Part 3 — CHAPTER XII THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES

Moving on now to the questions concerning the After-Life, it will be convenient to consider them under five heads: the chief present-day positions and perplexities with regard to belief in the After-Life in General; the main implications and convictions inherent to an Eschatology such as Catherine’s; and then the principal characteristics, difficulties, and helps of her tendencies and teachings concerning Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And throughout the Chapter we shall busy ourselves directly only with the After-Life in the sense of a heightened, or at least an equal, consciousness after death, as compared to that which existed before death: the belief in a shrunken state of survival, in non-annihilation, appearing to be as certainly the universal minimum of belief as such a minimum is not Immortality.

I. The Chief Present-day Problems, Perplexities, and Requirements with Regard to the After-Life in General.

Now I take our chief present-day problems, perplexities, and resultant requirements with regard to the After-Life in general, to fall into three groups, according as those problems are predominantly Historical, or Philosophical, or directly Practical and Ethical.

1. Three Historical Difficulties.

The Historical group now brings very clearly and certainly before us the striking non-universality, the startling lateness, and the generally strange fitfulness and apparent unreasonableness characterizing the earliest stage of belief in the soul’s heightened, or at least equivalent, consciousness after death.

(1) Now with respect to the Non-Universality of the doctrine, it is true that, in China, Confucianism is full of care for the dead. “Throughout the Empire, the authorities are obliged to hold three annual sacrifices for the refreshment and rest of the souls of the dead in general.” “It is hardly doubtful that the cultus of Ancestors formed the chief institution in classical Confucianism, and constituted the very centre of religion for the people. Even now ancestor-worship is the only form of religion for which rules, applicable to the various classes among the Emperor’s subjects, are laid down in the Dynastic Statutes.” And Professor De Groot, from whom I am quoting, gives an interesting conspectus of the numberless ways in which the religious service of the dead penetrates Chinese life.[191]—Yet we hear of Kong-Tse (Confucius) himself (551-478 B.C.), that, though he insisted upon the most scrupulous execution of the three hundred rules of the then extant temple-ceremonial, which were no doubt largely busy with the dead, and though he said that one should sacrifice to the spirits as if they were present, he designated, in several of his sayings, occupation with theological problems as useless: “as long as we do not know men, how shall we know spirits? As long as we do not understand life, how should we fathom death?” And to questions relative to the spirits and the dead, he would give evasive answers.[192] Thus the founder of the most characteristic of the Chinese religions was without any clear and consistent conviction on the point in question.

In India we find, for Brahmanic religion, certain unmistakable Immortality-Doctrines (in the sense of the survival of the soul’s self-consciousness), expressed in the hymns of the Rig-Veda.—But already, in the philosophizings of the Upanishads, we get a world-soul, and this soul’s exclusive permanence: “to attain to true unity, the very duality of subject and object is to disappear. The terms Atman and Brahman here express the true Being which vivifies all beings and appearances, and with which cognizing man reunites himself whilst losing his individual existence.”[193]

And if we move on to Buddhism, with its hundreds of millions of adherents in Burmah, Tibet, China, and Japan, we can learn, from the classical work of Oldenberg, how interestingly deep down lies the reason for the long conflict between scholars as to whether Nirvana is or is not to be taken for the complete extinction of the individual soul. “Everything, in the Buddhist dogmatic system, is part and parcel of a circle of Becoming and of Dissolution: all things are but a Dhamma, a Sankhara; and all Dhamma, all Sankhara are but temporary.… The Mutable, Conditioned is here thinkable only as conditioned by another Mutable and Conditioned. If we follow the dialectic consequence alone, there is no seeing how, according to this system, there can remain over, when a succession and mutual destruction of things conditioning and of things conditioned has run its course, anything but a pure vacuum.” And we have also such a saying of the Buddha as the following. “Now if, O disciples, the Ego (atta) and anything appertaining to the Ego (attaniya) cannot be comprehended with accuracy and certainty, is not then the faith which declares: ‘This is the world, and this is the Ego; this shall I become at death,—firm, constant, eternal, unchangeable,—thus shall I be there, throughout eternity,’—is not this sheer empty folly?” “How should it not, O Lord, be sheer empty folly?” answer the disciples. “One who spoke thus,” is Oldenberg’s weighty comment, “cannot have been far from the conviction that Nirvana is annihilation. Yet it is understandable how the very thinkers, who were capable of bearing this consequence, should have hesitated to raise it to the rank of an official dogma of the community.… Hence the official doctrine of the Buddhist Church attained the form, that, on the question of the real existence of the Ego, of whether or not the perfected saint lives on after death, the exalted Buddha has taught nothing. Indeed the legally obligatory doctrine of the old community required of its votaries an explicit renunciation of all knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of completely redeemed souls.”

“Buddhism,” so Oldenberg sums up the matter, with, I think, the substantial adhesion of all present-day competent authorities, “teaches that there is a way out of the world of created things, out into the dark Infinite. Does this way lead to new being? or does it lead to nothingness? Buddhist belief maintains itself on the knife’s edge of these alternatives. The desire of the heart, as it longs for the Eternal, is not left without something, and yet the thinking mind is not given a something that it could grasp and retain. The thought of the Infinite, the Eternal, could not be present at all, and yet vanish further away than here, where, a mere breath and on the point of sinking into sheer nothingness, it threatens to disappear altogether.”[194] This vast Buddhist community, numbering, perhaps, a third of the human race, should not, then, be forgotten, when we urge the contrary instances of the religions of Assyria and Babylonia; of Egypt; of Greece and Rome; and, above all, of the Jews and Christianity.

Yet it is well to remember that such non-universality of belief is at least as real, to this very hour, for such a fundamental religious truth and practice as Monotheism and Monolatry; such purely Ethical convictions as Monogamy and the Illicitness of Slavery; such a plain dictate of the universal humanitarian ideal as the illegitimacy of the application of physical compulsion in matters of religious conviction; and such directly demonstrable psychical and natural facts as subconsciousness in the human soul, the sexual character of plants, and the earth’s rotundity and rotation around the sun. In none of these cases can we claim more than that the higher, truer doctrine,—that is, the one which explains and transcends the element of truth contained in its predecessor and opposite,—is explicitly reached by a part only of humanity, and is but implied and required by other men, at their best. Yet this is clearly enough for leaving us free to decide,—reasonably conclusive evidence for their truth being forthcoming,—in favour of the views of the minority: since the assumption of an equality of spiritual and moral insight and advance throughout mankind is as little based upon fact, as would be the supposition of men’s equal physical strength or height, or of any other quality or circumstance of their nature and environment.

(2) The lateness of the doctrine’s appearance, precisely in the cases where there can be no doubt of its standing for a conviction of an endless persistence of a heightened consciousness after death,—that is, amongst the Greeks (and Romans) and the Jews (and Christians),—has now been well established by critical historical research.

With regard to the Greeks,[195] the matter is particularly plain, since we can still trace even in Plato, (427 to 347 B.C.), who, next to Our Lord Himself and to St. Paul, is doubtless the greatest and most influential teacher of full individual Immortality that the world has seen, two periods of thought in this matter, and can show that the first was without any such certain conviction. In his Apology of Socrates, written soon after the execution in 399 B.C., he makes his great master, close to his end, declare that death would bring to man either a complete unconsciousness, like to a dreamless sleep, or a transition into another life,—a life here pictured like to the Homeric Hades. Both possibilities Socrates made to accept resignedly, in full reliance on the justice of the Gods, and to look no further; how should he know what is known to no man?—And this is Plato’s own earlier teaching. For in the very Republic which, in its chronologically later constituents, (especially in Book V, 471c, to the end of Book VIII, Book IX, 560d to 588a, and Book X up to 608b), so insists upon and develops the truth and importance of Immortality in the strictest, indeed the sublimest sense: we get, in its earlier portions, (especially in Book II, 10c, to Book V, 460c), no trace of any such conviction. For, in these earlier passages, the Guardians in the Ideal State are not to consider what may come after death: the central theme is the manner in which Justice carries with it its own recompense; and the rewards, that are popularly wont to be placed before the soul, are referred to ironically,—Socrates is determined to do without such hopes. In those later portions, on the contrary, there is the greatest insistence upon the importance of caring, not for this short life alone, but for the soul’s “whole time” and for what awaits it after death. And in the still later parts, (as in Books VI and VII), the sublimest form of Immortality is presupposed as true and actual throughout. Thus in Greece it is not till about 390-380 B.C., and in Plato himself not till his middle life, that we get a quite definite and final doctrine of the Immortality of all souls, and of a blessed after-existence for every just and holy life here below.

