(3) And as to the supposed directly beneficial effects of a positive denial of Immortality, such as have been sung for us by George Eliot and Giovanni Pascoli, we can safely affirm that the special tendernesses and quiet heroisms, deduced by them from such a negation, are too obviously dependent upon spiritual implications and instincts, for us to be able to put them directly to the credit of that denial. Only in so far as Immortality were not a postulate intrinsically connected with belief in objective and obligatory Beauty, Truth, and Goodness,—in God as our origin and end,—could its persistent and deliberate denial not be injurious to these fundamental convictions and to the ultimate health of the soul’s life: and of this intrinsic non-connection there is no sufficient evidence.—Certainly, in such a case as Spinoza’s, the same strain of reasoning which makes him abandon individual Immortality Ought, in logic, to prevent him, a mere hopelessly determined link in the Natura Naturata, from ever attaining to the free self-dedication of himself, as now a fully responsible member of the Natura Naturans. And if not all the grand depth of his spiritual instinct and moral nobility, and its persistence in spite of its having no logical room in the fixedly naturalistic element of his teaching, can be urged as an argument in favour of the ultimate truth and ethical helpfulness of that whole element, neither can it be urged with respect to what is presumably one part of that element, his denial of personal Immortality.

II. Catherine’s General After-Life Conceptions.

Now Catherine’s general After-Life Conceptions in part bring into interesting prominence, in part really meet and overcome, the perplexities and mutually destructive alternatives which we have just considered. I shall here again leave over to the next chapter the simply ultimate questions, such as that of the pure Eternity versus the Unendingness of the soul; but shall allow myself, as to one set of her general ideas, a little digression as to the probability of their ultimate literary suggestion by Plato.—These Platonic passages probably reached her too indirectly, and by means and in forms which I have too entirely failed to discover, for me to be able to discuss them in my chapter devoted to her assured and demonstrably direct literary sources. But these sayings of Plato greatly help to illustrate the meaning of her doctrine.—I shall group these, her general, positions and implications under four heads, and shall consider three of these as, in substance, profoundly satisfactory, but one of them, the second, as acceptable only with many limitations, although this second has obviously much influenced the form given by her to several of those other conceptions.

1. Forecasts of the Hereafter, based upon present experience.

First, then, we get, as the fundamental presupposition of the whole Eschatology, a grandly sane, simple, and profound doctrine formulated over and over again and applied throughout, with a splendid consistency, as the key and limit to all her anticipations and picturings. Only because of the fact, and of our conviction of the fact, of the unbroken continuity and identity of God with Himself, of the human soul with itself, and of the deepest of the relations subsisting between that God and the soul, across the chasm formed by our body’s death, and only in proportion as we can and do experience and achieve, during this our earthly life, certain spiritual laws and realities of a sufficiently elemental, universal, and fruitful, more or less time- and space-less character, can we (whilst ever remembering the analogical nature of such picturings even as to the soul’s life here) safely and profitably forecast certain general features of the future which is thus already so largely a present. But, given these conditions in the present, we can and should forecast the future, to the extent implied. And as Plato’s great imaginative projection, his life-work, the Republic, achieves its original end, (of making more readily understandable, by objectivizing on a large scale, the life of the inner city of our own soul), in so far as he has rightly understood the human soul and has found appropriate representations of its powers, laws, and ideals in his future commonwealth, even if we cannot accept this picture for political purposes and in all its details: so is it also with Catherine’s projection, which, if bolder in its subject-matter, is, most rightly, indefinitely more general in its indications than is Plato’s great diagram of the soul. Man’s spiritual personality, being held by her to survive death,—to retain its identity and an at least equivalent consciousness, of that identity,—the deepest experiences of that personality before the body’s death are conceived as re-experienced by it, in a heightened degree and form, after death itself. Hence these great pictures, of what the soul will experience then, would remain profoundly true of what the soul seeks and requires now, even if there were no then at all.

And note particularly how only with regard to one stage and condition of the spirit’s future life,—that of the purification of the imperfect soul,—does she indulge in any at all direct doctrine or detailed picturing; and this, doubtless, not only because she has experienced much concerning this matter in her own life here, but also because the projection of these experiences would still give us, not the ultimate state, but more or less only a prolongation of our mixed, joy-in-suffering life upon earth. As to the two ultimate states, we get only quite incidental glimpses, although even these are strongly marked by her general position and method.

2. Catherine’s forecasts and present experience correspondingly limited.

And next, coming to the projection itself, we naturally find it to present all the strength and limitations of her own spiritual experiences which are thus projected: her attitude towards the body and towards human fellowship, (two subjects which are shown to be closely inter-related by the continuous manner in which they stand and fall together throughout the history of philosophy and religion,) thus constitute the second general peculiarity of her Eschatology. We have already noted, in her life, her strongly ecstatic, body-ignoring, body-escaping type of religion; and how, even in her case, it tended to starve the corporate, institutional conceptions and affections. Here, in the projection, we find both the cause and the effect again, and on a larger scale. Her continuous psycho-physical discomforts and keen thirst for a unity and simplicity as rapid and complete as possible, the joy and strength derived from ecstatic habits and affinities, would all make her, without even herself being aware of it, drop all further thought as to the future fate of that oppressive “prison-house” from which her spirit had at last got free.

Now such non-occupation with the fate of the body and of her fellow-souls may appear quite appropriate in her Purgatorial Eschatology, yet we cannot but find that, even here, it already possesses grave disadvantages, and that it persists throughout all her After-life conceptions. For in all the states and stages of the soul we get a markedly unsocial, a sola cum solo picture. And yet there is, perhaps, no more striking difference, amongst their many affinities, between Platonism and Christianity than the intense Individualism which marks the great Greek’s doctrine, and the profoundly social conception which pervades Our Lord’s own teaching,—in each case as regards the next life as well as this one. Plotinus’s great culminating commendation of “the flight of the alone to the Alone” continues Plato’s tradition; whereas, if even St. Paul and the Joannine writings speak at times as though the individual soul attained to its full personality in and by direct intercourse with God alone, the Synoptic Gospels, and at bottom also those two great lovers of Our Lord’s spirit, never cease to emphasize the social constituent of the soul’s life both here and hereafter. The Kingdom of Heaven, the Soul of the Church, as truly constitutes the different personalities, their spirituality and their joy, as they constitute it,—that great Organism which, as such, is both first and last in the Divine thought and love.

Here, in the at least partial ignoring of these great social facts, we touch the main defect of most mystical outlooks; yet this defect does not arise from what they possess, but from what they lack. For solitude, and the abstractive, unifying, intuitive, emotional, mystical element is also wanted, and this element and movement Catherine exemplifies in rare perfection. Indeed, in the great classical, central period of her life she had, as we know, combined all this with much of the outward movement, society, detailed observation, attachment, the morally en-static, the immanental type. Unfortunately the same ill-health and ever-increasing predominance of the former element, which turned her, quite naturally, to these eschatological contemplations, and which indeed helped to give them their touching tone of first-hand experience, also tended, of necessity, to make her drop even such slight and lingering social elements as had formerly coloured her thought. It is, then, only towards the understanding and deepening of the former of these two necessary movements of religion, that these, her latter-day enlargements of some of her deepest experiences and convictions will be found true helps.