(4) And yet the conception of Conditional Immortality cannot be far from the truth, since everything, surely, points to a lowered consciousness in the souls in question, or at least to one lower than that in the ultimate state of the saved. This conception of the shrunken condition of these souls was certainly held by Catherine, even if the other, the view of a heightened, consciousness, appears in hortatory passages which just may be authentic; and indeed only that conception is conformable with her fundamental position that love alone is fully positive and alone gives vital strength, and that all fully deliberate love is absent from the lost souls. And if we consider how predominantly hortatory in tone and object the ordinary teaching on this point cannot fail to be; and, on the other hand, how close to Manichaeism, any serious equating of the force and intensity of life and consciousness between the Saved and the Lost would be, we can hardly fail to find ourselves free, indeed compelled, to hold a lesser consciousness for the Lost than for the Saved. Whilst the joyful life of the Saved would range, in harmonious intensity, beyond all that we can experience here, the painful consciousness of the Lost would be, in various degrees, indefinitely less. The Saved would thus not be only other than the Lost, they would actually be more: for God is Life supreme, and, where there is more affinity with God, there is more life, and more consciousness.
(5) But, if the view just stated is the more likely one, then we cannot soften the sufferings of those souls, by giving them a sense of Eternity, of one unending momentary Now, instead of our earthly sense of Succession, as Cardinal Newman and Father Tyrrell have attempted to do, in a very instructive and obviously orthodox manner.[248] I shall presently argue strongly in favour of some consciousness of Eternity being traceable in our best moments here, and of this consciousness being doubtless more extended in the future blessed life. But here I have only to consider whether for one who, like Catherine, follows the analogy of earthly experience, the Lost should be considered nearer to, or farther from, such a Totum-Simul consciousness than we possess now, here below, at our best? And to this the answer must, surely, be that they are further away from it. Yet God in His mercy may allow this greater successiveness, if unaccompanied by any keen memory or prevision, to help in effecting that mitigation of the suffering which we have already allowed.
IV. Catherine and Purgatory.
1. Introductory.
(1) Changed feeling concerning Purgatory.
In the matter of a Purgatory, a very striking return of religious feeling towards its normal equilibrium has been occurring in the most unexpected, entirely unprejudiced quarters, within the last century and a half. In Germany we have Lessing, who, in the wake of Leibniz, encourages the acceptance of “that middle state which the greater part of our fellow-Christians have adopted”: Schleiermacher, who calls the overpassing of a middle state by a violent leap at death “a magical proceeding”; David F. Strauss, who entirely agrees; Carl von Hase, who, in his very Manual of Anti-Roman Polemics admits that “most men when they die are probably too good for Hell, but they are certainly too bad for Heaven”; the delicately thoughtful philosopher Fechner who, in the most sober-minded of his religious works, insists upon our “conceiving the life beyond according to the analogy of this-life conditions,” and refers wistfully to “the belief which is found amongst all peoples and is quite shrunken only among Protestants—that the living can still do something to aid the dead”; and Prof. Anrich, probably the greatest contemporary authority on the Hellenic elements incorporated in Christian doctrine, declares, all definite Protestant though he is, that “legitimate religious postulates underlie the doctrine of Purgatory.”[249] And in England that sensitively religious Unitarian, W. R. Greg, tells us “Purgatory, ranging from a single day to a century of ages, offers that borderland of discriminating retribution for which justice and humanity cry out”; and the Positivist, John Stuart Mill, declares at the end of his life: “All the probabilities in case of a future life are that such as we have been made or have made ourselves before the change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter.… To imagine that a miracle will be wrought at death … making perfect every one whom it is His will to include among His elect … is utterly opposed to every presumption that can be adduced from the light of nature.”[250]
(2) Causes of the previous prejudice.
Indeed the general principle of ameliorative suffering is so obviously true and inexhaustibly profound that only many, long-lived abuses in the practice, and a frequent obscuration in the teaching, of the doctrine, can explain and excuse the sad neglect, indeed discredit, into which the very principle and root-doctrine has fallen among well-nigh one-half of Western Christendom. As to the deplorably widespread existence, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, of both these causes, which largely occasioned or strengthened each other, we have the unimpeachable authority of the Council of Trent itself: for it orders the Bishops “not to permit that uncertain doctrines, or such as labour under the presumption of falsity, be propagated and taught,” and “to prohibit, as so many scandals and stones of stumbling for the faithful, whatever belongs to a certain curiosity or superstition or savours of filthy lucre.”[251] The cautious admissions of the strictly Catholic scholar-theologian, Dr. N. Paulus, and the precise documentary additions and corrections to Paulus furnished, directly from the contemporary documents, by the fair-minded Protestant worker at Reformation History, Prof. T. Brieger, now furnish us, conjointly, with the most vivid and detailed picture of the sad subtleties and abuses which gave occasion to that Decree.[252]
(3) Catherine’s purgatorial conceptions avoid those causes. Her conceptions harbour two currents of thought.
It is surely not a small recommendation of Catherine’s mode of conceiving Purgatory, that it cuts, as we shall see, at the very root of those abuses. Yet we must first face certain opposite dangers and ambiguities which are closely intertwined with the group of terms and images taken over, for the purpose of describing an immanental Purgation, by her and her great Alexandrian Christian predecessors, from the Greek Heathen world. And only after the delimitation of the defect in the suggestions which still so readily operate from out of these originally Hellenic ideas, can we consider the difficulties and imperfections peculiar to the other, in modern times the predominant, element in the complete teaching as to the Middle State, an element mostly of Jewish and Roman provenance, and aiming at an extrinsically punitive conception. Both currents can be properly elucidated only if we first take them historically.