2. Lode LVIIIa, LVIIIb.
The fine Loda LVIIIa, “Of Holy Poverty, Mistress of all Things,” has evidently suggested much to Catherine. “Waters, rivers, lakes, and ocean, fish within them and their swimming; airs, winds, birds, and all their flying: all these turn to jewels for me,” v. 10. How readily the sense of water, and of rapid movement within it, passes here into that of air, and of swift locomotion within it! And both these movements, are felt to represent, in vivid fashion, certain very different experiences of the soul.—“Moon, Sun, Sky, and Stars,—even these are not amongst my treasures; above the very sky those things abide, which are the object of my song,” v. 11. The positive, “analogic” method has here turned suddenly into the negative, “apophatic” one; and yet, even here, we still have the spacial symbolism, for the best is the highest up,—indeed it is this very symbolism which is made to add point to the negative declaration, a declaration which nevertheless clearly implies the mere symbolism of that spacialization. All this is fully absorbed by Catherine.—“Since God has my will, … my wings have such feathers that from earth to heaven there is no distance for me,” v. 12. Here we see how Plato filters through, complete, to Jacopone; but only in his central idea to Catherine. For the Phaedrus, 246b, c, teaches: “The perfect soul then, having become winged, soars upwards, and is the ruler of the universe; whilst the imperfect soul sheds her feathers and is borne downwards, till it settles on the solid ground.” Catherine never mentions wings nor feathers, but often dwells upon flying.
The great Loda LVIIIb, “Of Holy Poverty and its Treble Heaven,” (one passage of which is formally quoted and carefully expounded by Catherine), is a combination of Platonism, Paulinism, and Franciscanism, and has specially influenced her through its Platonist element. Verses 1-9 contain a fine apostrophe to Poverty. “O Love of Poverty, Reign of tranquillity! Poverty, high Wisdom! to be subject to nothing; through despising to possess all things created!” v. 1: all this is echoed by Catherine. But the ex-lawyer’s declaration that such a soul “has neither judge nor notary,” v. 3, did certainly not determine her literally, for we have had before us some fifteen cases in which she had recourse to lawyers. “God makes not His abode in a narrow heart; thou art, oh man, precisely as great as thine affection may be. The spirit of poverty possesses so ample a bosom, that Deity Itself takes up its dwelling there,” v. 8. Catherine’s deepest self seems to breathe from out of this profound saying.
Verses 10 to 30 describe the three heavens of successive self-despoilments. The firmamental heaven, which typifies the four-fold renouncement,—of honour, riches, science, reputation of sanctity, has left no echo in Catherine. The stellar heaven is “composed of solidified clear waters (aque solidate)”; here “the four winds” cease “that move the sea,—that perturb the mind: fear and hope, grief and joy,” 11-14. Here Plato again touches Catherine through Jacopone. For the Symposium, 197a, declares: “Love it is that produces peace among men and calm on the sea, a cessation of the winds, and repose and sleep even in trouble”; and Jacopone identifies the middle “crystalline” heaven, (“the waters above” of Genesis, chap, i,) with Plato’s “sea”; takes Plato’s (four) winds as the soul’s chief passions; and considers Plato’s “peace” and “windlessness” as equivalent to the “much silence,” which, says the Apocalypse, “arose in heaven,” viii, 1, interpreted here as “in mid-heaven.” “Not to fear Hell, nor to hope for Heaven, to rejoice in no good, to grieve over no adversity,” v. 16, is a formulation unlike Catherine, although single sayings of hers stand for sentiments analogous to the first and last.—“If the virtues are naked, and the vices are not garmented,—mortal wounds get given to the soul,” v. 19, has a symbolism exactly opposite to Catherine’s, who, we know, loves to glorify “nakedness” as the soul’s purity.—“The highest heaven” is “beyond even the imagings of the mortified fancy”; “of every good it has despoiled thee, and has expropriated thee from all virtue: lay up as a treasure this thy gain,—the sense of thine own vileness.” “O purified Love! it alone lives in the truth!” These verses, 20-22, have left a deep impress upon Catherine, although she wisely does not press that “expropriation from virtue,” which goes back at least to Plotinus, for whom the true Ecstatic is “beyond the choir of the virtues.”[110]
“That which appears to thee (as extant), is not truly, existent: so high (above) is that which truly is. True elevation of soul (la superbia) dwells in heaven above, and baseness of mind (humilitade) leads to damnation,” v. 24, is a saying to which we still have Catherine’s detailed commentary. In its markedly Platonic distinction between an upper true and a lower seeming world, and in its characteristically mystical love of paradox and a play upon words, it is more curious than abidingly important; but in its deeply Christian consciousness of “pride” and “humility,” in their ordinary ethical sense, being respectively the subtlest vice and the noblest virtue, it rises sheer above all Platonist and Neo-Platonist apprehension.
“Love abides in prison, in that darksome light! All light there is darkness, and all darkness there is as the day,” vv. 26, 27. Here Catherine no doubt found aids towards her prison-conception,—of the loving soul imprisoned in the earthly body, and of the imperfect, yet loving, disembodied souls imprisoned in Purgatory; and towards articulating her strong sense of the change in the meaning and value of the same symbols, as the soul grows in depth and experience. But her symbolization of God, and of our apprehension of Him as Light and Fire, is too solidly established in her mind, to allow her to emphasize the darkness-symbol with any reference to Him.
“There where Christ is enclosed (in the soul), all the old is changed by Him,—the one is transformed into the Other, in a marvellous union. To live as I and yet not I; and my very being to be not mine: this is so great a cross-purpose (traversio), that I know not how to define it,” vv. 28-30. This vivid description, based of course upon St. Paul, of the apparent shifting of the very centre of the soul’s personality, has left clear echoes in Catherine’s sayings; but the explicit reference to Christ is here as characteristically Franciscan as it is unlike Catherine’s special habits.—And the great poem ends with a refrain of its opening apostrophe.
3. Lode LXXIV, LXXIX, LXXXI, LXXXIII.
In the dramatically vivid Dialogue between the Old and the Young Friar “Concerning the divers manners of contemplating the Cross,” Loda LXXIV, the elder says to the younger man: “And I find the Cross full of arrows, which issue from its side: they get fixed in my heart. The Archer has aimed them at me; He causes me to be pierced,” v. 6. The Cross is here a bow; and yet the arrows evidently issue not from it, but, as so many rays, from the Sun, the Light-Christ, Who is laid upon it,—from the heart of the Crucified. Catherine maintains the rays and arrows, and the Sun and Fire from which they issue; but the Cross and the Crucified, presupposed here throughout, appear not, even to this extent, in her post-conversion picturings.—“You abide by the warmth, but I abide within the fire; to you it is delight, but I am burning through and through, I cannot find a place of refuge in this furnace,” v. 13. All this has been echoed throughout by Catherine.
Loda LXXIX, “Of the Divine Love and its Praises,” has evidently much influenced her. “O joyous wound, delightful wound, gladsome wound, for him who is wounded by Thee, O Love!” “O Love, divine Fire! Love full of laughter and playfulness!” “O Love, sweet and suave; O Love, Thou art the key of heaven! Ship that Thou art, bring me to port and calm the tempest,” vv. 3, 6, 16. All this we have found reproduced in her similes and experiences. “Love, bounteous in spending Thyself; Love with widespread tables!” “Love, Thou art the One that loves, and the Means wherewith the heart loves Thee!” vv. 24, 26. These verses give us the wide, wide world outlook, the connection between Love and the Holy Eucharist, and the identity of the Subject, Means, and Object of Love, which are all so much dwelt upon by Catherine.