(3) And her last simplification consists in taking the Fire of Hell, the Fire of Purgatory, and the Fire and Light of Heaven as profoundly appropriate symbols or descriptions of the variously painful or joyous impressions produced, through the differing volitional attitudes of souls towards Him, by the one God’s intrinsically identical presence in each and all. In all three cases, throughout their several grades, there are ever but two realities, the Spirit-God and the spirit-soul, in various states of inter-relation.
Here again it is Catherine’s complete abstraction from the body which renders such a view easy and, in a manner, necessary for her mind. But here I would only emphasize the impressive simplicity and spirituality of view which thus, as in the material world it finds the one sun-light and the one fire-heat, which, in themselves everywhere the same, vary indefinitely in their effects, owing to the varying condition of the different bodies which meet the rays and flames; so, in the Spiritual World it discovers One supreme spiritual Energy and Influence which, whilst ever self-identical, is assimilated, deflected, or resisted by the lesser spirits, with inevitably joyous, mixed, or painful states of soul, since they can each and all resist, but cannot eradicate that Energy’s impression within their deepest selves. And though, even with her, the Sun-light image remains quasi-Hellenic and Intellectual, and the Fire-heat picture is more immediately Christian and Moral: yet she also frequently takes the sunlight as the symbol of the achieved Harmony and Peace, and the Fire-heat as that of more or less persisting Conflict and Pain. She is doubtless right in keeping both symbols, and in ever thinking of each as ultimately implying the other, for God is Beauty and Truth, as well as Goodness and Love, and man is made with the indestructible aspiration after Him in His living completeness.
And here again Catherine has a complicated doctrinal history behind her.
We have already considered the numerous Scriptural passages where God and His effects upon the soul are symbolized as light and fire; and those again where joy or, contrariwise, trial and suffering are respectively pictured by the same physical properties. And Catherine takes the latter passages as directly explanatory of the first, in so far as these joys and sufferings are spiritual in their causes or effects.
Among the Greek Fathers, Clement of Alexandria tells us that “the Fire” of Purgatory,—for he has no Eternal Damnation,—“is a rational,” spiritual, “fire that penetrates the soul”; and Origen teaches that “each sinner himself lights the flame of his own fire, and is not thrown into a fire that has been lit before that moment and that exists in front of him.… His conscience is agitated and pierced by its own pricks.” Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzum are more or less influenced by Origen on this point. And St. John Damascene, who died in about 750 A.D., says explicitly that the fire of Hell is not a material fire, that it is very different from our ordinary fire, and that men hardly know what it is.[224]
Among the Latins, St. Ambrose declares: “neither is the gnashing, a gnashing of bodily teeth; nor is the everlasting fire, a fire of bodily flames; nor is the worm, a bodily one.”—St. Jerome, in one passage, counts the theory of the non-physical fire as one of Origen’s errors; but elsewhere he mentions it without any unfavourable note, and even enumerates several Scripture-texts which favour it, and admits that “‘the worm which dieth not and the fire which is not quenched,’ is understood, by the majority of interpreters (a plerisque), of the conscience of sinners which tortures them.”[225]—St. Augustine, in 413 A.D., declares: “In the matter of the pains of the wicked, both the unquenchable fire and the intensely living worm are interpreted differently by different commentators. Some interpreters refer both to the body, others refer both to the soul; and some take the fire literally, in application to the body, and the worm figuratively, in application to the soul, which latter opinion appears the more credible.” Yet when, during the last years of his life, he came, somewhat tentatively, to hold an other-world Purgatory as well, he throughout assimilated this Purgatory’s fire to the fire of this-world sufferings. Thus in 422 A.D.: “Souls which renounce the wood, hay, straw, built upon that foundation (I Cor. iii, 11-15), not without pain indeed (since they loved these things with a carnal affection), but with faith in the foundation, a faith operative through love … arrive at salvation, through a certain fire of pain.… Whether men suffer these things in this life only, or such-like judgments follow even after this life—in either case, this interpretation of that text is not discordant with the truth.” “‘He shall be saved yet so as by fire,’ because the pain, over the loss of the things he loved, burns him. It is not incredible that some such thing takes place even after this life … that some of the faithful are saved by a certain purgatorial fire, more quickly or more slowly, according as they have less or more loved perishable things.”[226]
St. Thomas, voicing and leading Scholastic opinion, teaches that the fire of Purgatory is the same as that of Hell; and Cardinal Bellarmine, who died in 1621, tells us: “The common opinion of theologians is that the fire of Purgatory is a real and true fire, of the same kind as an earthly fire. This opinion, it is true, is not of faith, but it is very probable,”—because of the “consent of the scholastics, who cannot be despised without temerity,” and also because of “the eruptions of Mount Etna.”[227] Yet the Council of Florence had, in 1439, restricted itself to the quite general proposition that “if men die truly penitent, in the love of God, before they have satisfied … for their sins … their souls are purified by purgatorial pains after death”; thus very deliberately avoiding all commitment as to the nature of these pains.[228] Cardinal Gousset, who died in 1866, tells us: “The more common opinion amongst theologians makes the sufferings of Purgatory to consist in the pain of fire, or at least in a pain analogous to that of fire.”[229] This latter position is practically identical with Catherine’s.
As to the fire of Hell, although here especially the Scholastics, old and new, are unanimous, it is certain that there is no definition or solemn judgment of the Church declaring it to be material. On this point again we find St. Thomas and those who follow him involved in practically endless difficulties and in, for us now, increasingly intolerable subtleties, where they try to show how a material fire can affect an immaterial spirit. Bossuet, so severely orthodox in all such matters, preaching, before the Court, about sin becoming in Hell the chastisement of the sinner, does not hesitate to finish thus: “We bear within our hearts the instrument of our punishment. ‘I shall produce fire from thy midst, which shall devour thee’ (Ezek. xxviii, 18). I shall not send it against thee from afar, it will ignite in thy conscience, its flames will arise from thy midst, and it will be thy sins which will produce it.”[230]—And the Abbé F. Dubois, in a careful article in the Ecclesiastical Revue du Clergé Français of Paris, has recently expressed the conviction that “the best minds of our time, which are above being suspected of yielding to mere passing fashions, feel the necessity of abandoning the literal interpretation, judged to be insufficient, of the ancient symbols; and of returning to a freer exegesis, of which some of the Ancients have given us the example.”[231] Among these helpful “Ancients” we cannot but count Catherine, with her One God Who is the Fire of Pain and the Light of Joy to souls, according as they resist Him or will Him, either here or hereafter.