This conception of positive stains is carefully taken over by the Alexandrian Fathers: Clement speaks of “removing, by continuous prayer, the stains (κηλίδας) contracted through former sins,” and declares that “the Gnostic,” the perfect Christian, “fears not death, having purified himself from all the spots (σπίλους) on his soul.” And Origen describes “the pure soul that is not weighed down by leaden weights of wickedness,” where the spots have turned to leaden pellets such as were fastened to fishing-nets. Hence, says Clement, “post-baptismal sins have to be purified out” of the soul; and, says Origen, “these rivers of fire are declared to be of God, who causes the evil that is mixed up with the whole soul to disappear from out of it.”[262]
In Pseudo-Dionysius the non-Orphic, purely negative, view prevails: “Evil is neither in demons nor in us as an existent evil, but as a failure and dearth in the perfection of our own proper goods.” And St. Thomas similarly declares that “different souls have correspondingly different stains, like shadows differ in accordance with the difference of the bodies which interpose themselves between the light.”[263]
But Catherine, in this inconsistent with her own general Privation-doctrine, again conceives the stain, the “macchia del peccato,” as Cardinal Manning has acutely observed, not simply as a deprivation of the light of glory, but “as the cause, not the effect, of God’s not shining into the soul”: it includes in it the idea of an imperfection, weakness with regard to virtue, bad (secondary) dispositions, and unheavenly tastes.[264]
3. The true and the false in the Orphic conception.
Now precisely in this profoundly true conception of Positive Stain there lurk certain dangers, which all proceed from the original Orphic diagnosis concerning the source of these stains, and these dangers will have to be carefully guarded against.
(1) The conviction as to the purificatory power of fire was no doubt, originally, the direct consequence from the Orphic belief as to the intrinsically staining and imprisoning effect of the body upon the soul. “The soul, as the Orphics say, is enclosed in the body, in punishment for the punishable acts”; “liberations” from the body, and “purifications” of the living and the dead, ever, with them, proceed together. And hence to burn the dead body was considered to purify the soul that had been stained by that prison-house: the slain Clytemnestra, says Euripides, “is purified, as to her body, by fire,” for, as the Scholiast explains, “fire purifies all things, and burnt bodies are considered holy.”[265] And such an intensely anti-body attitude we find, not only fully developed later on into a deliberate anti-Incarnational doctrine, among the Gnostics, but, as we have already seen, slighter traces of this same tone may be found in the (doubtless Alexandrian) Book of Wisdom, and in one, not formally doctrinal passage, a momentary echo of it, in St. Paul himself. And Catherine’s attitude is generally, and often strongly, in this direction.
(2) A careful distinction is evidently necessary here. The doctrine that sin defiles,—affects the quality of the soul’s moral and spiritual dispositions, and that this defilement and perversion, ever occasioned by the search after facile pleasure or the flight from fruitful pain, can normally be removed and corrected only by a long discipline of fully accepted, gradually restorative pain, either here, or hereafter, or both: are profound anticipations, and have been most rightly made integral parts, of the Christian life and conception. The doctrine that the body is essentially a mere accident or superaddition or necessary defilement to the soul, is profoundly untrue, in its exaggeration and one-sidedness: for if the body is the occasion of the least spiritual of our sins, it can and should become the chief servant of the spirit; the slow and difficult training of this servant is one of the most important means of development for the soul itself; and many faults and vices are not occasioned by the body at all, whilst none are directly and necessarily caused by it. Without the body, we should not have impurity, but neither should we have specifically human purity of soul; and without it, given the persistence and activity of the soul, there could be as great, perhaps greater, pride and solipsism, the most anti-Christian of all the vices. Hence if, in Our Lord’s teaching, we find no trace of a Gnostic desire for purification from all things bodily as essentially soul-staining, we do find a profound insistence upon purity of heart, and upon the soul’s real, active “turning,” conversion, (an interior change from an un- or anti-moral attitude to an ethical and spiritual dependence upon God), as a sine qua non condition for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. And the Joannine teachings re-affirm this great truth for us as a Metabasis, a moving from Death over to Life.
4. Catherine’s conceptions as to the character of the stains and of their purgation.
And this idea, as to an intrinsic purgation through suffering of impurities contracted by the soul, can be kept thoroughly Christian, if we ever insist, with Catherine in her most emphatic and deepest teachings, that Purgation can and should be effected in this life, hence in the body,—in and through all the right uses of the body, as well as in and through all the legitimate and will-strengthening abstentions from such uses; that the subject-matter of such purgation are the habits and inclinations contrary to our best spiritual lights, and which we have largely ourselves built up by our variously perverse or slothful acts, but which in no case are directly caused by the body, and in many cases are not even occasioned by it; and, finally, that holiness consists primarily, not in the absence of faults, but in the presence of spiritual force, in Love creative, Love triumphant,—the soul becoming flame rather than snow, and dwelling upon what to do, give and be, rather than upon what to shun.—Catherine’s predominant, ultimate tone possesses this profound positiveness, and corrects all but entirely whatever, if taken alone, would appear to render the soul’s substantial purity impossible in this life; to constitute the body a direct and necessary cause of impurity to the soul; and to find the ideal of perfection in the negative condition of being free from stain. In her greatest sayings, and in her actual life, Purity is found to be Love, and this Love is exercised, not only in the inward, home-coming, recollective movement,—in the purifying of the soul’s dispositions, but also in the outgoing, world-visiting, dispersive movement,—in action towards fellow-souls.