(2) We have next the symbol of the Sun and its purifying, healing Light, under which God and His action are rapturously proclaimed by Dionysius. “Even as our sun, by its very being, enlightens all things able to partake of its light in their various degrees, so also the Good, by its very existence, sends unto all things that be, the rays of its entire goodness, according to their capacity for them. By means of these rays they are purified from all corruption and death … and are separated from instability.” “The Divine Goodness, this our great sun, enlightens … nourishes, perfects, renews.” Even the pure can thus be made purer still. “He, the Good, is called spiritual light … he cleanses the mental vision of the very angels: they taste, as it were, the light.”[80] All this imagery goes back, in the first instance, to Proclus. For Proclus puts in parallel “sun” and “God,” and “to be enlightened” and “to be deified”; makes all purifying forces to coalesce in the activity of the Sun-God, Apollo Katharsios, the Purifier, who “everywhere unifies multiplicity … purifying the entire heaven and all living things throughout the world”; and describes how “from above, from his super-heavenly post, Apollo scatters the arrows of Zeus,—his rays upon all the world.”[81] The Sun’s rays, here as powerful as the bolts of Zeus, thus begin to play the part still assigned to them in Catherine’s imagery of the “Saëtte” and “Radii” of the divine Light and Love. And the substance of the whole symbol goes back, through fine sayings of Plotinus and through Philo, to Plato, who calls the Sun “the offspring of the Good and analogous to it,” and who (doubtless rightly) takes Homer’s “golden chain” to be nothing but the Sun-rays,—thus identifying the two symbols.[82]
(3) Fire, as a symbol for God and His action, is thus praised by Dionysius: “The sacred theologians often describe the super-essential Essence in terms of Fire.… For sensible fire is, so to say, present in all things, and pervades them all without mingling with them, and is received by all things; … it is intolerable yet invisible; it masters all things by its own might, and yet it but brings the things in which it resides to (the development of) their own energy; it has a transforming power; it communicates itself to all who approach it in any degree; … it has the power of dividing (what it seizes); it bears upwards; it is penetrating; … it increases its own self in a hidden manner; it suddenly shines forth.”[83]—All these qualities, and the delicate transitions from fire to light and from light back to fire, and from heat immanent to heat applied from without, we can find again, vividly assimilated and experienced, in Catherine’s teaching and emotional life. But the Sun-light predominates in Dionysius, the Fire-heat in Catherine; and whereas the former explicitly attaches purification only to the Sun-light, the latter connects the cleansing chiefly with Fire-heat, no doubt because the Greek man is busy chiefly with the intellectually cognitive, and the Italian woman with the morally ameliorative, activities and interests of the mind and soul.
3. The soul’s reaction.
(1) As to the soul’s reaction under God’s action, and its return to Him, we first get, in Dionysius, the insistence upon Mystical Quietude and Silence, which, according to him, are strictly necessary, since only like can know and become one with like, and God is “Peace and Repose” and, “as compared with every known progression, Immobility,” and “the one all-perfect source and cause of the Peace of all”; and He is Silence, “the Angels are, as it were, the heralds of the Divine Silence,”—teaching not unlike that of St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Jesus Christ … the Word which proceeds from Silence.”[84] Hence “in proportion as we ascend to the higher designations of God, do our expressions become more and more circumscribed”; and at last “we shall find, not a little speaking, but a complete absence of speech and of conception.”[85] As Proclus has it: “Let this Fountain of Godhead be honoured on our part by silence and by the union which is above silence.”[86] And Plotinus says: “This,” the Divine, “Light comes not from anywhere nor disappears any whither, but simply shines or shines not: hence we must not pursue after it, but must abide in quietness till it appears.” And when it does appear, “the contemplative, as one rapt and divinely inspired, abides here with quietude in a motionless condition, … being entirely stable, and becoming, as it were, stability itself.”[87]—All this still finds its echo in Catherine.—But the treble (cognitive) movement of the Angelic and human mind,—the circular, the straight-line, and the spiral,—which Dionysius, in direct imitation of Proclus, carefully develops throughout three sections, is quite absent from Catherine’s mind.[88]
