Or, with the further spacial imagery of movements up, level, or down, we get: “All things that have a soul change … and, in changing, move according to law and the order of destiny. Lesser changes of nature move on level ground, but great crimes sink … into the so-called lower places …; and, when the soul becomes greatly different and divine, she also greatly changes her place, which is now altogether holy.”[207] The original, divinely intended “places” of souls are all high and good, and similar to each other though not identical, each soul having its own special “place”; and for this congenital “place” each soul has a resistible yet ineradicable home-sickness. “The first incarnation” of human souls which “distributes each soul to a star,” is ordained to be similar for all.… “And when they have been of necessity implanted in bodily forms, should they master their passions … they live in righteousness; if otherwise, in unrighteousness. And he who lived well through his allotted time shall be conveyed once more to a habitation in his kindred star, and there shall enjoy a blissful and congenial life; but failing this he shall pass into … such a form of (further) incarnation as fits his disposition … until he shall overcome, by reason, all that burthen that afterwards clung around him.”[208]
If from all this we exclude the soul’s existence before any beginning of its body, its transmigration into other bodies, and the self-sufficiency of reason; and if we make it all to be penetrated by God’s presence, grace, and love, and by our corresponding or conflicting emotional and volitional as well as intellectual attitude: we shall get Catherine’s position exactly.
(2) But again, in at least one phase of his thinking, Plato pictures the purification of the imperfect soul as effected, of at least as begun, not in a succession of “places” of an extensionally small but organic kind, bodies, but in a “place” of an extensionally larger but inorganic sort,—the shore of a lake, where the soul has to wait. “The Acherusian lake is the lake to the shores of which the many go when they are dead; and, after waiting an appointed time, which to some is longer and to others shorter, they are sent back to be born as animals.” Here we evidently get a survival of the conception, predominant in Homer, of a pain-and-joyless Hades, but limited here to the middle, the imperfect class of souls, and followed, in their case, by transmigration, to which alone, apparently, purification is directly attached.
In the same Dialogue we read later on: “Those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill … go to the river Acheron, and are carried to the lake; and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds … and are absolved and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts.” Here we have, evidently, still the same “many” and the same place, the shores of the Acherusian lake, but also an explicit affirmation of purification effected there, for this purification is now followed directly, not by re-incarnation, but by the ultimate happiness in the soul’s original and fundamentally congenial “place.” And this scheme is far more conformable to Plato’s fundamental position: for how can bodies, even lower than the human, help to purify the soul which has become impure precisely on occasion of its human body?—We can see how the Christian Purgatorial doctrine derives some of its pictures from the second of these parallel passages; yet that the “longer or shorter waiting” of the first passage also enters into that teaching,—especially in its more ordinary modern form, according to which there is, in this state, no intrinsic purification.
And lower down we find: “Those who have committed crimes which, although great, are not unpardonable,—for these it is necessary to plunge (ἐμπεσεῖν) into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo for a year; but at the end of the year they are borne to the Acherusian lake. But those who appear incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes … such their appropriate destiny hurls (ῤίπτει) into Tartarus, whence they never come forth.” Here we get a Purgatory, pictured as a watery substance in which the more gravely impure of the curable souls are immersed before arriving at the easier purification, the waiting on the dry land alongside the lake; this Purgatory is, as a “place” and, in intensity, identical with Hell; and into this place the curable souls “plunge” and the incurable ones are “hurled.”—Of this third passage Catherine retains the identification of the pains of Purgatory and those of Hell; the “plunge,” or “hurling,” of two distinct classes of souls into these pains; and the mitigation, after a time, previous to complete cessation, of the suffering in the case of the curable class. But the “plunge,” with her, is common to all degrees of imperfectly pure souls; there is, for all these souls, no change of “place” during their purgation, but only a mitigation of suffering; and this mitigation is at work gradually and from the first. And the ordinary modern Purgatorial teaching is like this passage, in that it keeps the curable souls in Tartarus, say, for one year, and lets them suffer there, apparently without mitigation, throughout that time: and that, in the case of both classes of souls, it conceives the punishment as extrinsic, vindictive, and inoperative.
