, 2, be conceived as destined to come down upon earth. But Catherine, though she constantly talks of Heaven, Purgatory, Hell as “places,” makes it plain that such “places” are for her but vivid symbols for states of soul. God Himself repeatedly appears in her sayings as “the soul’s place”; and it is this “place,” the soul’s true spiritual birthplace and home, which, ever identical and bliss-conferring in itself, is variously experienced by the soul, in exact accordance with its dispositions,—as that profoundly painful, or that joyfully distressing, or that supremely blissful “place” which respectively we call Hell, and Purgatory, and Heaven.
(3) As to the Body, we have already noted St. Paul’s doctrine, intermediate between the Palestinian and Alexandrian Jewish teaching, that it will rise indeed, but composed henceforth of “glory” and no more of “flesh.” It is this his requirement of a body, however spiritual, which underlies his anxiety to be “found clothed, not naked,” at and after death, 2 Cor. v, 3. Indeed, in this whole passage, v, 1-4, “our earthly house of this habitation,” and “a building of God not made with hands,” no doubt mean, respectively, the present body of flesh and the future body of glory; just as the various, highly complex, conceptions of “clothed,” “unclothed,” “clothed upon,” refer to the different conditions of the soul with a body of flesh, without a body at all, and with a body of glory.—Now this passage, owing to its extreme complication and abstruseness of doctrine, has come down to us in texts and versions of every conceivable form; and this uncertainty has helped Catherine towards her very free utilization of it. For she not only, as ever, simply ignores all questions of a risen body, and transfers the concept of a luminous ethereal substance from the body to the soul itself, and refers the “nakedness,” “unclothing,” “clothing,” and “clothing upon” to conditions obtaining, not between the soul and the body, but between the soul and God; but she also, in most cases, takes the nakedness as the desirable state, since typical of the soul’s faithful self-exposure to the all-purifying rays of God’s light and fire, and interprets the “unclothing” as the penitential stripping from off itself of those pretences and corrupt incrustations which prevent God’s blissful action upon it.