The antagonism here is but apparent. For the fact that a certain condition of soul precedes, and that another condition succeed, each act of the same soul, in proportion as this act is full and deliberate, does not prevent the corresponding, complimentary fact that such acts take the preceding condition as their occasion, and make the succeeding condition into a further expression of themselves. Single acts which fully express the character, whether good or bad, are doubtless rarer than is mostly thought. Yet Catherine, in union with the Gospels and the Church, is deeply convinced of the power of one single act of Pure Love to abolish, not of course the effects outward, but the reflex spiritual consequences upon the soul itself, of sinful acts or states.
Catherine’s picture again, of the deliberate Plunge into Purgatory, gives us a similar heroic act which, summing up the whole soul’s active volitions, initiates and encloses the whole subsequent purification, but which itself involves a prevenient act of Divine Love and mercy, to which this act of human love is but the return and response. Indeed, as we know, this plunge-conception was but the direct projection, on to the other-world-picture, of her own personal experience at her conversion, when a short span of clock-time held acts of love received and acts of love returned, which transformed all her previous condition, and initiated a whole series of states ever more expressive of her truest self.—Act and state and state and act, each presupposes and requires the other: and both are present in the Synoptic pictures, and both are operative in the Purgatorial teaching; although in the former the accounts are so brief as to make states and acts alike look as though one single act; and, in the latter, the descriptions are so large as to make the single acts almost disappear behind the states.
V. Catherine and Heaven—Three Perplexities to be considered.
We have found a truly Purgational Middle state, with its sense of succession, its mixture of joy and suffering, and its growth and fruitfulness, to be profoundly consonant with all our deepest spiritual experiences and requirements. But what about Heaven, which we must, apparently, hold to consist of a sense of simultaneity, a condition of mere reproductiveness and utterly uneventful finality, and a state of unmixed, unchanging joy?—Here again, even if in a lesser degree, certain experiences of the human soul can help us to a few general positions of great spiritual fruitfulness, which can reasonably claim an analogical applicability to the Beyond, and which, thus taken as our ultimate ideals, cannot fail to stimulate the growth of our personality, and, with it, of further insight into these great realities. I shall here consider three main questions, which will roughly correspond to the three perplexities just indicated.
1. Time and Heaven.
Our first question, then, is as to the probable character of man’s happiest ultimate consciousness,—whether it is one of succession or of simultaneity: in other words, whether, besides the disappearance of the category of space (a point already discussed), there is likely to be the lapse of the category of time also.—And let it be noted that the retention of the latter sense for Hell, and even for Purgatory, does not prejudge the question as to its presence or absence in Heaven, since those two states are admittedly non-normative, whereas the latter represents the very ideal and measure of man’s full destination and perfection.
(1) Now it is still usual, amongst those who abandon the ultimacy of the space-category, simultaneously to drop, as necessarily concomitant, the time-category also. Tennyson, among the poets, does so, in his beautiful “Crossing the Bar”: “From out our bourne of Time and Place, the flood may bear me far”; and Prof. H. J. Holtzmann, among speculative theologians, in criticising Rothe’s conception of man as a quite ultimately spacial-temporal being, treats these two questions as standing and falling together.[283]—Yet a careful study of Kant’s critique of the two categories of Space and Time suffices to convince us of the indefinitely richer content, and more ultimate reality, of the latter. Indeed, I shall attempt to show more fully in the next Chapter, with the aid of M. Henri Bergson, that mathematical, uniform clock-time is indeed an artificial compound, which is made up of our profound experience of a duration in which the constituents (sensations, imaginations, thoughts, feelings, willings) of the succession ever, in varying degrees, overlap, interpenetrate, and modify each other, and the quite automatic and necessary simplification and misrepresentation of this experience by its imaginary projection on to space,—its restatement, by our picturing faculty, as a perfectly equable succession of mutually exclusive moments. It is in that interpenetrative duration, not in this atomistic clock-time, that our deeper human experiences take place.
(2) But that sense of duration, is it indeed our deepest apprehension? Dr. Holtzmann points out finely how that we are well aware, in our profoundest experiences, of “that permanently incomprehensible fact,—the existence of, as it were, a prism, through which the unitary ray of light, which fills our consciousness with a real content, is spread out into a colour-spectrum, so that what, in itself, exists in pure unitedness” and simultaneity, “becomes intelligible to us only as a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time. Beyond the prism, there are no such two things.” And he shows how keenly conscious we are, at times, of that deepest mode of apprehension and of being which is a Simultaneity, an eternal Here and Now; and how ruinous to our spiritual life would be a full triumph of the category of time.[284]
But it is St. Augustine who has, so far, found the noblest expression for the deepest human experiences in this whole matter of Duration and Simultaneity, as against mere Clock-Time, although, here as with regard to Space, he is deeply indebted to Plotinus. “In thee, O my soul, I measure time,—I measure the impression which passing events make upon thee, who remainest when those events have passed: this present impression then, and not those events which had to pass in order to produce it, do I measure, when I measure time.” “The three times,” tenses, “past, present, and future … are certain three affections in the soul, I find them there and nowhere else. There is the present memory of past events, the present perception of present ones, and the present expectation of future ones.” God possesses “the splendour of ever-tarrying Eternity,” which is “incomparable with never-tarrying times,” since in it “nothing passes, but the content of everything abides simply present.” And in the next life “perhaps our own thoughts also will not be flowing, going from one thing to another, but we shall see all we know simultaneously, in one intuition.” St. Thomas indeed is more positive: “All things will,” in Heaven, “be seen simultaneously and not successively.”[285]