Catherine has a double approach. For, consistently with the strong Neo-Platonist, Dionysian strain in her mind, she frequently teaches and implies that Evil is the absence of Good, of Love, and nothing positive at all. In this case Evil would not only be less strong than good—only Manichaeans would maintain that they were equal—but, as against the constructive force of good, it would have no kind even of destructive strength. Varying amounts, degrees, and kinds of good, but good and only good, everywhere, would render all, even transitory, pollution of the soul, and all, even passing, purification of it, so much actual impossibility and theoretical superstition. All that survived at all, could but be good; and at most some good might be added, but no evil could be removed, since none would exist.—Yet all this is, of course, strongly denied and supplanted by the, at first sight, less beautiful, but far deeper and alone fully Christian, position of her specifically Purgatorial teaching. Here Evil is something positive, an active disposition, orientation, and attachment of the will; it is not without destructive force; and its cure is a positive change in that will and its habits, and not a mere addition of good. Yet it is plain that, even exclusively within the implications of this deeper conviction, there is no necessity to postulate unmixed evil in the disposition of any soul. In some the evil would be triumphing over the good; in others good would be triumphing over evil,—each over the other, in every degree of good or of evil, up to the all but complete extinction of all inclinations to evil or to good respectively.
And Catherine has suggestive sayings. For one or two of them go, at least in their implications, beyond a declaration as to the presence of God’s extrinsic mercy in Hell, a presence indicated by a mitigation of the souls’ sufferings to below what these souls deserve; and even beyond the Areopagite’s insistence upon the presence of some real good in these souls, since he hardly gets beyond their continuous possession of those non-moral goods, existence, intelligence, and will-power.[234] For when she says, “The ray of God’s mercy shines even in Hell,” she need not, indeed, mean more than that extrinsic mercy, and its effect, that mitigation. But when she declares: “if a creature could be found that did not participate in the divine Goodness,—that creature would, as it were, be as malignant as God is good,” we cannot, I think, avoid applying this to the moral dispositions of such souls.[235]
Now I know that St. Thomas had already taught, in at first sight identical terms: “Evil cannot exist (quite) pure without the admixture of good, as the Supreme Good exists free from all admixture of evil.… Those who are detained in Hell, are not bereft of all good”;[236] and yet he undoubtedly maintained the complete depravation of the will’s dispositions in these souls. And, again, after Catherine’s first declaration there follow, (at least in the text handed down in the Vita), words which explain that extrinsic mercy, not as mitigating the finite amount of suffering due to the sinner, but as turning the infinite suffering due to the sinner’s infinite malice, into a finite, though indefinite amount; and hence, in the second declaration, a corresponding interior mercy may be signified—God’s grace preventing the sinner from being infinitely wicked.
But Catherine, unlike St. Thomas, expressly speaks not only of Good and Evil, but of Good and Malignancy; and Malignancy undoubtedly refers to dispositions of the will. And even if the words, now found as the sequel to the first saying, be authentic, they belong to a different occasion, and cannot be allowed to force the meaning of words spoken at another time. In this latter saying the words “as it were” show plainly that she is not thinking of a possible infiniteness of human wickedness which has been changed, through God’s mercy, to an actual finitude of evil; but is simply asking herself whether a man could be, not infinitely but wholly, malignant. For she answers that, were this possible, a man would “as it were” be as malignant as God is good, and thus shows that the malignancy, which she denies, would only in a sense form a counterpart to God’s benevolence: since, though the man would be as entirely malignant as God is entirely good, God would still remain infinite in His goodness as against the finitude of Man’s wickedness.