(2) We next get, in Dionysius, the following teachings as to Mystical Vision and Union. “The Unity-above-Mind is placed above the minds; and the Good-above-word is unutterable by word.” “There is, further, the most divine knowledge of Almighty God, which is known through not knowing … when the mind, having stood apart from all existing things, and having then also dismissed itself, has been made one with the super-luminous rays.” “We must contemplate things divine by our whole selves standing out of our whole selves, and becoming wholly of God.” “By the resistless and absolute ecstasy, in all purity, from out of thyself and all things, thou wilt be carried on high, to the super-essential ray of the divine darkness.” “It is during the cessation of every mental energizing, that such a union of the deified minds and of the super-divine light takes place.”[89] And the original cause and final effect of such a going forth from self, are indicated in words which were worked out in a vivid fulness by Catherine’s whole convert life: “Divine Love is ecstatic, not permitting any lovers to belong to themselves, but only to those beloved by them. And this love, the superior beings show by being full of forethought for their inferiors; those equal in rank, by their mutual coherence; and the inferior by a looking back and up to the superior ones.”[90]
Dionysius here everywhere follows Proclus. Yet the noblest Neo-Platonist sayings are again furnished by Plotinus: “We are not cut off or severed from the Light, but we breathe and consist in It, since It ever enlightens and bears us, as long as It is what It is.” In the moments of Union, “we are able to see both Him and ourself,—ourself in dazzling splendour, full of spiritual light, or rather one with the pure Light Itself … our life’s flame is then enkindled.” “There the soul rests, after it has fled up, away from evil, to the place which is free from evils … and the true life is there.” “Arrived there, the soul becomes that which she was at first.”[91] And if Plotinus has thus already got the symbolism of place, he is as fully aware as Catherine herself that, for purposes of vivid presentation, he is spacializing spiritual, that is, unextended, qualitative states and realities. “Things incorporeal do not get excluded by bodies; they are severed only by otherness and difference: hence, when such otherness is absent, they, not differing, are near each other.” And already, as with Catherine, there is the apparent finality, and yet also the renewed search for more. “The seer and the seen have become one, as though it were a case not of vision but of union.” “When he shall have crossed over as the image to its Archetype, then he will have reached his journey’s end.” And yet this “ecstasy, simplification, and donation of one’s self,” this “quiet,” is still also “a striving after contact,” “a musing to achieve union.”[92]
4. Terminology of the soul’s reaction.
(1) Certain terms and conceptions in connection with the soul’s return to God, which are specially dear to Catherine, already appear, fully developed, in Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus; in part, even in Plato. Her “suddenly “ (subito) appears but rarely in Dionysius, e.g. in Heavenly Hierarchy xv, 2; but it is carefully explained by him in his Third Epistle, specially devoted to the subject.[93] It is common in Plotinus: “Suddenly the soul saw, without seeing how it saw”; “suddenly thou shalt receive light,” “suddenly shining.”[94] And in Plato we find: “He who has learnt to see the Beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes towards the end, will suddenly perceive a Nature of wondrous beauty—Beauty alone, absolute, separate, simple and everlasting”: a passage which derives its imagery from the Epopteia of the Eleusynian Mysteries,—the sudden appearance, the curtain being withdrawn, upon the stage whereon the Heathen Mystery-play was being performed, under a peculiar fairy-illumination, of the figures of Demeter, Kore, and Iacchus, as the culmination of a long succession of purifications and initiations.[95]
Catherine’s “wound,” or “wounding stroke,” (ferita), is, in part, the necessary consequence of the “arrow” conception already considered; in part, the echo of that group of terms which, in Dionysius and Proclus even more than in Plotinus, express the painfully sudden and overwhelming, free-grace character of God’s action upon the soul,—especially of ἐπιβολή, “immissio,” a “coming-upon,” a “hitting,” a very common word in the Areopagite; μετοχή, “communication,” and παραδοχή, “reception,” being the corresponding terms for God’s and the soul’s share in this encounter respectively. Thus: “Unions, whether we call them immissions or receptions from God.”[96]
“Presence,” “presenza,” παρουσιά, is another favourite term, as with Catherine so also with Dionysius and Proclus. Thus the Areopagite: “The presence of the spiritual light causes recollection and unity in those that are being enlightened with it,” “His wholly inconceivable presence.”[97] And Proclus: “Every perfect spiritual contact and communion is owing to the presence of God.”[98] And the conception of a sudden presence goes back, among the Neo-Platonists, to Plato and the Greek Mysteries, in which the God was held suddenly to arrive and to take part in the sacred dance. Such rings of sacred dancers, “choirs,” are still characteristic of Dionysius—e.g. Heavenly Hierarchy, vii, 4—but they are quite wanting in Catherine.—But “contact,” “touch,” ἐπαφή,—said of God’s direct action upon the soul,—a conception so intensely active in Catherine’s mind and life, is again a favourite term with Dionysius and Proclus. The former declares this “touch” to be neither “sensible” nor “intelligible” and that “we are brought into contact with things unutterable”; the latter talks of “perfect spiritual contact.”[99]