And a fourth Phaedo passage tells us: “Those who are remarkable for having led holy lives are released from this earthly prison, and go to their pure home, which is above, and dwell in the purer earth,” the Isles of the Just, in Oceanus. “And those, again, amongst these who have duly purified themselves with philosophy, live henceforth altogether without the body, in mansions fairer far than these.” Here we get, alongside of the two Purgatories and the one Hell, two Heavens, of which the first is but taken over from Homer and Pindar, but of which the second is Plato’s own conception. Catherine, in entire accord with the ordinary teaching, has got but one “place” of each kind; and her Heaven corresponds, apart from his formal and final exclusion of every sort of body, to the second of these Platonic Heavens; whilst, here again, the all-encompassing presence of God’s love for souls as of the soul’s love for God, which, in her teaching, is the beginning, means, and end of the whole movement, effects an indefinite difference between the two positions.[209]
(3) Yet Plato, in his most characteristic moods, explicitly anticipates Catherine as to the intrinsic, ameliorative nature and work of Purgatory: “The proper office of punishment is two-fold: he who is rightly punished ought either to become better … by it, or he ought to be made an example to his fellows, that they may see what he suffers and … become better. Those who are punished by Gods and men and improved, are those whose sins are curable … by pain and suffering:—for there is no other way in which they can be delivered from evil, as in this world so also in the other. But the others are incurable—the time has passed at which they can receive any benefit themselves.… Rhadamanthus,” the chief of the three nether-world judges, “looks with admiration on the soul of some just one, who has lived in holiness and truth … and sends him” without any intervening suffering “to the Isles of the Blessed.… I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the Judge, in that day.”[210] Here the last sentence is strikingly like in form as well as in spirit to many a saying of St. Paul and Catherine.
(4) But the following most original passages give us a sentiment and an image which, in their special drift, are as opposed to St. Paul, and indeed to the ordinary Christian consciousness, as they are dear to Catherine, in this matter so strongly, although probably unconsciously, Platonist, indeed Neo-Platonist, in her affinities. “In the time of Kronos, indeed down to that of Zeus, the Judgment was given on the day on which men were to die,” i.e. immediately before their death; “and the consequence was, that the judgments were not well given,—the souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus said: ‘The reason is, that the judged have their clothes on, for they are alive.… There are many, having evil souls, who are apparelled in fair bodies or wrapt round in wealth and rank.… The Judges are awed by them; and they themselves too have their clothes on when judging: their eyes and ears and their whole bodies are interposed, as a veil, before their own souls. What is to be done? … Men shall be entirely stript before they are judged, for they shall be judged when dead; the Judge too shall be naked, that is, dead: he, with his naked soul, shall pierce into the other naked soul immediately after each man dies … and is bereft of all his kith and kin, and has left behind him all his brave attire upon earth, and thus the Judgment will be just.’”[211]—If we compare this with St. Paul’s precisely contrary instinct and desire to be “clothed upon” at death, “lest we be found naked,” i.e. without the protection of any kind of body; and then realize Catherine’s intense longing for “nudità,”—to strip herself here, as far as possible, from all imperfection and self-delusion before the final stripping off of the body in death, and to appear, utterly naked, before the utterly naked eye of God, so that no “clothes” should remain requiring to be burnt away by the purifying fires,[212] the profound affinity of sentiment and imagery between Catherine and Plato—and this on a point essentially Platonic,—is very striking.
(5) But, above all, in his deep doctrine as to the soul’s spontaneous choice after death of that condition, “place,” which, owing to the natural effects within her of her earthly willings and self-formation, she cannot but now find the most congenial to herself, Plato appears as the ultimate source of a literary kind for Catherine’s most original view, which otherwise is, I think, without predecessors. “The souls,” he tells us in the Republic, “immediately on their arrival in the other world, were required to go to Lachesis,” one of the three Fates. And “an interpreter, having taken from her lap a number of lots and plans of life, spoke as follows: ‘Thus saith Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity.… “Your destiny shall not be allotted to you, but you shall choose it for yourselves. Let him who draws the first lot, be the first to choose a life which shall be his irrevocably.… The responsibility lies with the chooser, Heaven is guiltless.”’” “No settled character of soul was included in the plans of life, because, with the change of life, the soul inevitably became changed itself.” “It was a truly wonderful sight, to watch how each soul selected its life.… When all the souls had chosen their lives, Lachesis dispatched with each of them the Destiny he had selected, to guard his life and satisfy his choice.”[213] And in the Phaedrus Plato tells us that “at the end of the first thousand years” (of the first incarnation) “the good souls and also the evil souls both come to cast lots and to choose their second life; and they may take any that they like.”[214]
In both the dialogues the lots are evidently taken over from popular mythology, but are here made merely to introduce a certain orderly succession among the spontaneous choosings of the souls themselves, whilst the lap of the daughter of Necessity, spread out before all the choosers previous to their choice, and the separate, specially appropriate Destiny that accompanies each soul after its choice, indicate plainly that, although the choice itself is the free act and pure self-expression of each soul’s then present disposition, yet that this disposition is the necessary result of its earthly volitions and self-development or self-deformation, and that the choice now made becomes, in its turn, the cause of certain inevitable consequences,—of a special environment which itself is then productive of special effects upon, and of special occasions for, the final working out of this soul’s character.—Plotinus retains the doctrine: “the soul chooses there” in the Other world,—“its Daemon and its kind of life.”[215] But neither Proclus nor Dionysius has the doctrine, whilst Catherine, on the contrary, reproduces it with a penetrating completeness.