Part 3 — CHAPTER X THE MAIN LITERARY SOURCES OF CATHERINE’S CONCEPTIONS (continued 2)

In Loda XXIII we first have five successive purifications and purities of Love, “carnal, counterfeit, self-seeking, natural, spiritual, transformed,” vv. 1-6; and then the symbols of spacial location and movement reappear, “if height does not abase itself, it cannot participate with, nor communicate itself to, the lowest grade”; all which is frequent with Catherine. But she nowhere echoes the teaching reproduced here, v. 10, as to the Divine Trinity being figured in man’s three faculties of soul.

Loda XXXV gives us a sort of Christian Stoicism very dear dear to Catherine: “Thou, my soul, hast been created in great elevation; thy nature is grounded in great nobility (gentilezza),” v. 7; “thou hast not thy life in created things; it is necessary for thee to breathe in other countries, to mount up to God thine inheritance, Who (alone) can satisfy thy poverty,” v. 10; “great is the honour which thou doest to God, when thou abidest (stare) in Him, in thy (true) nobility,” v. 11.

Loda XLV gives “the Five Modes in which God appears in the Soul”—“the state of fear”; mercenary, “beggar-love”; “the way of love”; “the paternal mode”; “the mode of espousals.” Catherine leaves the last two, anthropomorphic and familial, conceptions quite unused, and passes in her life, at one bound, from the first to the third mode.

2. Lode LVIIIa, LVIIIb.

The fine Loda LVIIIa, “Of Holy Poverty, Mistress of all Things,” has evidently suggested much to Catherine. “Waters, rivers, lakes, and ocean, fish within them and their swimming; airs, winds, birds, and all their flying: all these turn to jewels for me,” v. 10. How readily the sense of water, and of rapid movement within it, passes here into that of air, and of swift locomotion within it! And both these movements, are felt to represent, in vivid fashion, certain very different experiences of the soul.—“Moon, Sun, Sky, and Stars,—even these are not amongst my treasures; above the very sky those things abide, which are the object of my song,” v. 11. The positive, “analogic” method has here turned suddenly into the negative, “apophatic” one; and yet, even here, we still have the spacial symbolism, for the best is the highest up,—indeed it is this very symbolism which is made to add point to the negative declaration, a declaration which nevertheless clearly implies the mere symbolism of that spacialization. All this is fully absorbed by Catherine.—“Since God has my will, … my wings have such feathers that from earth to heaven there is no distance for me,” v. 12. Here we see how Plato filters through, complete, to Jacopone; but only in his central idea to Catherine. For the Phaedrus, 246b, c, teaches: “The perfect soul then, having become winged, soars upwards, and is the ruler of the universe; whilst the imperfect soul sheds her feathers and is borne downwards, till it settles on the solid ground.” Catherine never mentions wings nor feathers, but often dwells upon flying.

The great Loda LVIIIb, “Of Holy Poverty and its Treble Heaven,” (one passage of which is formally quoted and carefully expounded by Catherine), is a combination of Platonism, Paulinism, and Franciscanism, and has specially influenced her through its Platonist element. Verses 1-9 contain a fine apostrophe to Poverty. “O Love of Poverty, Reign of tranquillity! Poverty, high Wisdom! to be subject to nothing; through despising to possess all things created!” v. 1: all this is echoed by Catherine. But the ex-lawyer’s declaration that such a soul “has neither judge nor notary,” v. 3, did certainly not determine her literally, for we have had before us some fifteen cases in which she had recourse to lawyers. “God makes not His abode in a narrow heart; thou art, oh man, precisely as great as thine affection may be. The spirit of poverty possesses so ample a bosom, that Deity Itself takes up its dwelling there,” v. 8. Catherine’s deepest self seems to breathe from out of this profound saying.