For the survival after the body’s death, indubitably attributed to the Psyche in the Homeric Poems, is conceived there, throughout, as a miserably shrunken consciousness, and one which is dependent for its continuance upon the good offices bestowed by the survivors upon the corpse and grave. And the translation of the still living Menelaus to Elysium (Od. IV, 560-568) is probably a later insertion; belongs to a small class of exceptional cases; implies the writer’s inability to conceive a heightened consciousness for the soul, after the soul’s separation from the body; and is based, not upon any virtue or reward, but upon Menelaus’s family-relationship to Zeus. Ganymede gets similarly translated because of his physical beauty (II. XX, 232 seq.).

Hesiod, though later than Homer as a writer, gives us, in his account of the Five Ages of the World (Works and Days, ll. 109-201), some traces of an Animistic conception of a heightened life of the bodiless soul beyond the grave,—a conception which had been neglected or suppressed by Homer, but which had evidently been preserved alive in the popular religion of, at least, Central Greece. Yet Hesiod knows of such a life only for the Golden and for the Silver Ages, and for some miraculous, exceptional cases of the fourth, the Heroic Age: already in the third, the Bronze Age, and still more emphatically in his own fifth, the Iron Age, there are no such consolations: nothing but the shrunken consciousness of the Homeric after-death Psyche is, quite evidently, felt by him to be the lot of all souls in the hard, iron present.

The Cultus of the Heroes is already registered in Draco’s Athenian Laws, in about 620 B.C., as a traditional custom. And these Heroes have certainly lived at one time as men upon earth, and have become heroes only after death; their souls, though severed from the body, live a heightened imperishable life, indeed one that can mightily help men here below and now,—so at Delphi and at Salamis against the Persians. Yet here again each case of such an elevation was felt to be a miracle, an exception incapable of becoming a universal law: not even the germ of a belief in the Immortality of the soul as such seems to be here.

The Cultus of the Nether-World Deities, of the Departed generally, and, as the culmination of all this movement, the Eleusinian Mysteries, must not be conceived as involving or as leading to, any belief in the ecstatic elevation of the soul, or consciousness of its God-likeness; and such unending bliss as is secured, is gained by men, not because they are virtuous and devout, but through their initiation into the Mysteries. Rhode assures us, rightly I think, that “it remains unproved that, during the classical period of Greek culture, the belief in Judges and a Judgment to be held in Hades over the deeds done by men on earth, had struck root among the people”; Professor Percy Gardner adds his great authority to the same conclusion.[196] Here again it is Plato who is the first to take up a clearly and consistently spiritual and universalistic position.

Indeed it is only in the predominantly neuropathic, indeed largely immoral and repulsive, forms of the Dionysiac sect and movement, (at work, perhaps, already in the eighth century B.C. and which leads on to the formation of the more aristocratic and priestly Orphic communities) that a demonstrable and direct belief arose in the soul’s intrinsic God-likeness, or even divinity, and in its immortality, or even eternity; and that stimulations, materials, and conceptions were furnished to Greek thought, which are traceable wheresoever it henceforth inclines to belief in the soul’s intrinsic Immortality.

Yet the leaven spread but slowly into philosophy. For the Ionian philosophers, and among them Heraclitus, the impressive teacher of the flux of all things, flourish from about 600 to 430 B.C.; but, naïve Materialists and Pantheists as they are, they frankly exclude all survival of individual consciousness after death. The Eleatic philosophers live between 550 and 450 B.C., and are all busy with a priori logical constructions of the physical world, conceived as sole and self-explanatory; and amongst them is Parmenides, the powerful propounder of the complete identity and immutability of all reality. Those transcendent spiritual beliefs appear first as part, indeed as the very foundation, although still rather of a mode of life than of a formal philosophy, in the teaching and community of Pythagoras, who seems to have lived about 580 to 490 B.C., and who certainly emigrated from Asia Minor to Croton in Southern Italy. The soul appears here as intrinsically immortal, indeed without beginning and without end. And then Immortality forms one (the mystical) of the two thoroughly heterogeneous elements of the, otherwise predominantly Ionic and Materialistic, philosophy of Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily, about 490 to 435 B.C. In both these cases the Dionysiac-Orphic provenance of the “Immortality”-doctrines is clearly apparent.

And then, among the poets who bridge over the period up to Plato, we find Pindar, who, alongside of reproductions of the ordinary, popular conceptions, gives us at times lofty, Orphic-like teachings as to the eternity, the migration, and the eventual persistent rest and happiness of the just Soul, and as to the suffering of the unjust one; Aeschylus, who primarily dwells upon the Gods’ judgment in this life, and who makes occasional allusions to the after-life which are partly still of the Homeric type; Sophocles, who indeed refers to the special privileges which, in the after-life, attend upon the souls that have here been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, and who causes Oedipus to be translated, whilst still alive, to Other-World happiness, but who knows nothing of an unceasing heightened consciousness for all men after death; and Euripides, who, showing plainly the influence of the Sophists, gives expression, alongside of Pantheistic identifications of the soul and of the aether, to every kind of misgiving and doubt as to any survival after death.

And as to the appearance of the doctrine among the Jews, we again find a surprising lateness. I follow here, with but minor contributions and modifications from other writers and myself, the main conclusions of Dr. Charles’s standard Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, London, 1899, whose close knowledge of the subject is unsurpassed, and who finds as many and as early attestations as are well-nigh findable by serious workers.[197]

“The primitive beliefs of the individual Israelite regarding the future life, being derived from Ancestor-worship, were implicitly antagonistic to Yahwism, from its first proclamation by Moses.… This antagonism becomes explicit and results in the final triumph of Yahwism.” And to the early Israelite, even under Yahwism, “the religious unit was” not the individual but “the family or tribe.” Thus, even fully six centuries after Moses, “the message of the prophets of the eighth century,” Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, “is still directed to the nation, and the judgments they proclaim are collective punishment for collective guilt. It is not till late in the seventh century B.C. that the problem of individual retribution really emerged, and received its first solution in the teaching of Jeremiah.” And “the further development of these ideas,” by the teaching of Ezekiel and of some of the Psalms and Proverbs, as regards individual responsibility and retribution in this life, and by the deep misgivings and keen questionings of Job and Ecclesiastes, as to the adequacy of this teaching, “led inevitably to the conception of a blessed life beyond the grave.”

Yet throughout the Hebrew Old Testament the Eschatology of the Nation greatly predominates over that of the Individual. Indeed in pre-Exilic times “the day of Yahwe,” with its national judgments, constitutes the all but exclusive subject of the prophetic teaching as to the future. Only from the Exile, (597 to 538 B.C.), onwards, does the eschatological development begin to grow in complexity, for now the individualism first preached by Jeremiah begins to maintain its claim also. But not till the close of the fourth century, or the beginning of the third century B.C., do the separate eschatologies of the individual and of the nation issue finally in their synthesis: the righteous individual will participate in the Messianic Kingdom, the righteous dead of Israel will arise to share therein,—thus in Isaiah xxvi, 1-19, a passage which it is difficult to place earlier than about 334 B.C. The resurrection is here limited to the just. In Daniel xii, 2, which is probably not earlier than 165 B.C., the resurrection is extended, not indeed to all members of Israel, but, with respective good and evil effects, to its martyrs and apostates.

