And finally Loda LXXXVII, “Of true and false discretion,” which, in vv. 12-20, consists of a dialogue between “the Flesh” and “the Reason,” will have helped to suggest the slight beginnings of this form of apprehension to Catherine which we have found amongst her authentic sayings and experiences, and which were, later on, developed on so large a scale, by Battista Vernazza, throughout her long Dialogo della Beata Caterina.
5. Jacopone it is, then, who furnished Catherine with much help towards that rare combination of deep feeling with severely abstract thinking which, if at times it somewhat strains and wearies us moderns who would ever end with the concrete, gives a nobly virile, bracing note to even the most effective of her sayings.
V. Points Common to all Five Minds; and Catherine’s Main Difference from her Four Predecessors.
If we now consider for a moment the general points common to the four writers just considered and to Catherine, we readily note that all five are profoundly reflective and interpretative in their attitude towards the given contingencies of traditional religion; that they all tend to find the Then and There of History still at work, in various degrees, Here and Now, throughout Time and Space, and in the last resort, above and behind both these categories, in a spaceless, timeless Present. And if only three, Paul, Jacopone, and Catherine, bear marks, throughout all they think and feel and do and are, of the cataclysmic conversion-crisis through which they had passed,—the temporally intermediate two, John and Dionysius, have also got, but in a more indirect form, much of a similar Dualism. All five are, in these and other respects, indefinitely closer to each other than any one of them is to the still richer, more complete, and more entirely balanced though less articulated, Synoptic teaching, which enfolds all that is abiding in those other five, whilst they, even if united, do not approximately exhaust the substance of that teaching.
And if we would briefly define the main point on which Catherine holds views additional to, or other than, those other four, we must point to her Purgatorial teaching, which has received but little or no direct suggestion from any one of them, and which, whatever may have been its literary precursors and occasions, gives, perhaps more than anything else, a peculiarly human and personal, original and yet still modern, touch to what would otherwise be, to our feeling, too abstract and antique a spiritual physiognomy.
CHAPTER XI
CATHERINE’S LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES
Introductory: Catherine’s less ultimate Positions, concerning our Life here, are Four.
We have now attempted, (by means of a doubtless more or less artificial distinction between things that, in real life, constitute parts of one whole in a state of hardly separable inter-penetration,) a presentation of Catherine’s special, mental and psycho-physical, character and temperament, and of the principal literary stimulations and materials which acted upon, and in return were refashioned by, that character; and we have also given, in sufficient detail, the resultant doctrines and world-view acquired and developed by that deep soul and noble mind. The most important and difficult part of our task remains, however, still to be accomplished,—the attempt to get an (at least approximate) estimate of the abiding meaning, place, and worth of this whole, highly synthesized position, for and within the religious life generally and our present-day requirements in particular. For the general outline of the Introduction, (intended there more as an instrument of research and classification for the literature and history then about to be examined, than as this history’s final religious appraisement,) cannot dispense us from now attempting something more precise and ultimate.—I propose, then, to give the next four chapters to an examination of Catherine’s principal positions and practices, the first two, respectively, to “the less ultimate This-World Doctrines”; and “the Other-World Doctrines,” or “the Eschatology”; and the last two to “the Ultimate Implications and Problems” underlying both. The last chapter shall then sum up the whole book, and consider the abiding place and function of Mysticism, in its contrast to, and supplementation of, Asceticism, Institutionalism, and the Scientific Habit and Activity of the Mind.