Loda LXXXI is interesting by the way in which, although treating of “the love of Christ upon the Cross,” it everywhere apostrophizes Love and not the Lover, and treats the former, again like Catherine, as a kind of boundless living substance; indeed v. 17 must have helped to suggest one of her favourite conceptions: “O great Love, greater than the great sea! Oh! the man who is drowned within it, under it, and with it all around him, whilst he knows not where he is!”
Loda LXXXIII has two touches dear to Catherine. “O Love, whose name is ‘I love’—the plural is never found,” v. 5,—a saying which evidently is directed, not against a social conception of religion, but against a denial of the Divine Love being Source as well as Object of our love; and “I did not love Thee with any gain to myself, until I loved Thee for Thine own sake,” v. 15,—a declaration of wondrous depth and simplicity.
4. Lode LXXXVIII, LXXXIX, LXXXX, LXXXXVIII, LXXXXIX.
The great Loda LXXXVIII, “How the soul complains to God concerning the excessive ardours of the love infused into it,” contains numerous touches which have been interestingly responded to or ignored by Catherine. “All my will is on fire with Love, is united, transformed (into It); who can bear such Love? Nor fire nor sword can part the loving soul and her Love; a thing so united cannot be divided; neither suffering nor death can henceforth mount up to that height where the soul abides in ecstasy,” vv. 5, 6: a combination of St. Paul and Plotinus, quite after Catherine’s heart. But “the light of the sun appears to me obscure, now that I see that resplendent Countenance,” v. 7, has an anthropomorphic touch to which she does not respond; and “I have given all my heart, that it may possess that Lover who renews me so,—O Beauty ancient and ever new!” v. 10, has the personal designation “Lover,” which, again, is alien to her vocabulary.
“Seeing such Beauty, I have been drawn out of myself … and the heart now gets undone, melted as though it were wax, and finds itself again, with the likeness of Christ upon it,” v. 11, must have stimulated, by its first part, some of her own experiences, and will, by its second part, taken literally, have helped on the fantastic expectations of her attendants. “Love rises to such ardour, that the heart seems to be transfixed as with a knife,” v. 14, no doubt both expressed an experience of Jacopone and helped to constitute the form of a similar experience on the part of Catherine. “As iron, which is all on fire, as dawn, made resplendent by the sun, lose their own form (nature) and exist in another, so is it with the pure mind, when clothed by Thee, O Love,” v. 21, contains ideas, (all but the symbol of clothing,) very dear to Catherine. But the astonishingly daring words: “Since my soul has been transformed into Truth, into Thee, O Christ alone, into Thee Who art tender Loving,—not to myself but to Thee can be imputed what I do. Hence, if I please Thee not, Thou dost not please Thine Own Self, O Love!” v. 22, remain unechoed by her, no doubt because her states shift from one to another, and she wisely abstains from pushing the articulation of any one of them to its own separate logical limit.
“Thou wast born into the world by love and not by flesh, O Love become Man (humanato Amore),” v. 27, is like her in its interesting persistence in the “Love” (not “Lover”) designation, but is unlike her in its definite reference to the historic Incarnation. “Love, O Love, Jesus, I have reached the haven,” v. 32, is closely like her, all but the explicit mention of the historic name; and “Love, O Love, Thou art the full-orbed circle,” “Thou art both warp and woof,” beginning and end, material and transforming agency, v. 33, is Catherine’s central idea, expressed in a form much calculated to impress it upon her.
The daring and profound Loda LXXXIX, “How the soul, by holy self-annihilation and love, reaches an unknowable and indescribable state,” contains again numerous touches which have been assimilated by Catherine. So with: “Drawn forth, out of her natural state, into that unmeasurable condition whither love goes to drown itself, the soul, having plunged into the abyss of this ocean, henceforth cannot find, on any side, any means of issuing forth from it,” vv. 12, 13. So also with: “Since thou dost no longer love thyself, but alone that Goodness … it has become necessary for thee again to love thyself, but with His Love,—into so great an unity hast thou been drawn by Him,” vv. 52-54. So too with: “All Faith ceases for the soul to whom it has been given to see; and all Hope, since it now actually holds what it used to seek,” v. 70, although this is more absolute than are her similar utterances.—But especially are the startling words interesting: “In this transformation, thou drinkest Another, and that Other drinketh thee (tu bevi e sei bevuto, in transformazione),” v. 98, which, in their second part, are identical with R. Browning’s “My end, to slake Thy thirst”:[111] for they will have helped to support or to encourage Catherine’s corresponding inversion—the teaching of an eating, an assimilation, not of God by man, but of man by God. Both sets of images go back, of course, to the Eucharistic reception by the soul of the God-man Christ, under the forms of Bread eaten and of Wine drunk.
The striking Loda LXXXX, “How the soul arrives at a treble state of annihilation,” has doubtless suggested much to Catherine. “He who has become the very Cause of all things” (chi è cosa d’ogni cosa) “can never more desire anything,” v. 4, is, it is true, more daring, because more quietly explicit, than any saying of hers. But v. 13 has been echoed by her throughout: “The heavens have grown stagnant; their silence constrains me to cry aloud: ‘O profound Ocean, the very depth of Thine Abyss has constrained me to attempt and drown myself within it,’”—where note the interestingly antique presupposition of the music of the spheres, which has now stopped, and of the watery constitution of the crystalline heaven, which allows of stagnation; and the rapidity of the change in the impressions,—from immobility to silence, and from air to water. Indeed that Ocean is one as much of air as of water, and as little the one as the other; and its attractive force is still that innate affinity between the river-soul and its living Source and Home, the Ocean God, which we have so constantly found in Plotinus, Proclus, and Dionysius. “The land of promise is, for such a soul, no longer one of promise only: for the perfect soul already reigns within that land. Men can thus transform themselves, in any and every place,” v. 18, has, in its touching and lofty Stoic-Christian teaching, found the noblest response and re-utterance in and by Catherine’s words and life.
Loda LXXXXVIII, “Of the Incarnation of the Divine Word,” full though it is of beautiful Franciscanism, has left her uninfluenced. But the fine Loda LXXXXIX, “How true Love is not idle,” contains touches which have sunk deep into her mind. “Splendour that givest to all the world its light, O Love Jesus … heaven and earth are by Thee; Thine action resplends in all things and all things turn to Thee. Only the sinner despises Thy Love and severs himself from Thee, his Creator,” v. 6, is, in its substance, taken over by her. “O ye cold sinners!” v. 12, is her favourite epithet. And vv. 13, 14, with their rapid ringing of the changes on the different sense-perceptions, will, by their shifting vividness, have helped on a similar iridescence in her own imagery: “O Odour, that transcendest every sweetness! O living river of Delight … that causest the very dead to return to their vigour! In heaven Thy lovers possess Thine immense Sweetness, tasting there those savoury morsels.”