(5) We can then summarize the influence exercised by John upon Catherine by saying that he encouraged her to conceive religion as an experience of eternity; as a true, living knowledge of things spiritual; indeed as a direct touch of man’s soul by God Himself, culminating in man’s certainty that God is Love.
III. The Areopagite Writings.
Catherine’s close relations to the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Dionysius, are of peculiar interest, in their manifold agreement, difference, or non-responsiveness; and this although the ideas thus assimilated are mostly of lesser depth and importance than those derived from the New Testament writings just considered. They can be grouped conveniently under the subject-matters of God’s creative, providential, and restorative, outgoing, His action upon souls and all things extant, and of the reasons for the different results of this action; of certain symbols used to characterize that essential action of God upon His creatures; of the states and energizings of the soul, in so far as it is responsive to that action; of certain terms concerning these reactions of the soul; and of the final result of the whole process. I shall try and get back, in most cases, to the Areopagite’s Neo-Platonist sources, the dry, intensely scholastic Proclus, and that great soul, the prince of the non-Christian Mystics, Plotinus.[70]
1. God’s general action.
As to God’s action, we have in Dionysius the Circle with the three stages of its movement,—a conception so dear to Catherine. “Theologians call Him the Esteemed and the Loved, and again Love and Loving-kindness, as being a Power at once propulsive and leading up” and back “to Himself; a loving movement self-moved, which pre-exists in the Good, and bubbles forth from the Good to things existing, and which again returns to the Good—as it were a sort of everlasting circle whirling round, because of the Good, from the Good, in the Good, and to the Good,—ever advancing and remaining and returning in the same and throughout the same.” This is “the power of the divine similitude” present throughout creation, “which turns all created things to their cause.”[71] The doctrine is derived from Proclus: “Everything caused both abides in its cause and proceeds from it and returns to it”; and “everything that proceeds from something returns, by a natural instinct, to that from which it proceeds.”[72] And Plotinus had led the way: “there” in the super-sensible world, experienced in moments of ecstasy, “in touch and union with the One, the soul begets Beauty, Justice, and Virtue: and that place and life is, for it, its principle and end: principle, since it springs from thence; end, because the Good is there, and because, once arrived there, the soul becomes what it was at first.”[73]
And Dionysius has the doctrine, so dear to Catherine, that “the Source of Good is indeed present to all, but all are not,” by their intention, “present to It; yet, by our aptitude for Divine union, we all,” in a sense, “are present to It.” “It shines, on Its own part, equally upon all things capable of participation in It.”[74] Already Plotinus had finely said: “The One is not far away from any one, and yet is liable to be far away from one and all, since, present though It be, It is” efficaciously “present only to such as are capable of receiving It, and are so disposed as to adapt themselves to It and, as it were, to seize and touch It by their likeness to It, … when, in a word, the soul is in the state in which it was when it came from It.”[75]
We have again in Dionysius the combination, so characteristic of Catherine, of a tender respect for the substance of human nature, as good and ever respected by God, and of a keen sense of the pathetic weakness of man’s sense-clogged spirit here below. “Providence, as befits its goodness, provides for each being suitably: for to destroy nature is not a function of Providence.” “All those who cavil at the Divine Justice, unconsciously commit a manifest injustice. For they say that immortality ought to be in mortals, and perfection in the imperfect … and perfect power in the weak, and that the temporal should be eternal … in a word, they assign the properties of one thing to another.”[76]
2. Symbols of God’s action.
(1) As to the symbols of God’s action, we have first the Chain or Rope, Catherine’s “fune,” that “rope of His pure Love,” of which “an end was thrown to her from heaven.”[77] This symbol was no doubt suggested by Dionysius: “Let us then elevate our very selves by our prayers to the higher ascent of the Divine … rays; as though a luminous chain (rope, σειρά) were suspended from the celestial heights and reached down hither, and we, by ever stretching out to it up and up … were thus carried upwards.”[78] And this passage again goes back to Proclus, who describes the “chain (rope) of love” as “having its entirely simple and hidden highest point fixed amongst the very first ranks of the Gods”; its middle effluence “amongst the Gods higher than the (sensible) world”; and its third, lowest, part, as “divided multiformly throughout the (sensible) world.” “The divine Love implants one common bond (chain) and one indissoluble friendship in and between each soul (that participates in its power), and between all and the Beautiful Itself.”[79] And this simile of a chain from heaven, which in Dionysius is luminous, and in Catherine and Proclus is loving, goes back, across Plato (Theaetetus 153c and Republic, X, 61b, 99c) to Homer, where it again is luminous (golden). For, in the Iliad, viii, 17-20, Zeus says to the Gods in Olympus, “So as to see all things, do you, O Gods and Goddesses all, hang a golden chain from heaven, and do you all seize hold of it”—so as thus to descend to earth.