Verses 10 to 30 describe the three heavens of successive self-despoilments. The firmamental heaven, which typifies the four-fold renouncement,—of honour, riches, science, reputation of sanctity, has left no echo in Catherine. The stellar heaven is “composed of solidified clear waters (aque solidate)”; here “the four winds” cease “that move the sea,—that perturb the mind: fear and hope, grief and joy,” 11-14. Here Plato again touches Catherine through Jacopone. For the Symposium, 197a, declares: “Love it is that produces peace among men and calm on the sea, a cessation of the winds, and repose and sleep even in trouble”; and Jacopone identifies the middle “crystalline” heaven, (“the waters above” of Genesis, chap, i,) with Plato’s “sea”; takes Plato’s (four) winds as the soul’s chief passions; and considers Plato’s “peace” and “windlessness” as equivalent to the “much silence,” which, says the Apocalypse, “arose in heaven,” viii, 1, interpreted here as “in mid-heaven.” “Not to fear Hell, nor to hope for Heaven, to rejoice in no good, to grieve over no adversity,” v. 16, is a formulation unlike Catherine, although single sayings of hers stand for sentiments analogous to the first and last.—“If the virtues are naked, and the vices are not garmented,—mortal wounds get given to the soul,” v. 19, has a symbolism exactly opposite to Catherine’s, who, we know, loves to glorify “nakedness” as the soul’s purity.—“The highest heaven” is “beyond even the imagings of the mortified fancy”; “of every good it has despoiled thee, and has expropriated thee from all virtue: lay up as a treasure this thy gain,—the sense of thine own vileness.” “O purified Love! it alone lives in the truth!” These verses, 20-22, have left a deep impress upon Catherine, although she wisely does not press that “expropriation from virtue,” which goes back at least to Plotinus, for whom the true Ecstatic is “beyond the choir of the virtues.”[110]

“That which appears to thee (as extant), is not truly, existent: so high (above) is that which truly is. True elevation of soul (la superbia) dwells in heaven above, and baseness of mind (humilitade) leads to damnation,” v. 24, is a saying to which we still have Catherine’s detailed commentary. In its markedly Platonic distinction between an upper true and a lower seeming world, and in its characteristically mystical love of paradox and a play upon words, it is more curious than abidingly important; but in its deeply Christian consciousness of “pride” and “humility,” in their ordinary ethical sense, being respectively the subtlest vice and the noblest virtue, it rises sheer above all Platonist and Neo-Platonist apprehension.

“Love abides in prison, in that darksome light! All light there is darkness, and all darkness there is as the day,” vv. 26, 27. Here Catherine no doubt found aids towards her prison-conception,—of the loving soul imprisoned in the earthly body, and of the imperfect, yet loving, disembodied souls imprisoned in Purgatory; and towards articulating her strong sense of the change in the meaning and value of the same symbols, as the soul grows in depth and experience. But her symbolization of God, and of our apprehension of Him as Light and Fire, is too solidly established in her mind, to allow her to emphasize the darkness-symbol with any reference to Him.

“There where Christ is enclosed (in the soul), all the old is changed by Him,—the one is transformed into the Other, in a marvellous union. To live as I and yet not I; and my very being to be not mine: this is so great a cross-purpose (traversio), that I know not how to define it,” vv. 28-30. This vivid description, based of course upon St. Paul, of the apparent shifting of the very centre of the soul’s personality, has left clear echoes in Catherine’s sayings; but the explicit reference to Christ is here as characteristically Franciscan as it is unlike Catherine’s special habits.—And the great poem ends with a refrain of its opening apostrophe.

3. Lode LXXIV, LXXIX, LXXXI, LXXXIII.

In the dramatically vivid Dialogue between the Old and the Young Friar “Concerning the divers manners of contemplating the Cross,” Loda LXXIV, the elder says to the younger man: “And I find the Cross full of arrows, which issue from its side: they get fixed in my heart. The Archer has aimed them at me; He causes me to be pierced,” v. 6. The Cross is here a bow; and yet the arrows evidently issue not from it, but, as so many rays, from the Sun, the Light-Christ, Who is laid upon it,—from the heart of the Crucified. Catherine maintains the rays and arrows, and the Sun and Fire from which they issue; but the Cross and the Crucified, presupposed here throughout, appear not, even to this extent, in her post-conversion picturings.—“You abide by the warmth, but I abide within the fire; to you it is delight, but I am burning through and through, I cannot find a place of refuge in this furnace,” v. 13. All this has been echoed throughout by Catherine.

Loda LXXIX, “Of the Divine Love and its Praises,” has evidently much influenced her. “O joyous wound, delightful wound, gladsome wound, for him who is wounded by Thee, O Love!” “O Love, divine Fire! Love full of laughter and playfulness!” “O Love, sweet and suave; O Love, Thou art the key of heaven! Ship that Thou art, bring me to port and calm the tempest,” vv. 3, 6, 16. All this we have found reproduced in her similes and experiences. “Love, bounteous in spending Thyself; Love with widespread tables!” “Love, Thou art the One that loves, and the Means wherewith the heart loves Thee!” vv. 24, 26. These verses give us the wide, wide world outlook, the connection between Love and the Holy Eucharist, and the identity of the Subject, Means, and Object of Love, which are all so much dwelt upon by Catherine.