And the slowness and incompleteness of the development throughout the Hebrew Old Testament is strikingly illustrated by the great paucity of texts which yield, without the application of undue pressure, any clear conviction or hope of a heightened, or even a sheer, maintenance of the soul’s this-life consciousness and force after death. Besides the passages just indicated, Dr. Charles can only find Psalms xlix and lxxiii, and Job xix, 25-27, all three, according to him, later than Ezekiel, who died in 571 B.C.[198] The textually uncertain and obscure Job-passage (xix, 25, 26) must be discounted, since it evidently demands interpretation according to the plain presupposition and point of the great poem as a whole.—And the same result is reached by the numerous, entirely unambiguous, passages which maintain the negative persuasion. In the hymn put into the mouth of the sick king Hezekiah, for about 713 B.C., (a composition which seems to be very late, perhaps only of the second century B.C.), we hear: “The grave cannot praise Thee … they that go down into the pit cannot hope for truth. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day.” And the Psalter contains numerous similar declarations. Thus vi, 5: “In death there is no remembrance of Thee: in the grave who shall give Thee thanks?” and cxv, 17: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence; but we praise the Lord.” See also Psalms xxx, 19; lxxxviii, 11.

Indeed the name for the Departed is Rephaim, “the limp, the powerless ones.” Stade well says: “According to the ancient Israelitish conception the entire human being, body and soul, outlasts death, whilst losing all that makes life worth living. That which persists in Sheol for all eternity is the form of man, emptied of all content. Antique thought ignores as yet that there exists no such thing as a form without substance. The conception has as little in common with the conviction of the Immortality of the Soul, which found its chief support in Greek ideas, as with the expectation of the Resurrection, which grew out of the Jewish Messianic hope, or with the Christian anticipation of Eternal Life, which is also based upon religious motives.”[199]

Yet, with respect to this objection from the lateness of the doctrine, we must not forget that fully consistent Monotheism and Monogamy are also late, but not, on that account, less true or less precious; and indeed that, as a universal rule, the human mind has acquired at all adequate convictions as to most certain and precious truths but slowly and haltingly. This process is manifest even in Astronomy, Geology, Botany, Human Anatomy. It could not fail to be, not less but more the case in a matter like this which, if it concerns us most deeply, is yet both too close to us to be readily appreciated in its true proportions, and too little a matter of mathematical demonstration or of direct experience not to take much time to develop, and not to demand an ever-renewed acquisition and purification, being, as it is, the postulate and completion of man’s ethical and spiritual faiths, at their deepest and fullest.

(3) And with regard to the unsatisfactory character of some of the earliest manifestations of the belief, this point is brought home to us, with startling vividness, in the beginnings of the doctrine in ancient Greece. For Rhode’s very careful and competent examination of precisely this side of the whole question shows conclusively (even though I think, with Crusius, that he has overlooked certain rudiments of analogous but healthy experiences and beliefs in pre-Dionysiac Greece) how new and permanently effective a contribution to the full doctrine was made, for the Hellenic world and hence indirectly for all Western humanity, by the self-knowledge gained in that wildly orgiastic upheaval, those dervish-like dances and ecstatic fits during the Dionysian night-celebrations on the Thracian mountain-sides. Indeed Rhode traces how from these experiences, partly from the continuation of them, partly from the reaction against them, on the part of the intensely dualistic and ascetic teaching and training of the Orphic sect, there arose, and filtered through to Pythagoras, to Plato, and to the whole Neo-Platonist school, the clear conception and precise terminology concerning ecstatic, enthusiastic states, the divinity and eternity of the human soul, its punitive lapse into and imprisonment within the body, and its need of purification throughout the earthly life and of liberation through death from this its incurably accidental and impeding companion.—Thus we get here, concerning one of the chief sources of at least the formulation of our belief in Immortality, what looks a very nest of suspicious, repulsive circumstances:—psycho-physical phenomena, which, quite explicable to, and indeed explained by, us now as in nowise supernatural, could not fail to appear portentous to those men who first experienced them; unmoral or immoral attitudes and activities of mind and will; and demonstrable excesses of feeling and conception as regards both the static goodness, the downright divinity, eternity, and increateness of the soul, and the unmixed evil of the body with its entirely disconnected alongsideness to the soul. Does not all this spell a mass of wild hallucination, impurity, fanaticism, and superstition?

Yet here again it behoves us, if not to accept, yet also not to reject, in wholesale fashion and in haste. For the profoundly experienced Professor Pierre Janet shows[200] us, what is now assumed as an axiom, and as the ultimate justification of the present widespread interest in the study of Hysteria, that “we must admit for the moral world the great principle universally admitted for the physical world since Claude Bernard,—viz. that the laws of illness are, at bottom, the same as those of health, and that, in the former, there is but the exaggeration or the diminution of phenomena which existed already in the latter.”

And if thus our recent studies of morbid mentalities have been able to throw a flood of light upon the mechanism and character of the healthy mind, a mind more difficult to analyze precisely because of the harmonious interaction of its forces, there is nothing very surprising if man, in the past, learnt to know his own fundamental nature better in and through periods of abnormal excitation than in those of normal balance. And the resultant doctrines in the case in question only required, and demand again and again, a careful pruning and harmonizing to show forth an extraordinary volume of abiding truth. The insuppressible difference between mind and matter, and the distinction between the fully recollected soul (intuitive reason), and explicit reasoning; the immeasurable superiority of mind over matter, and the superiority of that full reason over this “thin” reasoning; the certainty, involved in all our inevitable mental categories and assumptions and in all our motives for action, of this mind and intuition being more like the cause of all things than are those other inferior realities and activities; the indestructibleness of the postulates and standards of objective and infinite Beauty, Truth, Goodness, of our consciousness of being intrinsically bound to them, and of our inmost humanity and its relative greatness being measurable by just this our consciousness of this our obligation, and hence by the keenness of our sense of failure, and by our striving after purification and the realization of our immanental possibilities: all this remains deeply fruitful and true.

And those crude early experiences and analyses certainly point to what, even now, are our most solid reasons for belief in Immortality: for if man’s mind and soul can thus keenly suffer from the sense of the contingency and mutability of all things directly observed by it without and within, it must itself be, at least in part or potentially, outside of this flux which it so vividly apprehends as not Permanence, not Rest, not true Life. Let us overlook, then, and forgive the first tumultuous, childishly rude and clumsy, mentally and emotionally hyper-aesthetic forms of apprehension of these great spiritual facts and laws, forms which are not, after all, more misleading than is the ordinary anaesthetic condition of our apprehending faculties towards these fundamental forces and testimonies of our lot and nature. Not the wholesale rejection, then, of even those crude Dionysian witnessings, still less of the already more clarified Orphic teaching, and least of all of Plato’s great utilizations and spiritualizations can be required of us, but only a reinterpretation of those first impressions and of mankind’s analogous experiences, and a sifting and testing of the latter by the light of all that has been deeply lived through, and seriously thought out, by spiritually awake humanity ever since.—And we should remember that the history of the doctrine among the Jews is, as has already been intimated, grandly free from any such suspicious occasions and concomitances.

2. Two Philosophical Difficulties.

Yet it is precisely this latter, social, body-and-soul-survival doctrine which brings the second group of objections, the philosophical difficulties, to clear articulation. For thus we are unavoidably driven to one or other of the equally difficult alternatives, of a bodiless life of the soul, and of a survival or resurrection of the body.

(1) Christianity, by its explicit teachings, and even more by its whole drift and interior affinities, requires the survival of all that is essential to the whole man, and conceives this whole as constituted, not by thought alone but also by feeling and will and the power of effectuation; so that the body, or some unpicturable equivalent to it, seems necessary to this physico-spiritual, ultimately organic conception of what man is and must continue to be, if he is to remain man at all.—And Psychology, on its part, is showing us, more and more, how astonishingly wide and deep is the dependence, at least for their actuation, of the various functions and expressions of man’s character and spirit upon his bodily frame. For not only is the reasoning faculty seen, ever since Aristotle, to depend, for its material and stimulation, upon the impressions of the senses, nor can we represent it to ourselves otherwise than as seated in the brain or in some such physical organism, but the interesting Lange-James observations and theory make it likely that also the emotions,—the feelings as distinct from sensations,—ever result, as a matter of fact, from certain foregoing, physico-neural impressions and modifications, which latter follow upon this or that perception of the mind, a perception which would otherwise, as is the case in certain neural lesions and anaesthesias, remain entirely dry and unemotional.[201]—And the sense of the Infinite, which we have had such reason to take as the very centre of religion, arises ever, within man’s life here below, in contrast to, and as a concomitant and supplementation of, his perception of the Finite and Contingent, and hence not without his senses being alive and active.

