And if Catherine is profoundly reflective, that reflection is, in its general drift, deeply dualistic,—at least in the matter of body and spirit. Their difference and incompatibility; the spirit’s fleeing of the body; the spirit’s getting outside of it,—by ecstasy, for a little while, even in this earthly life, and by this earthly body’s death, for good and all; the body a prison-house, a true purgatory to the soul: all this hangs well together, and is largely, in its very form, of ultimately Neo-Platonist or Platonic origin.
1. New Testament valuations of the body.
Now here is one of the promised instances of a double type—if not of doctrine, yet at least of emotional valuation in the New Testament.
(1) In the Synoptist documents, (with the but apparent, or at least solitary, exceptions, of Jesus’ Fasting in the Desert and of His commendation of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven),[113] we find no direct or acute antagonism to the body, even to the average earthly human body, in the teaching and practice of Our Lord. The Second Coming and its proximity do indeed, here also, dwarf all earthly concerns, in so far as earthly.[114] This background to the teaching and its tradition was, in course of time, in part abstracted from, in part restated.—The entrance into life is through the narrow gate and the steep way; only if a man turn, can he enter into the Kingdom of God; only if he lose his soul, can he find it:[115] this great teaching and example, as to life and joy being ever reached through death to self and by the whole-hearted turning of the soul from its false self to its true source, God: remains, in the very form of its promulgation as given by the Synoptists, the fundamental test and standard of all truly spiritual life and progress. But as to the body in particular, Jesus here knows indeed that “the flesh is weak,” and that we must pray for strength against its weakness:[116] but He nowhere declares it evil—an inevitable prison-house or a natural antagonist to the spirit. The beautiful balance of an unbroken, unstrained nature, and a corresponding doctrine as full of sober earnestness as it is free from all concentrated or systematic dualism, are here everywhere apparent.
(2) It is St. Paul, the man of the strongest bodily passions and temptations, he who became suddenly free from them by the all-transforming lightning-flash of his conversion, who, on and on, remained vividly conscious of what he had been and, but for that grace, still would be, and of what, through that grace, he had become. The deepest shadows are thus ever kept in closest contrast to the highest lights; and the line of demarcation between them runs here along the division between body and soul. “Unhappy man that I am, who can liberate me from this body of sin?” “In my flesh dwelleth no good thing”:[117] are sayings which are both keener in their tone and more limited in their range than are Our Lord’s. And we have seen how, in one of his most depressed moods, he transiently adopts and carries on a specifically Platonist attitude towards the body’s relation to the soul, as he finds it in that beautiful, profoundly Hellenistic treatise, the Book of Wisdom.[118] This attitude evidently represents, in his strenuous and deeply Christian character, only a passing feeling; for, if we pressed it home, we could hardly reconcile it with his doctrine as to the reality and nature of the body’s resurrection. It is indeed clear how the Platonist, and especially the Neo-Platonist, mode of conceiving that relation excludes any and every kind of body from the soul’s final stage of purification and happiness; and how the Synoptic, and indeed the generally Christian conception of it, necessarily eliminates that keen and abiding dualism characteristic of the late Greek attitude.
2. Platonic, Synoptic, and Pauline elements in Catherine’s view.
Now in Catherine we generally find an interesting combination of the Platonic form with the Synoptic substance and spirit: and this can, of course, be achieved only because that abiding form itself is made to signify a changed set and connection of ideas.
(1) We have seen how she dwells much, Plotinus-like, upon the soul’s stripping itself of all its numerous garments, and exposing itself naked to the rays of God’s healing light. Yet in the original Platonic scheme these garments are put on by the soul in its descent from spirit into matter, and are stripped off again in its ascent back out of matter into spirit; in both cases, they stand for the body and its effects. In Catherine, even more than in Plotinus, the garments stand for various evil self-attachments and self-delusions of the soul; and against these evils and dangers the Synoptists furnish endless warnings. And yet she insists upon purity, clear separation, complete abstraction of the soul, in such terms as still to show plainly enough the originally Neo-Platonist provenance of much of her form; for in the Neo-Platonists we get, even more markedly than here, a like insistence upon the natural dissimilarity of the body and the soul, and a cognate longing to get away from it in ecstasy and death. But whilst in the Neo-Platonists there is, at the bottom of all this, a predominant belief that the senses are the primary source and occasion of all sin, so that sin is essentially the contamination of spirit by matter: in Catherine, (although she shares to the full Plotinus’s thirst for ecstasy, as the escape from division and trouble into unity and peace), impurity stands primarily for self-complacency,—belief in, and love of, our imaginary independence of even God Himself; and purity means, in the first instance, the loving Him and His whole system of souls and of life, and one’s own self only in and as part of that system.
It is very instructive to note, in this connection, how, after her four years of directly penitential and ascetical practice, (an activity which, even then, extended quite as much to matters of decentralization of the self as of bodily mortification), her warfare is, in the first instance, all but exclusively directed against the successive refuges and ambushes of self-complacency and self-centredness. Thus there is significance in the secondary place occupied, (even in the Vita, and doubtless still more in her own mind), by the question of continence; indeed her great declaration to the Friar indicates plainly her profound concentration upon the continuous practice of, and growth in, Love Divine, and her comparative indifference to the question of the systematic renunciation of anything but sin and selfish attachments and self-centrednesses of any kind. Her conception of sinners as “cold,” even more than as dark or stained; of God as Fire, even more than as Light; and of purity as indefinitely increasable, since Love can grow on and on: all similarly point to this finely positive, flame-, not snow-conception, in which purity has ceased to be primarily, as with the Greeks, a simple absence of soiledness, even if it be moral soiledness, and has become, as with the Synoptic teaching, something primarily positive, love itself.
In her occasionally intense insistence upon herself as being all evil, a very Devil, and in some of her picturings of her interior combat, we get, on the other hand, echoes, not of Plato, nor again of the Synoptist teaching, but of St. Paul’s “in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing,” and of his combat between flesh and spirit.—Yet the evil which she is thus conscious of, is not sensual nor even sensible evil and temptation, but consists in her unbounded natural claimfulness and intense inclination to sensitive self-absorption.—And this gives, indeed, to these feminine echoes of St. Paul a certain thin shrillness which the original tones have not got, standing there for the massive experiences of a man violently solicitated by both sense and spirit. But it leaves her free to note, as regards the flesh, the whole bodily organism, (and this in beautiful sympathy with Our Lord’s own genially fervent, homely heroic spirit), not its wickedness, but its weakness, its short-livedness, and its appeal for merciful allowance to God, “Who knows that we are dust.” Instead of a direct and pointed dualism of two distinct substances informed by all but incurably antagonistic principles, we thus get a direct conflict between two dispositions of the soul, and a but imperfect correspondence between the body and that soul.