Loda LXXXI is interesting by the way in which, although treating of “the love of Christ upon the Cross,” it everywhere apostrophizes Love and not the Lover, and treats the former, again like Catherine, as a kind of boundless living substance; indeed v. 17 must have helped to suggest one of her favourite conceptions: “O great Love, greater than the great sea! Oh! the man who is drowned within it, under it, and with it all around him, whilst he knows not where he is!”

Loda LXXXIII has two touches dear to Catherine. “O Love, whose name is ‘I love’—the plural is never found,” v. 5,—a saying which evidently is directed, not against a social conception of religion, but against a denial of the Divine Love being Source as well as Object of our love; and “I did not love Thee with any gain to myself, until I loved Thee for Thine own sake,” v. 15,—a declaration of wondrous depth and simplicity.

4. Lode LXXXVIII, LXXXIX, LXXXX, LXXXXVIII, LXXXXIX.

The great Loda LXXXVIII, “How the soul complains to God concerning the excessive ardours of the love infused into it,” contains numerous touches which have been interestingly responded to or ignored by Catherine. “All my will is on fire with Love, is united, transformed (into It); who can bear such Love? Nor fire nor sword can part the loving soul and her Love; a thing so united cannot be divided; neither suffering nor death can henceforth mount up to that height where the soul abides in ecstasy,” vv. 5, 6: a combination of St. Paul and Plotinus, quite after Catherine’s heart. But “the light of the sun appears to me obscure, now that I see that resplendent Countenance,” v. 7, has an anthropomorphic touch to which she does not respond; and “I have given all my heart, that it may possess that Lover who renews me so,—O Beauty ancient and ever new!” v. 10, has the personal designation “Lover,” which, again, is alien to her vocabulary.

“Seeing such Beauty, I have been drawn out of myself … and the heart now gets undone, melted as though it were wax, and finds itself again, with the likeness of Christ upon it,” v. 11, must have stimulated, by its first part, some of her own experiences, and will, by its second part, taken literally, have helped on the fantastic expectations of her attendants. “Love rises to such ardour, that the heart seems to be transfixed as with a knife,” v. 14, no doubt both expressed an experience of Jacopone and helped to constitute the form of a similar experience on the part of Catherine. “As iron, which is all on fire, as dawn, made resplendent by the sun, lose their own form (nature) and exist in another, so is it with the pure mind, when clothed by Thee, O Love,” v. 21, contains ideas, (all but the symbol of clothing,) very dear to Catherine. But the astonishingly daring words: “Since my soul has been transformed into Truth, into Thee, O Christ alone, into Thee Who art tender Loving,—not to myself but to Thee can be imputed what I do. Hence, if I please Thee not, Thou dost not please Thine Own Self, O Love!” v. 22, remain unechoed by her, no doubt because her states shift from one to another, and she wisely abstains from pushing the articulation of any one of them to its own separate logical limit.

“Thou wast born into the world by love and not by flesh, O Love become Man (humanato Amore),” v. 27, is like her in its interesting persistence in the “Love” (not “Lover”) designation, but is unlike her in its definite reference to the historic Incarnation. “Love, O Love, Jesus, I have reached the haven,” v. 32, is closely like her, all but the explicit mention of the historic name; and “Love, O Love, Thou art the full-orbed circle,” “Thou art both warp and woof,” beginning and end, material and transforming agency, v. 33, is Catherine’s central idea, expressed in a form much calculated to impress it upon her.

The daring and profound Loda LXXXIX, “How the soul, by holy self-annihilation and love, reaches an unknowable and indescribable state,” contains again numerous touches which have been assimilated by Catherine. So with: “Drawn forth, out of her natural state, into that unmeasurable condition whither love goes to drown itself, the soul, having plunged into the abyss of this ocean, henceforth cannot find, on any side, any means of issuing forth from it,” vv. 12, 13. So also with: “Since thou dost no longer love thyself, but alone that Goodness … it has become necessary for thee again to love thyself, but with His Love,—into so great an unity hast thou been drawn by Him,” vv. 52-54. So too with: “All Faith ceases for the soul to whom it has been given to see; and all Hope, since it now actually holds what it used to seek,” v. 70, although this is more absolute than are her similar utterances.—But especially are the startling words interesting: “In this transformation, thou drinkest Another, and that Other drinketh thee (tu bevi e sei bevuto, in transformazione),” v. 98, which, in their second part, are identical with R. Browning’s “My end, to slake Thy thirst”:[111] for they will have helped to support or to encourage Catherine’s corresponding inversion—the teaching of an eating, an assimilation, not of God by man, but of man by God. Both sets of images go back, of course, to the Eucharistic reception by the soul of the God-man Christ, under the forms of Bread eaten and of Wine drunk.

