(2) There is, indeed, no doubt that the very ancient association of the ideas of Fire and of spiritual Purification goes back, in the first instance, to the conception of the soul being necessarily stained by the very fact of its connection with the body, and of those stains being finally removed by the body’s death and cremation. We find this severely self-consistent view scattered up and down Hellenic religion and literature.[119] And even in Catherine the fire, a sense of fever-heat, still seizes the body, and this body wastes away, and leaves the soul more and more pure, during those last years of illness.—Yet the striking identity, between that old cluster of ideas and her own forms of thought, brings out, all the more clearly, the immense road traversed by spirituality between the substance of those ideas and the essence of this thought. For in her teaching, which is but symbolized or at most occasioned by those physico-psychical fever-heats, the Fire is, at bottom, so spiritual and so directly busy with the soul alone, that it is ever identical with itself in Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and on earth, and stands for God Himself; and that its effects are not the destruction of a foreign substance, but the bringing back, wherever and as far as possible, of the fire-like soul’s disposition and quality to full harmony with its Fire-source and Parent, God Himself.
(3) Only the Prison-house simile for the body, as essentially an earthly purgatory for the soul, must be admitted, I think, to remain a primarily Platonic, not fully Christianizable conception; just as the absence of all reference by her to the resurrection of the body will have been, in part, occasioned by the strong element of Platonism in her general selection and combination of ideas. Yet it would obviously be unfair to press these two points too much, since, as to the resurrection, her long illness and evidently constant physical discomfort must, even of themselves, have disinclined her to all picturing of an abiding, even though highly spiritualized, bodily organization; and as to the likeness of her body to a prison and purgatory of the soul, we are expressly told that it began only with the specially suffering last part of her life.
3. Dualism pragmatic, not final. Its limits.
Now, for this whole matter of the right conception as to the relations of body and soul, it is clear that any more than partial and increasingly superable antagonism between body and spirit cannot be accepted.
(1) A final Dualism is unsound in Psychology, since all the first materials, stimulations, and instruments for even our most abstract thinking are supplied to us by our sense-perceptions, hence also through the body. It is narrow in Cosmology, for we do not want to isolate man in this great universe of visible things; and his link with animal- and plant-life, and even with the mineral creation, is, increasingly as we descend in the scale of beings, his body. It is ruinous for Ethics, because purity, in such a physical-spiritual being as is man, consists precisely in spiritual standards and laws extending to and transforming his merely physical inclinations. It is directly contradictory of the central truth and temper of Christianity, since these require a full acceptance of the substantial goodness and the thorough sanctifiableness of man’s body; of God’s condescension to man’s whole physico-spiritual organism; and of the persistence or reanimation of all that is essential to man’s true personality across and after death. And it is, at bottom, profoundly un-Catholic; the whole Sacramental system, the entire deep and noble conception of the normal relations between the Invisible and the Visible being throughout of the Incarnational type,—an action of the one in the other, which develops the agent and subject at the same time that it spiritualizes the patient, the object, is in direct conflict with it. Neo-Platonism came more and more to treat the body and the entire visible creation as an intrinsic obstacle to spirit, to be eliminated by the latter as completely as possible; at least this very prominent strain within it was undoubtedly pushed on to this extreme by the Gnostic sects. But Christianity has ever to come back to its central presupposition—the substantial goodness and spiritual utility and transfigurableness of body and matter; and to its final end,—the actual transformation of them by the spirit into ever more adequate instruments, materials, and expressions of abiding ethical and religious values and realities.
(2) The fact is that here, as practically at every chief turning-point in ethical and religious philosophy, the movement of the specifically Christian life and conviction is not a circle round a single centre,—detachment; but an ellipse round two centres,—detachment and attachment. And precisely in this difficult, but immensely fruitful, oscillation and rhythm between, as it were, the two poles of the spiritual life; in this fleeing and seeking, in the recollection back and away from the visible (so as to allay the dust and fever of growing distraction, and to reharmonize the soul and its new gains according to the intrinsic requirements and ideals of the spirit), and in the subsequent, renewed immersion in the visible, (in view both of gaining fresh concrete stimulation and content for the spiritual life, and of gradually shaping and permeating the visible according to and with spiritual ends and forces): in this combination, and not in either of these two movements taken alone, consists the completeness and culmination of Christianity.[120]
(3) It no doubt looks, at first sight, as though the Church, by her canonization of the Monastic Ideal, gave us, for the ultimate pattern and measure of all Christian perfection, as pure and simple a flight of the soul from the body and the world, as (short of insanity or suicide) can be made in this life. But here we have to remember three things.
In the first place, the Church not only forbids all attacks upon the legitimacy, indeed sanctity of marriage, or upon its necessity, indeed duty, for mankind at large; but St. Augustine and St. Thomas only articulate her ordinary, strenuously anti-Manichean teaching, in declaring that man was originally created by God, in body and in soul, not for celibacy but for marriage; and that only owing to the accidental event of the Fall and of its effects,—the introduction of disorder and excess into human nature, but not any corruption of its substance and foundations,—does any inferiority,—the dispositions, motives, and circumstances being equal,—attach to marriage as compared with virginity.[121] Hence, still, the absolute ideal would be that man could and did use marriage as all other legitimate functions and things of sense, as a necessary, and ever more and more perfected, means and expression of truly human spirituality, a spirituality which ever requires some non-spiritual material in which to work, and by working in which the soul itself, not only spiritualizes it, but increasingly develops its own self.
And secondly, detachment, unification, spiritual recollection is the more difficult, and the less obviously necessary, of the two movements, and yet is precisely the one which (by coming upon the extant or inchoate attachments, and by suppressing or purifying them according as they are bad or good) first stamps any and every life as definitely religious at all. No wonder, then, that it is this sacred detachment and love of the Cross that we notice, first of all, in the life and doctrine of Our Lord and of all His followers, indeed in all truly religious souls throughout the world; and that the Church should, by her teaching and selection of striking examples, ever preach and uphold this most necessary test and ingredient, this very salt of all virile and fruitful spirituality.