Now all this fits in admirably with the whole Jewish-Christian respect for, high claims upon, and constant training of the body, the senses, the emotions, and with the importance attached to the Visible and Audible,—History, Institutions, Society.—Yet our difficulties are clear. For however spiritually we may conceive a bodily survival or resurrection; however completely we may place the identity of the various stages of the body in this life, and the sameness between the body before death and after the resurrection, in the identity of its quasi-creator, the body-weaving soul, we can in nowise picture to ourselves such a new, indefinitely more spiritual, incorporation, and we bring upon ourselves acute difficulties, for both before and after this unpicturable event. Before the resurrection there would have to be unconsciousness between death and that event; but thus the future life is broken up, and for no spiritual reason. Or there would be consciousness; but then the substitute for the body, that occasions this consciousness, would, apparently, render all further revivification of the body unnecessary. And if we take the resurrection as effected, we promptly feel how mixed and clumsy, how inadequate, how less, and not more, than the best and noblest elements of our experience and aspirations even here and now, is such a, still essentially temporal and spacial, mode of existence.

I take it that, against all this, we can but continue to maintain two points. The soul’s life after bodily death is not a matter of experience or of logical demonstration, but a postulate of faith and a consequence from our realization of the human spirit’s worth; and hence is as little capable of being satisfactorily pictured, as are all the other great spiritual realities which can nevertheless be shown to be presupposed and implicitly affirmed by every act of faith in the final truth and abiding importance of anything whatsoever.—And again, it is not worth while to attempt to rescue, Aristotle-wise, just that single, and doubtless not the highest, function of man’s spirit and character, his dialectic faculty, or even his intellectual intuitive power, for the purpose of thus escaping, or at least minimizing, the difficulties attendant upon the belief in Immortality. If we postulate, as we do, man’s survival, we must postulate, without being able to fill in or to justify any details of the scheme, the survival of all that may and does constitute man’s true and ultimate personality. How much or how little this may precisely mean, we evidently know but very imperfectly: but we know enough to be confident that it means more than the abstractive, increasingly dualistic school of Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Proclus would allow.

(2) But speculative reason seems also to raise a quite general objection, based upon man’s littleness within the immense Universe, and upon the arbitrariness of excepting those tiny points, those centres of human consciousness, men’s souls, from the flux, the ceaseless becoming and undoing, of all the other parts of that mighty whole, immortal, surely, only as a whole.

Here we can safely say that, at least in this precise form, the difficulty springs predominantly not from reason or experience, but from an untutored imagination. For all our knowledge of that great external world, which this objection supposes to englobe our small internal world, as a part inferior, or at most but equal, to the other parts of that whole, is dependent upon this interior world of ours; and however truly inherent in that external world we may hold that world’s laws to be, those laws can, after all, be shown to be as truly the result of our own mind’s spontaneous work,—an architectonic building up by this mind of the sense-impressions conveyed to it from without. And that whole Universe, in so far as it is material, cannot be compared, either in kind or in dignity, to Mind: only the indications there, parallel in this to our experiences within our own mind, of a Mind and Spirit infinitely greater and nobler than, yet with a certain affinity to, our own,—only these constitute that outer world as great as this our inner world. Indeed it is plain that Materialism is so far from constituting the solution to the problem of existence, that even Psycho-Physical Parallelism, even the attribution of any ultimate reality to Matter, are on their trial. It is anyhow already clear that, of the two, it is easier and nearer to the truth to maintain that Matter and its categories are simply modes in the manifestation of Mind to minds and in the apprehension of Mind by minds, than to declare Mind to be but a function or resultant of Matter.[202]

But if all this is so, then no simply sensible predominance of the sensible Universe, nor even any ascertainment of the mere flux and interchange of and between all things material and their elements, can reasonably affect the question as to the superiority and permanence of Mind. But we shall return, in the next chapter, to the difficulties special to the Immortality of individual human spirits or personalities,—for this is, I think, the point at which the problem is still acute.

3. Three Ethico-Practical Difficulties.

The last group of objections is directly practical and ethical, and raises three points: the small space and influence occupied and exercised, apparently, by such a belief, in the spiritual life of even serious persons; the seemingly selfish, ungenerous type of religion and of moral tone fostered by definite belief in, or at least occupation with, the thought of an individual future life, as contrasted with the nobility of tone engendered by such denials or abstractions from all such beliefs as we find in Spinoza and Schleiermacher; and, finally, the plausibility of the teaching, on the part of some distinguished thinkers and poets, that a positive conviction of this our short earthly life being the sole span of our individual consciousness is directly productive of a certain deep tenderness, an heroic concentration of attention, and a virile truthfulness, which are unattainable, which indeed are weakened or rendered impossible by, the necessarily vague anticipation of an unending future life; a hope which, where operative at all, can but dwarf and deaden all earthly aspiration and endeavour.

(1) As to the first point, which has perhaps never been more brilliantly affirmed than by Mr. Schiller,[203] I altogether doubt whether the numerous appearances, which admittedly seem to point that way, are rightly interpreted by such a conclusion. For it is, for one thing, most certainly possible to be deeply convinced of the reality and importance of the soul’s heightened after-life, and to have no kind of belief or interest in Psychical Research, at least in such Research as an intrinsically valuable aid to any specifically religious convictions. No aloofness from such attempts to find spiritual realities at the phenomenal level can, (unless it is clear that the majority of educated Western Europeans share the naïve assumptions of this position), indicate negation of, or indifference to, the belief in Immortality.—And next, it is equally certain that precisely the most fruitful form of the belief is that which conceives the After-life as already involved in this one, and which, therefore, dwells specially, not upon the posteriority in time, but upon the difference in kind of that spiritual life of the soul which, even hic et nunc, can be sought after and experienced, in ever imperfect degrees no doubt, yet really and more and more. Here we ever get an approach to Simultaneity and Eternity, instead of sheer succession and clock-time: and here the fundamental attitude of the believer would appear only if pressed to deny or exclude the deathlessness of the spirit and its life,—the usual latency and simple implication of the positive conviction, in nowise diminishing this conviction’s reality.—And, finally, it would have to be seen whether those who are indifferent or sceptical as to Immortal or Eternal Life, are appreciably fewer and largely other than those who are careless as to the other deep implications and requirements of spiritual experience. We may well doubt whether they would turn out to be so.

(2) As to the second point, we have already found how utterly insuppressible is the pleasure, normally concomitant upon every act of noble self-conquest; and how, though we can and should perform such and all other acts, as far as possible, from the ultimate, determining motive of thereby furthering the realization of the Kingdom of God, there can be no solid truthfulness or sane nobility in insisting upon attempts at thinking away and denying the fact and utility of that concomitant pleasure. But if so, then a further, other-world extension of that realization and of this concomitant happiness, and a belief here below in such an eventual extension, cannot of themselves be ignoble or debasing. Occasions for every degree and kind of purely selfish and faultily natural acts, of acts inchoatively supernatural but still predominantly slavish, reappear here, in close parallel to the variety of disposition displayed by men towards every kind of reality and ideal, towards the Family, Science, the State, Humanity, where the same concomitances and the same high uses and mean abuses are ever possible and actual. Neither here nor there should we attempt to impoverish truth and life, in order to exclude the possibility of their abuse.—And it would, of course, be profoundly unfair to contrast such a rarely noble spirit as Spinoza among the deniers with the average mind from among the affirmers. The average or the majority of the deniers would not, I think, appear as more generous and devoted than the corresponding average or majority on the other side.

