And, to come to the true answer to our objection, such a judgment does not mean that the reflective penetration and reapplication of the original more spontaneous message was, from the very nature of the case, inferior to the first less articulated announcement of the Good Tidings. But it merely signifies that this necessary process of reflection could only be applied to parts of the original, immensely rich and varied, because utterly living, divinely spiritual, whole; and that, thus, the special balance and tension which characterized the original, complete spirit and temper, could, however profoundly, be reproduced only in part. For the time being this later penetration and resetting of some elements from among the whole of Our Lord’s divinely rich and simple life and teaching, necessarily and rightly, yet none the less most really, ignored, or put for the time into some other context, certain other sides and aspects of that primitive treasure of inexhaustible experience. Only the full, equable, and simultaneous unfolding of all the petals could have realized the promise and content of the bud; whereas the bud, holding enfolded within itself such various elements and combinations of truth, could not expand its petals otherwise than successively, hence, at any one moment only somewhat one-sidedly and partially. Each and all of these unfoldings bring some further insight into, and articulation of, the original spiritual organism; and that they are not more, but less, than the totality of that primitive experience and revelation, does not prove that such reflective work is wrong or even simply dispensable,—for, on the contrary, in some degree or form it was and ever is necessary to the soul’s apprehension of that life and truth,—but simply implies the immensity of the spiritual light and impulsion given by Our Lord, and the relative smallness of even the greatest of His followers.
Thus only if it could be shown that those parts of the New Testament which doubtless give us the nearest approach to the actual words and deeds of Our Lord require us to conceive them as having been without the reflective and emotional element; or again that, in the case of the more derivative parts of the New Testament, it is their reflectiveness, and not their relative incompleteness and one-sidedness, that cause them to be more readily englobed in the former world, than that former world in the latter: could the facts here found be used as an argument against the importance and strict necessity for religion of the reflective and emotional, the “Subjective” elements, alongside of the “Objective,” the Historical and Institutional ones.
It is a most legitimate ground for consolation to a Catholic when he finds the necessities of life and those of learned research both driving us more and more to this conclusion; for it is not deniable that Catholicism has ever refused to do more than include the Pauline and Joannine theologies amongst its earliest and most normative stimulations and expressions; and that it has ever retained, far more than Protestantism, the sense, which (upon the whole) is most unbrokenly preserved by the Synoptists, of, if I may so phrase it, the Christianity of certain true elements in the pre- and extra-Christian religions. For it is in the Synoptists that we get the clear presentation of Our Lord’s attitude towards the Jewish Church of His time, as one, even at its keenest, analogous to that of Savonarola, and not to that of a Luther, still less of a Calvin, towards the Christian Church of their day.—Indeed in these documents all idea of limiting Christianity to what He brought of new, appears as foreign to His mind as it ever has been to that of the Catholic Church. Here we get the most spontaneous and many-sided expression of that divinely human, widely traditional and social, all-welcoming and all-transforming spirit, which embraces both grace and nature, eternity and time, soul and body, attachment and detachment. The Pauline strain stands for the stress necessary to the full spiritualization of all those occasions and materials, as against all, mere unregenerate or static, retention of the simple rudiments or empty names of those things; and predominantly insists upon grace, not nature; eternity, not time; soul, not body; the cross and death here, the Crown and Life hereafter. No wonder it is this latter strain that gets repeated, with varying truth and success, in times of acute transition, and by characters more antithetic than synthetic, more great at developing a part of the truth than the whole.
