Yet if the usual ad extra disadvantages of such an abstractive position towards the body are thus exemplified by her, in this her unsocial, individualistic attitude, it is most interesting to note how entirely she avoids the usual ad intra drawbacks of this same position. For if her whole attention, and, increasingly, even her consciousness are, in true ecstatic guise, absorbed away from her fellows and concentrated exclusively upon God in herself and herself in God, yet this consciousness consists not only of Noûs, that dry theoretic reason which, already by Plato, but still more by Aristotle, is alone conceived as surviving the body, but contains also the upper range of Thumos,—all those passions of the noblest kind,—love, admiration, gratitude, utter self-donation, joy in purifying suffering and in an ever-growing self-realization as part of the great plan of God,—all the highest notes in that wondrous scale of deep feeling and of emotionally coloured willing which Plato made dependent, not for its character but for the possibility of its operation, upon the body’s union with the soul.—And thus we see how, in her conception of the soul’s own self within itself and of its relation to God, the Christian idea of Personality, as of a many-sided organism in which Love and Will are the very flower of the whole, has triumphed over the Platonic presentation of the Spirit, in so far as this is taken to require and achieve an ultimate sublimation free from all emotive elements. Thus in her doctrine the whole Personality survives death, although this Personality energizes only, as it were upwards, to God alone, and not also sideways and downwards, towards its fellows and the lesser children of God.
3. Catherine’s forecast influenced by Plato.
Catherine’s third peculiarity consists in a rich and profound organization of two doctrines, the one libertarian, the other determinist; and requires considerable quotation from Plato, whose teachings, bereft of all transmigration-fancies, seem clearly to reappear here, (however complex may have been the mediation,) in Catherine’s great conception.
The determinist doctrine maintains that virtue and vice, in proportion as they are allowed their full development, spontaneously and necessarily attain to their own congenital consummation, a consummation which consists, respectively, in the bliss inseparable from the final and complete identity between the inevitable results upon itself of the soul’s deliberate endeavours, and the indestructible requirements of this same soul’s fundamental nature; and in the misery of the, now fully felt but only gradually superable, or even, in other cases, insuperable, antagonism between the inevitable consequences within its own self of the soul’s more or less deliberate choosings, and those same, here also ineradicable, demands of its own truest nature.
As Marsilio Ficino says, in his Theologia Platonica, published in Florence in 1482: “Virtue is reward in its first budding, reward is virtue full-grown. Vice is punishment at the moment of its birth; punishment is vice at its consummation. For, in each of these cases, one and the same thing is first the simple seed and then the full ear of corn; and one and the same thing is the full ear of corn and then the food of man. Precisely the very things then that we sow in this our (earthly) autumn, shall we reap in that (other-world) summer-day.”[204] It is true that forensic terms and images are also not wanting in Catherine’s sayings; but these, in part, run simply parallel to the immanental conception without modifying it; in part, they are in its service; and, in part, they are the work of the theologians’ arrangements and glosses discussed in my Appendix.
And the libertarian doctrine declares that it is the soul itself which, in the beyond and immediately after death, chooses the least painful, because the most expressive of her then actual desires, from among the states which the natural effects upon her own self of her own earthly choosings have left her interiorly free to choose.
Now it is in this second doctrine especially that we find so detailed an anticipation by Plato of a whole number of highly original and characteristic points and combinations of points, as to render a fortuitous concurrence between Catherine and Plato practically impossible. Yet I have sought in vain, among Catherine’s authentic sayings, actions, possessions, or friends, for any trace of direct acquaintance with any of Plato’s writings. But Ficino’s Latin translation of Plato, published, with immense applause, in Florence in 1483, 1484, must have been known, in those intensely Platonizing times, to even non-professed Humanists in Genoa, long before Catherine’s death in 1510, so that one or other of her intimates may have communicated the substance of these Platonic doctrines to her.[205] Plotinus, of whom Ficino published a Latin translation in 1492, contains but a feeble echo of Plato on this point. Proclus, directly known only very little till much after Catherine’s time, is in even worse case. The Areopagite, who has so continuously taken over whole passages from all three writers, although directly almost exclusively from Proclus, contains nothing more immediately to the purpose than his impressive sayings concerning Providence’s continuous non-forcing of the human personality in its fundamental constitution and its free elections with their inevitable consequences; hence Catherine cannot have derived her ideas, in the crisp definiteness which they retain in her sayings, from her cousin the Dominican nun and the Areopagite. And it is certain, as we have seen, how scattered and inchoate are the hints which she may have found in St. Paul, the Joannine writings, and Jacopone da Todi. St. Augustine contains nothing that would be directly available,—an otherwise likely source considering Catherine’s close connection with the Augustinian Canonesses of S. Maria delle Grazie.
In Plato, then, we get five conceptions and symbolic pictures that are practically identical with those of Catherine.
(1) First we get the conception of souls having each, in exact accordance with the respective differences of their moral and spiritual disposition and character, as these have been constituted by them here below, a “place” or environment, expressive of that character, ready for their occupation after the body’s death. “The soul that is pure departs at death, herself invisible, to the invisible world,—to the divine, immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss. But the soul that is impure at the time of her departure and is … engrossed by the corporeal …, is weighed down and drawn back again into the visible place (world).”
And this scheme, of like disposition seeking a like place, is then carried out, by the help of the theory of transmigration, as a re-incarnation of these various characters into environments, bodies, exactly corresponding to them: gluttonous souls are assigned to asses’ bodies, tyrannous souls to those of wolves, and so on: in a word, “there is no difficulty in assigning to all ‘a whither’ (a place) answering to their general natures and propensities.”[206] For this corresponds to a law which runs throughout all things,—a determinism of consequences which does not prevent the liberty of causes. “The King of the universe contrived a general plan, by which a thing of a certain nature found a seat and place of a certain kind. But the formation of this nature, he left to the wills of individuals.”