(3) And as to the supposed directly beneficial effects of a positive denial of Immortality, such as have been sung for us by George Eliot and Giovanni Pascoli, we can safely affirm that the special tendernesses and quiet heroisms, deduced by them from such a negation, are too obviously dependent upon spiritual implications and instincts, for us to be able to put them directly to the credit of that denial. Only in so far as Immortality were not a postulate intrinsically connected with belief in objective and obligatory Beauty, Truth, and Goodness,—in God as our origin and end,—could its persistent and deliberate denial not be injurious to these fundamental convictions and to the ultimate health of the soul’s life: and of this intrinsic non-connection there is no sufficient evidence.—Certainly, in such a case as Spinoza’s, the same strain of reasoning which makes him abandon individual Immortality Ought, in logic, to prevent him, a mere hopelessly determined link in the Natura Naturata, from ever attaining to the free self-dedication of himself, as now a fully responsible member of the Natura Naturans. And if not all the grand depth of his spiritual instinct and moral nobility, and its persistence in spite of its having no logical room in the fixedly naturalistic element of his teaching, can be urged as an argument in favour of the ultimate truth and ethical helpfulness of that whole element, neither can it be urged with respect to what is presumably one part of that element, his denial of personal Immortality.

II. Catherine’s General After-Life Conceptions.

Now Catherine’s general After-Life Conceptions in part bring into interesting prominence, in part really meet and overcome, the perplexities and mutually destructive alternatives which we have just considered. I shall here again leave over to the next chapter the simply ultimate questions, such as that of the pure Eternity versus the Unendingness of the soul; but shall allow myself, as to one set of her general ideas, a little digression as to the probability of their ultimate literary suggestion by Plato.—These Platonic passages probably reached her too indirectly, and by means and in forms which I have too entirely failed to discover, for me to be able to discuss them in my chapter devoted to her assured and demonstrably direct literary sources. But these sayings of Plato greatly help to illustrate the meaning of her doctrine.—I shall group these, her general, positions and implications under four heads, and shall consider three of these as, in substance, profoundly satisfactory, but one of them, the second, as acceptable only with many limitations, although this second has obviously much influenced the form given by her to several of those other conceptions.

1. Forecasts of the Hereafter, based upon present experience.

First, then, we get, as the fundamental presupposition of the whole Eschatology, a grandly sane, simple, and profound doctrine formulated over and over again and applied throughout, with a splendid consistency, as the key and limit to all her anticipations and picturings. Only because of the fact, and of our conviction of the fact, of the unbroken continuity and identity of God with Himself, of the human soul with itself, and of the deepest of the relations subsisting between that God and the soul, across the chasm formed by our body’s death, and only in proportion as we can and do experience and achieve, during this our earthly life, certain spiritual laws and realities of a sufficiently elemental, universal, and fruitful, more or less time- and space-less character, can we (whilst ever remembering the analogical nature of such picturings even as to the soul’s life here) safely and profitably forecast certain general features of the future which is thus already so largely a present. But, given these conditions in the present, we can and should forecast the future, to the extent implied. And as Plato’s great imaginative projection, his life-work, the Republic, achieves its original end, (of making more readily understandable, by objectivizing on a large scale, the life of the inner city of our own soul), in so far as he has rightly understood the human soul and has found appropriate representations of its powers, laws, and ideals in his future commonwealth, even if we cannot accept this picture for political purposes and in all its details: so is it also with Catherine’s projection, which, if bolder in its subject-matter, is, most rightly, indefinitely more general in its indications than is Plato’s great diagram of the soul. Man’s spiritual personality, being held by her to survive death,—to retain its identity and an at least equivalent consciousness, of that identity,—the deepest experiences of that personality before the body’s death are conceived as re-experienced by it, in a heightened degree and form, after death itself. Hence these great pictures, of what the soul will experience then, would remain profoundly true of what the soul seeks and requires now, even if there were no then at all.

And note particularly how only with regard to one stage and condition of the spirit’s future life,—that of the purification of the imperfect soul,—does she indulge in any at all direct doctrine or detailed picturing; and this, doubtless, not only because she has experienced much concerning this matter in her own life here, but also because the projection of these experiences would still give us, not the ultimate state, but more or less only a prolongation of our mixed, joy-in-suffering life upon earth. As to the two ultimate states, we get only quite incidental glimpses, although even these are strongly marked by her general position and method.

2. Catherine’s forecasts and present experience correspondingly limited.

And next, coming to the projection itself, we naturally find it to present all the strength and limitations of her own spiritual experiences which are thus projected: her attitude towards the body and towards human fellowship, (two subjects which are shown to be closely inter-related by the continuous manner in which they stand and fall together throughout the history of philosophy and religion,) thus constitute the second general peculiarity of her Eschatology. We have already noted, in her life, her strongly ecstatic, body-ignoring, body-escaping type of religion; and how, even in her case, it tended to starve the corporate, institutional conceptions and affections. Here, in the projection, we find both the cause and the effect again, and on a larger scale. Her continuous psycho-physical discomforts and keen thirst for a unity and simplicity as rapid and complete as possible, the joy and strength derived from ecstatic habits and affinities, would all make her, without even herself being aware of it, drop all further thought as to the future fate of that oppressive “prison-house” from which her spirit had at last got free.

Now such non-occupation with the fate of the body and of her fellow-souls may appear quite appropriate in her Purgatorial Eschatology, yet we cannot but find that, even here, it already possesses grave disadvantages, and that it persists throughout all her After-life conceptions. For in all the states and stages of the soul we get a markedly unsocial, a sola cum solo picture. And yet there is, perhaps, no more striking difference, amongst their many affinities, between Platonism and Christianity than the intense Individualism which marks the great Greek’s doctrine, and the profoundly social conception which pervades Our Lord’s own teaching,—in each case as regards the next life as well as this one. Plotinus’s great culminating commendation of “the flight of the alone to the Alone” continues Plato’s tradition; whereas, if even St. Paul and the Joannine writings speak at times as though the individual soul attained to its full personality in and by direct intercourse with God alone, the Synoptic Gospels, and at bottom also those two great lovers of Our Lord’s spirit, never cease to emphasize the social constituent of the soul’s life both here and hereafter. The Kingdom of Heaven, the Soul of the Church, as truly constitutes the different personalities, their spirituality and their joy, as they constitute it,—that great Organism which, as such, is both first and last in the Divine thought and love.

Here, in the at least partial ignoring of these great social facts, we touch the main defect of most mystical outlooks; yet this defect does not arise from what they possess, but from what they lack. For solitude, and the abstractive, unifying, intuitive, emotional, mystical element is also wanted, and this element and movement Catherine exemplifies in rare perfection. Indeed, in the great classical, central period of her life she had, as we know, combined all this with much of the outward movement, society, detailed observation, attachment, the morally en-static, the immanental type. Unfortunately the same ill-health and ever-increasing predominance of the former element, which turned her, quite naturally, to these eschatological contemplations, and which indeed helped to give them their touching tone of first-hand experience, also tended, of necessity, to make her drop even such slight and lingering social elements as had formerly coloured her thought. It is, then, only towards the understanding and deepening of the former of these two necessary movements of religion, that these, her latter-day enlargements of some of her deepest experiences and convictions will be found true helps.

Yet if the usual ad extra disadvantages of such an abstractive position towards the body are thus exemplified by her, in this her unsocial, individualistic attitude, it is most interesting to note how entirely she avoids the usual ad intra drawbacks of this same position. For if her whole attention, and, increasingly, even her consciousness are, in true ecstatic guise, absorbed away from her fellows and concentrated exclusively upon God in herself and herself in God, yet this consciousness consists not only of Noûs, that dry theoretic reason which, already by Plato, but still more by Aristotle, is alone conceived as surviving the body, but contains also the upper range of Thumos,—all those passions of the noblest kind,—love, admiration, gratitude, utter self-donation, joy in purifying suffering and in an ever-growing self-realization as part of the great plan of God,—all the highest notes in that wondrous scale of deep feeling and of emotionally coloured willing which Plato made dependent, not for its character but for the possibility of its operation, upon the body’s union with the soul.—And thus we see how, in her conception of the soul’s own self within itself and of its relation to God, the Christian idea of Personality, as of a many-sided organism in which Love and Will are the very flower of the whole, has triumphed over the Platonic presentation of the Spirit, in so far as this is taken to require and achieve an ultimate sublimation free from all emotive elements. Thus in her doctrine the whole Personality survives death, although this Personality energizes only, as it were upwards, to God alone, and not also sideways and downwards, towards its fellows and the lesser children of God.