The striking Loda LXXXX, “How the soul arrives at a treble state of annihilation,” has doubtless suggested much to Catherine. “He who has become the very Cause of all things” (chi è cosa d’ogni cosa) “can never more desire anything,” v. 4, is, it is true, more daring, because more quietly explicit, than any saying of hers. But v. 13 has been echoed by her throughout: “The heavens have grown stagnant; their silence constrains me to cry aloud: ‘O profound Ocean, the very depth of Thine Abyss has constrained me to attempt and drown myself within it,’”—where note the interestingly antique presupposition of the music of the spheres, which has now stopped, and of the watery constitution of the crystalline heaven, which allows of stagnation; and the rapidity of the change in the impressions,—from immobility to silence, and from air to water. Indeed that Ocean is one as much of air as of water, and as little the one as the other; and its attractive force is still that innate affinity between the river-soul and its living Source and Home, the Ocean God, which we have so constantly found in Plotinus, Proclus, and Dionysius. “The land of promise is, for such a soul, no longer one of promise only: for the perfect soul already reigns within that land. Men can thus transform themselves, in any and every place,” v. 18, has, in its touching and lofty Stoic-Christian teaching, found the noblest response and re-utterance in and by Catherine’s words and life.

Loda LXXXXVIII, “Of the Incarnation of the Divine Word,” full though it is of beautiful Franciscanism, has left her uninfluenced. But the fine Loda LXXXXIX, “How true Love is not idle,” contains touches which have sunk deep into her mind. “Splendour that givest to all the world its light, O Love Jesus … heaven and earth are by Thee; Thine action resplends in all things and all things turn to Thee. Only the sinner despises Thy Love and severs himself from Thee, his Creator,” v. 6, is, in its substance, taken over by her. “O ye cold sinners!” v. 12, is her favourite epithet. And vv. 13, 14, with their rapid ringing of the changes on the different sense-perceptions, will, by their shifting vividness, have helped on a similar iridescence in her own imagery: “O Odour, that transcendest every sweetness! O living river of Delight … that causest the very dead to return to their vigour! In heaven Thy lovers possess Thine immense Sweetness, tasting there those savoury morsels.”

And finally Loda LXXXVII, “Of true and false discretion,” which, in vv. 12-20, consists of a dialogue between “the Flesh” and “the Reason,” will have helped to suggest the slight beginnings of this form of apprehension to Catherine which we have found amongst her authentic sayings and experiences, and which were, later on, developed on so large a scale, by Battista Vernazza, throughout her long Dialogo della Beata Caterina.

5. Jacopone it is, then, who furnished Catherine with much help towards that rare combination of deep feeling with severely abstract thinking which, if at times it somewhat strains and wearies us moderns who would ever end with the concrete, gives a nobly virile, bracing note to even the most effective of her sayings.

V. Points Common to all Five Minds; and Catherine’s Main Difference from her Four Predecessors.

If we now consider for a moment the general points common to the four writers just considered and to Catherine, we readily note that all five are profoundly reflective and interpretative in their attitude towards the given contingencies of traditional religion; that they all tend to find the Then and There of History still at work, in various degrees, Here and Now, throughout Time and Space, and in the last resort, above and behind both these categories, in a spaceless, timeless Present. And if only three, Paul, Jacopone, and Catherine, bear marks, throughout all they think and feel and do and are, of the cataclysmic conversion-crisis through which they had passed,—the temporally intermediate two, John and Dionysius, have also got, but in a more indirect form, much of a similar Dualism. All five are, in these and other respects, indefinitely closer to each other than any one of them is to the still richer, more complete, and more entirely balanced though less articulated, Synoptic teaching, which enfolds all that is abiding in those other five, whilst they, even if united, do not approximately exhaust the substance of that teaching.

And if we would briefly define the main point on which Catherine holds views additional to, or other than, those other four, we must point to her Purgatorial teaching, which has received but little or no direct suggestion from any one of them, and which, whatever may have been its literary precursors and occasions, gives, perhaps more than anything else, a peculiarly human and personal, original and yet still modern, touch to what would otherwise be, to our feeling, too abstract and antique a spiritual physiognomy.