The difficulties of such a combination of convictions are, of course, numerous and great. Psychologically it seems hard to understand why this remnant of good disposition should be unable to germinate further and further good, so that, at last, good would leaven the whole soul. From the point of view of any Theodicy, it appears difficult to justify the unending exclusion of such a soul from growth in, and the acquirement of, a predominantly good will and the happiness that accompanies such a will. And the testimony of Our Lord Himself and of the general doctrine of the Church appear definitely opposed: for does not His solemn declaration: “Hell, where their worm dieth not” (Mark ix, 48), find its authoritative interpretation in the common Church teaching as to the utterly reprobate will of the lost? And indeed Catherine herself, in her great saying that if but one little drop of Love could fall into Hell (that is, surely, if but the least beginning of a right disposition towards God could enter those souls) Hell would be turned into Heaven, seems clearly to endorse this position.
And yet, we have full experience in this life of genuinely good dispositions being present, and yet not triumphing or even spreading within the soul; of such conditions being, in various degrees, our own fault; and of such defeat bringing necessarily with it more or less of keen suffering.—There would be no injustice if, after a full, good chance and sufficient aid had been given to the soul to actualize its capabilities of spiritual self-constitution, such a soul’s deliberately sporadic, culpably non-predominant, good did not, even eventually, lead to the full satisfaction of that soul’s essential cravings.—The saying attributed to Our Lord, which appears in St. Mark alone, is a pure quotation from Isaiah lxvi, 24 and Ecclesiasticus vii, 17, and does not seem to require more than an abiding distress of conscience, an eternal keenness of remorse.
Again, the common Church-teaching is undoubtedly voiced by St. Thomas in the words, “Since these souls are completely averse to the final end of right reason, they must be declared to be without any good will.” Yet St. Thomas himself (partly in explanation of the Areopagite’s words, “the evil spirits desire the good and the best, namely, to be, to live, and to understand”), is obliged to distinguish between such souls’ deliberate will and their “natural will and inclination,” and to proclaim that this latter, “which is not from themselves but from the Author of nature, who put this inclination into nature … can indeed be good.”[237] And, if we would not construct a scheme flatly contradictory of all earthly experience, we can hardly restrict the soul, even in the beyond, to entirely indeliberate, good inclinations, and to fully deliberate, bad volitions, but cannot help interposing an indefinite variety of inchoative energizings, half-wishes, and the like, and thinking of these as mixed with good and evil. Indeed this conclusion seems also required by the common teaching that the suffering there differs from soul to soul, and this because of the different degrees of the guilt: for such degrees depend undoubtedly even more upon the degree of deliberation and massiveness of the will than upon the degree of objective badness in the deed, and hence can hardly fail to leave variously small or large fragments of more or less good and imperfectly deliberate wishings and energizings present in the soul.
And finally Catherine’s “little drop of Love” would, she says, “at once” turn Hell into Heaven, and hence cannot mean some ordinary good moral disposition or even such supernatural virtues as theological Faith and Hope, but Pure Love alone, which latter queen of all the virtues she is explicitly discussing there. Thus she in nowise requires the absence from these souls of a certain remnant of semi-deliberate virtue of a less exalted, and not necessarily regenerative kind.
3. Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost.
As to the Mitigation of the Suffering, it is remarkable that Catherine, who has been so bold concerning the source of the pains, and the dispositions, of the lost souls, does not more explicitly teach such an alleviation. I say “remarkable,” because important Fathers and Churches, that were quite uninfected by Origenism, have held and have acted upon such a doctrine. St. Augustine, in his Enchiridion (A.D. 423 (?)) tells us that “in so far as” the Offering of the Sacrifice of the Altar and Alms “profit” souls in the beyond, “they profit them by procuring a full remission (of the punishment), or at least that their damnation may become more tolerable.” And after warning men against believing in an end to the sufferings of the lost, he adds: “But let them consider, if they like, that the sufferings of the damned are somewhat mitigated during certain intervals of time.”[238]—Saints John Chrysostom and John Damascene, thoroughly orthodox Greek Fathers, and the deeply devout hymn-writer Prudentius among the Latins, teach similar doctrine; and in many ancient Latin missals, ranging from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, prayers for the Mitigation of the Sufferings of the Damned are to be found.[239]