Thinkers, of such wide historical outlook and unimpeachable detachment from immediate controversial interest as Prof. Wilhelm Dilthey and Dr. Edward Caird, have brought out, with admirable force, this greater fulness of content offered by the Synoptists, and how the Pauline-Joannine writings give us the first and most important of those concentrations upon, and in part philosophic and mystical reinterpretations of, certain constituents of the original happenings, actions and message, as apprehended and transmitted by the first eye-witnesses and believers.[112]—Here I would but try and drive home the apparently vague, but in reality ever pressing and concrete, lesson afforded by the clear and dominant fact of these two groups within the New Testament itself:—of how no mere accumulation of external happenings, or of external testimony as to their having happened,—no amount of history or of institutionalism, taken as sheer, purely positive givennesses,—can anywhere be found, or can anywhere suffice for the human mind and conscience, in the apprehension and embodiment of the truth. For although, in Our Lord’s most literally transmitted sayings and doings, this continuous and inalienable element of the apprehending, organizing, vitalizing mind and heart,—on His part above all, but also on the part of His several hearers and chroniclers,—can mostly still be traced and must everywhere be assumed: yet it is in the Pauline-Joannine literature that the ever important, the rightly and fruitfully “subjective,” the speculative and emotional, the mystical and the volitional strain can best be studied, both as to its necessity and as to its special character and dangers, because here it is developed to the relative exclusion of the other factors of complete religion.
4. The exclusive emotionalism of Dionysius and Jacopone.
Now if even in St. Paul and St. John there is a strong predominance of these reflective-emotional elements, in Dionysius and Jacopone they threaten to become exclusive of everything else. Especially is this the case with the Pseudo-Areopagite, steeped as he is in reflection upon reflections and in emotion upon emotions, often of the most subtle kind: a Christian echo, with curiously slight modifications, of Neo-Platonism in its last stage,—hence, unfortunately, of the over-systematic and largely artificial Proclus, instead of the predominantly experimental and often truly sublime Plotinus. And even Jacopone, although he has distinctly more of the historic element, is still predominantly reflective-emotional, and presents us with many a hardly modified Platonic or Stoic doctrine, derived no doubt from late Graeco-Roman writers and their mediaeval Christian echoes.
5. Catherine’s interpretation of the Gospel Ideal.
Catherine herself, although delightfully free from the long scale of mediations between the soul and God which forms one of the predominant doctrines of the Areopagite, continues and emphasizes most of what is common, and much of what is special to, all and each of these four writers; she is a reflective saint, if ever there was one. And of her too we shall have to say that she is great by what she possesses, and not by what she is without: great because of her noble embodiment of the reflective and emotional, the mystical and volitional elements of Christianity and Religion generally. Religion is here, at first sight at least, all but entirely a thought and an emotion; yet all this thought and emotion is directed to, and occasioned by, an abiding Reality which originates, sustains, regulates, and fulfils it. And although this Reality is in large part conceived, in Greek and specially in Neo-Platonist fashion, rather under its timeless and spaceless, or at least under its cosmic aspect, rather as Law and Substance, than as Personality and Spirit: yet, already because of the strong influence upon her of the noblest Platonic doctrine, it is loved as overflowing Love and Goodness, as cause and end of all lesser love and goodness; and the real, though but rarely articulated, acceptance and influence of History and Institutions, above all the enthusiastic devotion to the Holy Eucharist with all its great implications, gives to the whole a profoundly Christian tone and temper.
True, the Church at large, indeed the single soul (if we would take such a soul as our standard of completeness) requires a larger proportion of those crisp, definite outlines, of those factual, historical, and institutional elements; a very little less than what remains in Catherine of these elements, and her religion would be a simple, even though deep religiosity, a general aspiration, not a definite finding, an explicit religion. Yet it remains certain, although ever readily forgotten by religious souls, especially by theological apologists, that without some degree and kind of those outgoing, apprehending, interpreting activities, no religion is possible. Only the question as to what these activities should be, and what is their true place and function within the whole religious life, remains an open one. And this question we can study with profit in connection with such a life and teaching as Catherine’s, which brings out, with a spontaneous, childlike profundity and daring, the elemental religious passion, the spiritual hunger and thirst of man when he is once fully awake; the depths within him anticipating the heights above him; the affinity to and contact with the Infinite implied and required by that nobly incurable restlessness of his heart, which finds its rest in Him alone Who made it.