3. Catherine’s forecast influenced by Plato.

Catherine’s third peculiarity consists in a rich and profound organization of two doctrines, the one libertarian, the other determinist; and requires considerable quotation from Plato, whose teachings, bereft of all transmigration-fancies, seem clearly to reappear here, (however complex may have been the mediation,) in Catherine’s great conception.

The determinist doctrine maintains that virtue and vice, in proportion as they are allowed their full development, spontaneously and necessarily attain to their own congenital consummation, a consummation which consists, respectively, in the bliss inseparable from the final and complete identity between the inevitable results upon itself of the soul’s deliberate endeavours, and the indestructible requirements of this same soul’s fundamental nature; and in the misery of the, now fully felt but only gradually superable, or even, in other cases, insuperable, antagonism between the inevitable consequences within its own self of the soul’s more or less deliberate choosings, and those same, here also ineradicable, demands of its own truest nature.

As Marsilio Ficino says, in his Theologia Platonica, published in Florence in 1482: “Virtue is reward in its first budding, reward is virtue full-grown. Vice is punishment at the moment of its birth; punishment is vice at its consummation. For, in each of these cases, one and the same thing is first the simple seed and then the full ear of corn; and one and the same thing is the full ear of corn and then the food of man. Precisely the very things then that we sow in this our (earthly) autumn, shall we reap in that (other-world) summer-day.”[204] It is true that forensic terms and images are also not wanting in Catherine’s sayings; but these, in part, run simply parallel to the immanental conception without modifying it; in part, they are in its service; and, in part, they are the work of the theologians’ arrangements and glosses discussed in my Appendix.

And the libertarian doctrine declares that it is the soul itself which, in the beyond and immediately after death, chooses the least painful, because the most expressive of her then actual desires, from among the states which the natural effects upon her own self of her own earthly choosings have left her interiorly free to choose.

Now it is in this second doctrine especially that we find so detailed an anticipation by Plato of a whole number of highly original and characteristic points and combinations of points, as to render a fortuitous concurrence between Catherine and Plato practically impossible. Yet I have sought in vain, among Catherine’s authentic sayings, actions, possessions, or friends, for any trace of direct acquaintance with any of Plato’s writings. But Ficino’s Latin translation of Plato, published, with immense applause, in Florence in 1483, 1484, must have been known, in those intensely Platonizing times, to even non-professed Humanists in Genoa, long before Catherine’s death in 1510, so that one or other of her intimates may have communicated the substance of these Platonic doctrines to her.[205] Plotinus, of whom Ficino published a Latin translation in 1492, contains but a feeble echo of Plato on this point. Proclus, directly known only very little till much after Catherine’s time, is in even worse case. The Areopagite, who has so continuously taken over whole passages from all three writers, although directly almost exclusively from Proclus, contains nothing more immediately to the purpose than his impressive sayings concerning Providence’s continuous non-forcing of the human personality in its fundamental constitution and its free elections with their inevitable consequences; hence Catherine cannot have derived her ideas, in the crisp definiteness which they retain in her sayings, from her cousin the Dominican nun and the Areopagite. And it is certain, as we have seen, how scattered and inchoate are the hints which she may have found in St. Paul, the Joannine writings, and Jacopone da Todi. St. Augustine contains nothing that would be directly available,—an otherwise likely source considering Catherine’s close connection with the Augustinian Canonesses of S. Maria delle Grazie.

In Plato, then, we get five conceptions and symbolic pictures that are practically identical with those of Catherine.

(1) First we get the conception of souls having each, in exact accordance with the respective differences of their moral and spiritual disposition and character, as these have been constituted by them here below, a “place” or environment, expressive of that character, ready for their occupation after the body’s death. “The soul that is pure departs at death, herself invisible, to the invisible world,—to the divine, immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss. But the soul that is impure at the time of her departure and is … engrossed by the corporeal …, is weighed down and drawn back again into the visible place (world).”

And this scheme, of like disposition seeking a like place, is then carried out, by the help of the theory of transmigration, as a re-incarnation of these various characters into environments, bodies, exactly corresponding to them: gluttonous souls are assigned to asses’ bodies, tyrannous souls to those of wolves, and so on: in a word, “there is no difficulty in assigning to all ‘a whither’ (a place) answering to their general natures and propensities.”[206] For this corresponds to a law which runs throughout all things,—a determinism of consequences which does not prevent the liberty of causes. “The King of the universe contrived a general plan, by which a thing of a certain nature found a seat and place of a certain kind. But the formation of this nature, he left to the wills of individuals.”

Or, with the further spacial imagery of movements up, level, or down, we get: “All things that have a soul change … and, in changing, move according to law and the order of destiny. Lesser changes of nature move on level ground, but great crimes sink … into the so-called lower places …; and, when the soul becomes greatly different and divine, she also greatly changes her place, which is now altogether holy.”[207] The original, divinely intended “places” of souls are all high and good, and similar to each other though not identical, each soul having its own special “place”; and for this congenital “place” each soul has a resistible yet ineradicable home-sickness. “The first incarnation” of human souls which “distributes each soul to a star,” is ordained to be similar for all.… “And when they have been of necessity implanted in bodily forms, should they master their passions … they live in righteousness; if otherwise, in unrighteousness. And he who lived well through his allotted time shall be conveyed once more to a habitation in his kindred star, and there shall enjoy a blissful and congenial life; but failing this he shall pass into … such a form of (further) incarnation as fits his disposition … until he shall overcome, by reason, all that burthen that afterwards clung around him.”[208]

If from all this we exclude the soul’s existence before any beginning of its body, its transmigration into other bodies, and the self-sufficiency of reason; and if we make it all to be penetrated by God’s presence, grace, and love, and by our corresponding or conflicting emotional and volitional as well as intellectual attitude: we shall get Catherine’s position exactly.

(2) But again, in at least one phase of his thinking, Plato pictures the purification of the imperfect soul as effected, of at least as begun, not in a succession of “places” of an extensionally small but organic kind, bodies, but in a “place” of an extensionally larger but inorganic sort,—the shore of a lake, where the soul has to wait. “The Acherusian lake is the lake to the shores of which the many go when they are dead; and, after waiting an appointed time, which to some is longer and to others shorter, they are sent back to be born as animals.” Here we evidently get a survival of the conception, predominant in Homer, of a pain-and-joyless Hades, but limited here to the middle, the imperfect class of souls, and followed, in their case, by transmigration, to which alone, apparently, purification is directly attached.

In the same Dialogue we read later on: “Those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill … go to the river Acheron, and are carried to the lake; and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds … and are absolved and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts.” Here we have, evidently, still the same “many” and the same place, the shores of the Acherusian lake, but also an explicit affirmation of purification effected there, for this purification is now followed directly, not by re-incarnation, but by the ultimate happiness in the soul’s original and fundamentally congenial “place.” And this scheme is far more conformable to Plato’s fundamental position: for how can bodies, even lower than the human, help to purify the soul which has become impure precisely on occasion of its human body?—We can see how the Christian Purgatorial doctrine derives some of its pictures from the second of these parallel passages; yet that the “longer or shorter waiting” of the first passage also enters into that teaching,—especially in its more ordinary modern form, according to which there is, in this state, no intrinsic purification.

