4. Simplifications characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology.
And under our last, fourth head, we can group the simplifications characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology.
(1) One simplification has, of course, for now some fifteen hundred years, been the ordinary Christian conception: I mean the elimination of the time-element between the moment of death and the beginning of the three states. Yet it is interesting to note how by far the greatest of the Latin Fathers, St. Augustine, who died in A.D. 430, still clings predominantly to the older Christian and Jewish conception of the soul abiding in a state of shrunken, joy-and-painless consciousness from the moment of the body’s death up to that of the general resurrection and judgment. “After this short life, thou wilt not yet be where the saints will be,” i.e. in Heaven. “Thou wilt not yet be there: who is ignorant of this? But thou canst straightway be where the rich man descried the ulcerous beggar to be a-resting, far away,” i.e. in Limbo. “Placed in that rest, thou canst await the day of judgment with security, when thou shalt receive thy body also, when thou shalt be changed so as to be equal to an Angel.”[216] Only with regard to Purgatory, a state held by him, in writings of his last years, 410-430 A.D., to be possible, indeed probable, does he make an exception to his general rule: for such purification would have to take place” in the interval of time between the death of the body and the last day of condemnation and reward.”[217]
It is doubtless the still further fading away of the expectation, so vivid and universal in early Christian times, of the proximity of Our Lord’s Second Advent, and the tacit prevalence of Greek affinities and conceptions concerning the bodiless soul, that helped to eliminate, at last universally, this interval of waiting, in the case of souls too good or too bad for purgation, from the general consciousness of at least Western Christendom. The gain in this was the great simplification and concentration of the immediate outlook and interest; the loss was the diminished apprehension of the essentially complex, concrete, synthetic character of man’s nature, and of the necessity for our assuming that this characteristic will be somehow preserved in this nature’s ultimate perfection.
(2) There is a second simplification in Catherine which, though here St. Augustine leads the way, is less common among Christians: her three other-world “places” are not, according to her ultimate thought, three distinct spacial extensions and localities, filled, respectively, with ceaselessly suffering, temporarily suffering, and ceaselessly blessed souls; but they are, (notwithstanding all the terms necessitated by such spacial picturings as “entering,” “coming out,” “plunging into”), so many distinct states and conditions of the soul, of a painful, mixed, or joyful character. We shall have these her ultimate ideas very fully before us presently. But here I would only remark that this her union of a picturing faculty, as vivid as the keenest sense-perception, and of a complete non-enslavement to, a vigorous utilization of, these life-like spacial projections, by a religious instinct and experience which never forgets that God and souls are spirits, to whom our ordinary categories of space and extension, time and motion, do not and cannot in strictness apply, is as rare as it is admirable; and that, though her intensely anti-corporeal and non-social attitude made such a position more immediately easy for her than it can be for those who remain keenly aware of the great truths involved in the doctrines of the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints, this her trend of thought brings into full articulation precisely the deepest of our spiritual apprehensions and requirements, whilst it is not her fault if it but further accentuates some of our intellectual perplexities.
We get much in St. Augustine, which he himself declares to have derived, in the first instance, from “the writings of the Platonists,” which doubtless means above all Plotinus, (that keen spiritual thinker who can so readily be traced throughout this part of the great Convert’s teaching), as to this profound incommensurableness between spiritual presence, energizing, and affectedness on the one hand, and spacial position, extension, and movement on the other. “What place is there within me, to which my God can come? … I would not exist at all, unless Thou already wert within me.” “Thou wast never a place, and yet we have receded from Thee; and we have drawn near to Thee, yet Thou art never a place.” “ Are we submerged and do we emerge? Yet it is not places into which we are plunged and out of which we rise. What can be more like to places and yet more unlike? For here the affections are in case,—the impurity of our spirit, which flows downwards, oppressed by the love of earthly cares; and the holiness of Thy Spirit, which lifts us upwards with the love of security.”[218] For, as he teaches “the spiritual creature can only be changed by times,”—a succession within a duration: “by remembering what it had forgotten, or by learning what it did not know, or by willing what it did not will. The bodily creature can be changed by times and places,” by spacial motion, “from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, from east to west.” “That thing is not moved through space which is not extended in space … the soul is not considered to move in space, unless it be held to be a body.”[219]
In applying the doctrine just expressed to eschatological matters, St. Augustine concludes: “If it be asked whether the soul, when it goes forth from the body, is borne to some corporeal places, or to such as, though incorporeal, are like to bodies, or to what is more excellent than either: I readily answer that, unless it have some kind of body, it is not borne to bodily places at all, or, at least, that it is not borne to them by bodily motion.… But I myself do not think that it possesses any body, when it goes forth from this earthly body.… It gets borne, according to its deserts, to spiritual conditions, or to penal places having a similitude to bodies.”[220]
The reader will readily note a curiously uncertain frame of mind in this last utterance. I take it that Plotinian influences are here being checked by the Jewish conception of certain, definitely located, provision-chambers (promptuaria), in which all souls are placed for safe keeping, between the time of the body’s death and its resurrection. So in the Fourth Book of Esra (of about 90 A.D.), “the souls of the just in their chambers said: ‘How long are we to remain here?’”; and in the Apocalypse of Baruch (of about 150-250 A.D.), “at the coming of the Messiah, the provision-chambers will open, in which the” whole, precise “number of the souls of the just have been kept, and they will come forth.”[221]
But it is St. Thomas Aquinas who, by the explicit and consistent adoption and classification of these promptuaria receptacula, reveals to us more clearly the perplexities and fancifulnesses involved in the strictly spacial conception. “Although bodies are not assigned to souls (immediately) after death, yet certain bodily places are congruously assigned to these souls in accordance with the degree of their dignity, in which places they are, as it were, locally, in the manner in which bodiless things can be in space: each soul having a higher place assigned to it, according as it approaches more or less to the first substance, God, whose seat, according to Scripture, is Heaven.” “In the Scriptures God is called the Sun, since He is the principle of spiritual life, as the physical sun is of bodily life; and, according to this convention, … souls spiritually illuminated have a greater fitness for luminous bodies, and sin-darkened souls for dark places.” “It is probable that, as to local position, Hell and the Limbo of the Fathers constitute one and the same place, or are more or less continuous.” “The place of Purgatory adjoins (that of) Hell.” “There are altogether five places ready to receive (receptanda) souls bereft of their bodies: Paradise, the Limbo of the Fathers, Purgatory, Hell, and the Limbo of Infants.”[222]
No doubt all these positions became the common scholastic teaching. But then, as Cardinal Bellarmine cogently points out: “no ancient, as far as I know, has written that the Earthly Paradise was destroyed … and I have read a large number who affirm its existence. This is the doctrine of all the Scholastics, beginning with St. Thomas, and of the Fathers. … St. Augustine indeed appears to rank this truth amongst the dogmas of faith.”[223] We shall do well, then, not to press these literal localization-schemes, especially since, according to St. Augustine’s penetrating analysis, our spiritual experiences, already in this our earthly existence, have a distinctly non-spacial character. Catherine’s position, if applied to the central life of man here, and hence presumptively hereafter, remains as true and fresh and unassailable as ever.