Now this, for our modern and Christian feeling, curiously impersonal, general and abstract method goes back, through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato, who, above all in his Symposium, is dominated by the two tendencies and requirements, of identifying the First and Perfect with the most General and the most Abstract; and of making the very prerequisites and instruments of the search for It,—even the earthly Eros, still so far from the Heavenly Eros and from the Christian Agapē,—into occasions, effects or instalments of and for the great Reality sought by them. And since it is thus the love, the desire, the eros, of things beautiful, and true, and good,—a love first sensible, then intellectual, and at last spiritual, which makes us seek and find It, the Beauty, Truth, and Goodness which is First Cause and Final End of the whole series, this Cause and End will be considered not as a Lover but as Love Itself. It is plain, I think, that it is specially this second motive, this requirement of a pervading organization and circle of and within the life of spirits and of the Spirit, which has also determined Catherine to retain Plato’s terminology.
IV. Jacopone Da Todi’s “lode.”
In the case of Jacopone, the suddenly wife-bereft and converted lawyer, an ardent poet doubled by a soaring, daring mystic, with an astonishing richness of simultaneous symbols and conceptions and rapidity of successive complements and contrasts, it will really be simplest if I take the chief touches which have characteristically stimulated Catherine or have left her unaffected, in the order and grouping in which they appear in his chief “Lode,” as these latter are given in the first printed edition, probably the very one used by Catherine.[109]
1. Lode XIII, XXIII, XXXV, XLV.
In Loda XIII “the vicious soul is likened unto Hell,” vv. 1-7; and “the soul that yesterday was Hell, to-day has turned into Heaven,” v. 8. We thus get here, precisely as in Catherine, the spaceless conditions of the soul and their modifications treated under the symbols of places and of the spacial change from one place to the other.
In Loda XXIII we first have five successive purifications and purities of Love, “carnal, counterfeit, self-seeking, natural, spiritual, transformed,” vv. 1-6; and then the symbols of spacial location and movement reappear, “if height does not abase itself, it cannot participate with, nor communicate itself to, the lowest grade”; all which is frequent with Catherine. But she nowhere echoes the teaching reproduced here, v. 10, as to the Divine Trinity being figured in man’s three faculties of soul.
Loda XXXV gives us a sort of Christian Stoicism very dear dear to Catherine: “Thou, my soul, hast been created in great elevation; thy nature is grounded in great nobility (gentilezza),” v. 7; “thou hast not thy life in created things; it is necessary for thee to breathe in other countries, to mount up to God thine inheritance, Who (alone) can satisfy thy poverty,” v. 10; “great is the honour which thou doest to God, when thou abidest (stare) in Him, in thy (true) nobility,” v. 11.
Loda XLV gives “the Five Modes in which God appears in the Soul”—“the state of fear”; mercenary, “beggar-love”; “the way of love”; “the paternal mode”; “the mode of espousals.” Catherine leaves the last two, anthropomorphic and familial, conceptions quite unused, and passes in her life, at one bound, from the first to the third mode.