And lower down we find: “Those who have committed crimes which, although great, are not unpardonable,—for these it is necessary to plunge (ἐμπεσεῖν) into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo for a year; but at the end of the year they are borne to the Acherusian lake. But those who appear incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes … such their appropriate destiny hurls (ῤίπτει) into Tartarus, whence they never come forth.” Here we get a Purgatory, pictured as a watery substance in which the more gravely impure of the curable souls are immersed before arriving at the easier purification, the waiting on the dry land alongside the lake; this Purgatory is, as a “place” and, in intensity, identical with Hell; and into this place the curable souls “plunge” and the incurable ones are “hurled.”—Of this third passage Catherine retains the identification of the pains of Purgatory and those of Hell; the “plunge,” or “hurling,” of two distinct classes of souls into these pains; and the mitigation, after a time, previous to complete cessation, of the suffering in the case of the curable class. But the “plunge,” with her, is common to all degrees of imperfectly pure souls; there is, for all these souls, no change of “place” during their purgation, but only a mitigation of suffering; and this mitigation is at work gradually and from the first. And the ordinary modern Purgatorial teaching is like this passage, in that it keeps the curable souls in Tartarus, say, for one year, and lets them suffer there, apparently without mitigation, throughout that time: and that, in the case of both classes of souls, it conceives the punishment as extrinsic, vindictive, and inoperative.

And a fourth Phaedo passage tells us: “Those who are remarkable for having led holy lives are released from this earthly prison, and go to their pure home, which is above, and dwell in the purer earth,” the Isles of the Just, in Oceanus. “And those, again, amongst these who have duly purified themselves with philosophy, live henceforth altogether without the body, in mansions fairer far than these.” Here we get, alongside of the two Purgatories and the one Hell, two Heavens, of which the first is but taken over from Homer and Pindar, but of which the second is Plato’s own conception. Catherine, in entire accord with the ordinary teaching, has got but one “place” of each kind; and her Heaven corresponds, apart from his formal and final exclusion of every sort of body, to the second of these Platonic Heavens; whilst, here again, the all-encompassing presence of God’s love for souls as of the soul’s love for God, which, in her teaching, is the beginning, means, and end of the whole movement, effects an indefinite difference between the two positions.[209]

(3) Yet Plato, in his most characteristic moods, explicitly anticipates Catherine as to the intrinsic, ameliorative nature and work of Purgatory: “The proper office of punishment is two-fold: he who is rightly punished ought either to become better … by it, or he ought to be made an example to his fellows, that they may see what he suffers and … become better. Those who are punished by Gods and men and improved, are those whose sins are curable … by pain and suffering:—for there is no other way in which they can be delivered from evil, as in this world so also in the other. But the others are incurable—the time has passed at which they can receive any benefit themselves.… Rhadamanthus,” the chief of the three nether-world judges, “looks with admiration on the soul of some just one, who has lived in holiness and truth … and sends him” without any intervening suffering “to the Isles of the Blessed.… I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the Judge, in that day.”[210] Here the last sentence is strikingly like in form as well as in spirit to many a saying of St. Paul and Catherine.

(4) But the following most original passages give us a sentiment and an image which, in their special drift, are as opposed to St. Paul, and indeed to the ordinary Christian consciousness, as they are dear to Catherine, in this matter so strongly, although probably unconsciously, Platonist, indeed Neo-Platonist, in her affinities. “In the time of Kronos, indeed down to that of Zeus, the Judgment was given on the day on which men were to die,” i.e. immediately before their death; “and the consequence was, that the judgments were not well given,—the souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus said: ‘The reason is, that the judged have their clothes on, for they are alive.… There are many, having evil souls, who are apparelled in fair bodies or wrapt round in wealth and rank.… The Judges are awed by them; and they themselves too have their clothes on when judging: their eyes and ears and their whole bodies are interposed, as a veil, before their own souls. What is to be done? … Men shall be entirely stript before they are judged, for they shall be judged when dead; the Judge too shall be naked, that is, dead: he, with his naked soul, shall pierce into the other naked soul immediately after each man dies … and is bereft of all his kith and kin, and has left behind him all his brave attire upon earth, and thus the Judgment will be just.’”[211]—If we compare this with St. Paul’s precisely contrary instinct and desire to be “clothed upon” at death, “lest we be found naked,” i.e. without the protection of any kind of body; and then realize Catherine’s intense longing for “nudità,”—to strip herself here, as far as possible, from all imperfection and self-delusion before the final stripping off of the body in death, and to appear, utterly naked, before the utterly naked eye of God, so that no “clothes” should remain requiring to be burnt away by the purifying fires,[212] the profound affinity of sentiment and imagery between Catherine and Plato—and this on a point essentially Platonic,—is very striking.

(5) But, above all, in his deep doctrine as to the soul’s spontaneous choice after death of that condition, “place,” which, owing to the natural effects within her of her earthly willings and self-formation, she cannot but now find the most congenial to herself, Plato appears as the ultimate source of a literary kind for Catherine’s most original view, which otherwise is, I think, without predecessors. “The souls,” he tells us in the Republic, “immediately on their arrival in the other world, were required to go to Lachesis,” one of the three Fates. And “an interpreter, having taken from her lap a number of lots and plans of life, spoke as follows: ‘Thus saith Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity.… “Your destiny shall not be allotted to you, but you shall choose it for yourselves. Let him who draws the first lot, be the first to choose a life which shall be his irrevocably.… The responsibility lies with the chooser, Heaven is guiltless.”’” “No settled character of soul was included in the plans of life, because, with the change of life, the soul inevitably became changed itself.” “It was a truly wonderful sight, to watch how each soul selected its life.… When all the souls had chosen their lives, Lachesis dispatched with each of them the Destiny he had selected, to guard his life and satisfy his choice.”[213] And in the Phaedrus Plato tells us that “at the end of the first thousand years” (of the first incarnation) “the good souls and also the evil souls both come to cast lots and to choose their second life; and they may take any that they like.”[214]

In both the dialogues the lots are evidently taken over from popular mythology, but are here made merely to introduce a certain orderly succession among the spontaneous choosings of the souls themselves, whilst the lap of the daughter of Necessity, spread out before all the choosers previous to their choice, and the separate, specially appropriate Destiny that accompanies each soul after its choice, indicate plainly that, although the choice itself is the free act and pure self-expression of each soul’s then present disposition, yet that this disposition is the necessary result of its earthly volitions and self-development or self-deformation, and that the choice now made becomes, in its turn, the cause of certain inevitable consequences,—of a special environment which itself is then productive of special effects upon, and of special occasions for, the final working out of this soul’s character.—Plotinus retains the doctrine: “the soul chooses there” in the Other world,—“its Daemon and its kind of life.”[215] But neither Proclus nor Dionysius has the doctrine, whilst Catherine, on the contrary, reproduces it with a penetrating completeness.

4. Simplifications characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology.

And under our last, fourth head, we can group the simplifications characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology.

(1) One simplification has, of course, for now some fifteen hundred years, been the ordinary Christian conception: I mean the elimination of the time-element between the moment of death and the beginning of the three states. Yet it is interesting to note how by far the greatest of the Latin Fathers, St. Augustine, who died in A.D. 430, still clings predominantly to the older Christian and Jewish conception of the soul abiding in a state of shrunken, joy-and-painless consciousness from the moment of the body’s death up to that of the general resurrection and judgment. “After this short life, thou wilt not yet be where the saints will be,” i.e. in Heaven. “Thou wilt not yet be there: who is ignorant of this? But thou canst straightway be where the rich man descried the ulcerous beggar to be a-resting, far away,” i.e. in Limbo. “Placed in that rest, thou canst await the day of judgment with security, when thou shalt receive thy body also, when thou shalt be changed so as to be equal to an Angel.”[216] Only with regard to Purgatory, a state held by him, in writings of his last years, 410-430 A.D., to be possible, indeed probable, does he make an exception to his general rule: for such purification would have to take place” in the interval of time between the death of the body and the last day of condemnation and reward.”[217]

It is doubtless the still further fading away of the expectation, so vivid and universal in early Christian times, of the proximity of Our Lord’s Second Advent, and the tacit prevalence of Greek affinities and conceptions concerning the bodiless soul, that helped to eliminate, at last universally, this interval of waiting, in the case of souls too good or too bad for purgation, from the general consciousness of at least Western Christendom. The gain in this was the great simplification and concentration of the immediate outlook and interest; the loss was the diminished apprehension of the essentially complex, concrete, synthetic character of man’s nature, and of the necessity for our assuming that this characteristic will be somehow preserved in this nature’s ultimate perfection.

