The symbols of “Nakedness” and “Garments,” as indicative respectively of the soul’s purity and impurity or self-delusion, are, though most prominent in Catherine, rare in Dionysius. But his declaration: “The nakedness of the (Angels’) feet indicates purification from the addition of all things external and assimilation to the divine simplicity” exactly expresses her idea.[100] And Proclus has it more fully: The soul, on descending into the body, forsakes unity, “and around her, from all sides, there grow multiform kinds of existence and manifold garments”; “love of honour is the last garment of souls”; and “when,” in mounting up, “we lay aside our passions and garments which, in coming down, we had put on, we must also strip off that last garment, in order that, having become (entirely) naked, we may establish ourselves before God, having made ourselves like to the divine life.”[101]
(2) Again, as to Triads, it is interesting to note that Catherine has nothing about the three stages or ways of the inner life,—purgative, illuminative, unitive,—of which Dionysius is full, and which are already indicated in Proclus; for we can find but two in her life, the purgative and unitive, and in her teaching these two alone appear, mostly in close combination, sometimes in strong contrast. Nor has she anything about the three degrees or kinds of prayer,—Meditation, Contemplation, Union,—as indicated in Dionysius: “It behoves us, by our prayers, to be lifted into proximity with the Divine Trinity; and then, by still further approaching it, to be initiated…; and (lastly) to make ourselves one with it”; and as taught by Proclus: “Knowledge leads, then follows proximity, and then union.”[102] With her we only get Contemplation and Union.—Nor do we get in her anything about thrice three choirs of Angels, or three orders of Christian Ministrants, or three classes of Christian people, or thrice three groups of Sacraments and Sacramental acts. For she is too intensely bent upon immediate intercourse with God, and too much absorbed in the sense of profound unity and again of innumerable multiplicity, to be attracted by Dionysius’s Neo-Platonist ladder of carefully graduated intermediaries, or by his continuous interest in triads of every kind. Catherine thus follows the current in Dionysius which insists upon direct contact between the soul and the transcendent God, and ignores the other, which bridges over the abyss between the two by carefully graduated intermediaries: these intermediaries having become, with her, successive stages of purification and of ever more penetrating union of the one soul with the one God.
5. Deification, especially through the Eucharist.
As to the end of the whole process, we find that Deification, so frequently implied or suggested by Catherine, is formally taught by Dionysius: “A union of the deified minds” (ἐκθεουμένων); the heavenly and the earthly Hierarchy have the power and task “to communicate to their subjects, according to the dignity of each, the sacred deification” (ἐκθέωσις); “we are led up, by means of the multiform of sensible symbols, to the uniform Deification.”[103] “The One is the very God,” says Proclus, “but the Mind (the Noûs) is the divinest of beings, and the soul is divine, and the body is godlike.… And every body that is God-like is so through the soul having become divine; and every soul that is divine, is so through the Mind being very divine; and every Mind that is thus very divine, is so through participation in the Divine One.”[104] There are preformations of this doctrine in Plotinus and echoes of it throughout Catherine’s sayings.
And the Areopagite’s teaching that the chief means and the culmination of this deification are found and reached in the reception of the Holy Eucharist will no doubt also have stimulated Catherine’s mind: “The Communicant is led to the summit of deiformation, as far as this is possible for him.”[105] And her soul responds completely to the beautiful Dionysian-Proclian teaching concerning God’s presence in all things, as the cause of the profound sympathy which binds them all together. “They say,” declares Dionysius, “that He is in minds … and in bodies, and in heaven and in earth; (indeed that He is) sun, fire, water, spirit … all things existing, and yet again not one of all things existing.” “The distribution of boundless power passes from Almighty God all things, and no single being but has intellectual, or rational, or sensible, or vital, or essential power.” “The gifts of the unfailing Power pass on to men and (lesser) living creatures, to plants, and to the entire nature of the Universe.”[106] This latter passage was suggested by Proclus: “One would say that, through participation in the One, all things are deified, each according to its rank, inclusive of the very lowest of beings.” “The image of the One and the inter-communion existing through it,—this it is that produces the extant sympathy” which permeates all things.[107]—But Catherine has nowhere the term “echo,” which is so dear to Dionysius: “His all-surpassing power holds together and preserves even the remotest of its echoes”; “the sun and plants are or hold most distant echoes of the Good and of Life”; indeed even the licentious man still possesses, in his very passion, “as it were a faint echo of Union and of Friendship.”[108]
6. Dionysius and Catherine; three agreements and differences.
I conclude with three important points of difference and similarity between Catherine and Dionysius.
(1) Catherine abstains from the use of those repulsive, impossibly hyperbolic epithets such as “the Super-Good,” “the Above-Mind,” which Dionysius is never weary of applying to God, and is content with ever feeling and declaring how high above the very best conception which she can form of mind and of goodness He undoubtedly is; thus wisely moderated, I take it, by her constant experience and faith as to God’s immediate presence within the human soul, which soul cannot, consequently, be presented as entirely remote from the nature of God.
(2) Catherine transforms over-intense and impoverishing insistence upon the pure Oneness of God, such as we find it even in Dionysius and still more in Proclus, into a, sometimes equally over-intense, conception as to the oneness of our union with Him, leaving Him to be still conceived as an overflowing richness of all kinds.
(3) And Catherine keeps, in an interesting manner, Hellenic, and specifically Platonic, formulation for the deepest of her experiences and teachings, since her standing designation of God and of Our Lord is never personal, “My Lover” or “My Friend”; but, as it were, elemental, “Love” or “My Love.” Her keen self-purifying instinct and reverence for God will have spontaneously inclined her thus to consider Him first as an Ocean of Being in which to quench and drown her small, clamorous individuality, and this as a necessary step towards reconstituting that true personality, which, itself spirit, would be penetrated and sustained by the Spirit, Christ, God. And then the Pauline-Joannine picturings of God as a quasi-place and extended substance (“from Him and in Him and to Him,” “in the Spirit,” “in Christ,” “God is Charity and he that abideth in Charity, abideth in Him”) will have strongly confirmed this trend. Yet Dionysius too must have greatly helped on this movement of her mind. For in Dionysius the standing appellations for God are, in true Neo-Platonist fashion, derived from extended or diffusive material substances or conditions, Light, Fire, Fountain, Ocean; and from that pervasive emotion, Love, strictly speaking Desire, Eros.