(2) There is a second simplification in Catherine which, though here St. Augustine leads the way, is less common among Christians: her three other-world “places” are not, according to her ultimate thought, three distinct spacial extensions and localities, filled, respectively, with ceaselessly suffering, temporarily suffering, and ceaselessly blessed souls; but they are, (notwithstanding all the terms necessitated by such spacial picturings as “entering,” “coming out,” “plunging into”), so many distinct states and conditions of the soul, of a painful, mixed, or joyful character. We shall have these her ultimate ideas very fully before us presently. But here I would only remark that this her union of a picturing faculty, as vivid as the keenest sense-perception, and of a complete non-enslavement to, a vigorous utilization of, these life-like spacial projections, by a religious instinct and experience which never forgets that God and souls are spirits, to whom our ordinary categories of space and extension, time and motion, do not and cannot in strictness apply, is as rare as it is admirable; and that, though her intensely anti-corporeal and non-social attitude made such a position more immediately easy for her than it can be for those who remain keenly aware of the great truths involved in the doctrines of the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints, this her trend of thought brings into full articulation precisely the deepest of our spiritual apprehensions and requirements, whilst it is not her fault if it but further accentuates some of our intellectual perplexities.

We get much in St. Augustine, which he himself declares to have derived, in the first instance, from “the writings of the Platonists,” which doubtless means above all Plotinus, (that keen spiritual thinker who can so readily be traced throughout this part of the great Convert’s teaching), as to this profound incommensurableness between spiritual presence, energizing, and affectedness on the one hand, and spacial position, extension, and movement on the other. “What place is there within me, to which my God can come? … I would not exist at all, unless Thou already wert within me.” “Thou wast never a place, and yet we have receded from Thee; and we have drawn near to Thee, yet Thou art never a place.” “ Are we submerged and do we emerge? Yet it is not places into which we are plunged and out of which we rise. What can be more like to places and yet more unlike? For here the affections are in case,—the impurity of our spirit, which flows downwards, oppressed by the love of earthly cares; and the holiness of Thy Spirit, which lifts us upwards with the love of security.”[218] For, as he teaches “the spiritual creature can only be changed by times,”—a succession within a duration: “by remembering what it had forgotten, or by learning what it did not know, or by willing what it did not will. The bodily creature can be changed by times and places,” by spacial motion, “from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, from east to west.” “That thing is not moved through space which is not extended in space … the soul is not considered to move in space, unless it be held to be a body.”[219]

In applying the doctrine just expressed to eschatological matters, St. Augustine concludes: “If it be asked whether the soul, when it goes forth from the body, is borne to some corporeal places, or to such as, though incorporeal, are like to bodies, or to what is more excellent than either: I readily answer that, unless it have some kind of body, it is not borne to bodily places at all, or, at least, that it is not borne to them by bodily motion.… But I myself do not think that it possesses any body, when it goes forth from this earthly body.… It gets borne, according to its deserts, to spiritual conditions, or to penal places having a similitude to bodies.”[220]

The reader will readily note a curiously uncertain frame of mind in this last utterance. I take it that Plotinian influences are here being checked by the Jewish conception of certain, definitely located, provision-chambers (promptuaria), in which all souls are placed for safe keeping, between the time of the body’s death and its resurrection. So in the Fourth Book of Esra (of about 90 A.D.), “the souls of the just in their chambers said: ‘How long are we to remain here?’”; and in the Apocalypse of Baruch (of about 150-250 A.D.), “at the coming of the Messiah, the provision-chambers will open, in which the” whole, precise “number of the souls of the just have been kept, and they will come forth.”[221]

But it is St. Thomas Aquinas who, by the explicit and consistent adoption and classification of these promptuaria receptacula, reveals to us more clearly the perplexities and fancifulnesses involved in the strictly spacial conception. “Although bodies are not assigned to souls (immediately) after death, yet certain bodily places are congruously assigned to these souls in accordance with the degree of their dignity, in which places they are, as it were, locally, in the manner in which bodiless things can be in space: each soul having a higher place assigned to it, according as it approaches more or less to the first substance, God, whose seat, according to Scripture, is Heaven.” “In the Scriptures God is called the Sun, since He is the principle of spiritual life, as the physical sun is of bodily life; and, according to this convention, … souls spiritually illuminated have a greater fitness for luminous bodies, and sin-darkened souls for dark places.” “It is probable that, as to local position, Hell and the Limbo of the Fathers constitute one and the same place, or are more or less continuous.” “The place of Purgatory adjoins (that of) Hell.” “There are altogether five places ready to receive (receptanda) souls bereft of their bodies: Paradise, the Limbo of the Fathers, Purgatory, Hell, and the Limbo of Infants.”[222]

No doubt all these positions became the common scholastic teaching. But then, as Cardinal Bellarmine cogently points out: “no ancient, as far as I know, has written that the Earthly Paradise was destroyed … and I have read a large number who affirm its existence. This is the doctrine of all the Scholastics, beginning with St. Thomas, and of the Fathers. … St. Augustine indeed appears to rank this truth amongst the dogmas of faith.”[223] We shall do well, then, not to press these literal localization-schemes, especially since, according to St. Augustine’s penetrating analysis, our spiritual experiences, already in this our earthly existence, have a distinctly non-spacial character. Catherine’s position, if applied to the central life of man here, and hence presumptively hereafter, remains as true and fresh and unassailable as ever.

(3) And her last simplification consists in taking the Fire of Hell, the Fire of Purgatory, and the Fire and Light of Heaven as profoundly appropriate symbols or descriptions of the variously painful or joyous impressions produced, through the differing volitional attitudes of souls towards Him, by the one God’s intrinsically identical presence in each and all. In all three cases, throughout their several grades, there are ever but two realities, the Spirit-God and the spirit-soul, in various states of inter-relation.

Here again it is Catherine’s complete abstraction from the body which renders such a view easy and, in a manner, necessary for her mind. But here I would only emphasize the impressive simplicity and spirituality of view which thus, as in the material world it finds the one sun-light and the one fire-heat, which, in themselves everywhere the same, vary indefinitely in their effects, owing to the varying condition of the different bodies which meet the rays and flames; so, in the Spiritual World it discovers One supreme spiritual Energy and Influence which, whilst ever self-identical, is assimilated, deflected, or resisted by the lesser spirits, with inevitably joyous, mixed, or painful states of soul, since they can each and all resist, but cannot eradicate that Energy’s impression within their deepest selves. And though, even with her, the Sun-light image remains quasi-Hellenic and Intellectual, and the Fire-heat picture is more immediately Christian and Moral: yet she also frequently takes the sunlight as the symbol of the achieved Harmony and Peace, and the Fire-heat as that of more or less persisting Conflict and Pain. She is doubtless right in keeping both symbols, and in ever thinking of each as ultimately implying the other, for God is Beauty and Truth, as well as Goodness and Love, and man is made with the indestructible aspiration after Him in His living completeness.

And here again Catherine has a complicated doctrinal history behind her.

We have already considered the numerous Scriptural passages where God and His effects upon the soul are symbolized as light and fire; and those again where joy or, contrariwise, trial and suffering are respectively pictured by the same physical properties. And Catherine takes the latter passages as directly explanatory of the first, in so far as these joys and sufferings are spiritual in their causes or effects.

Among the Greek Fathers, Clement of Alexandria tells us that “the Fire” of Purgatory,—for he has no Eternal Damnation,—“is a rational,” spiritual, “fire that penetrates the soul”; and Origen teaches that “each sinner himself lights the flame of his own fire, and is not thrown into a fire that has been lit before that moment and that exists in front of him.… His conscience is agitated and pierced by its own pricks.” Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzum are more or less influenced by Origen on this point. And St. John Damascene, who died in about 750 A.D., says explicitly that the fire of Hell is not a material fire, that it is very different from our ordinary fire, and that men hardly know what it is.[224]

Among the Latins, St. Ambrose declares: “neither is the gnashing, a gnashing of bodily teeth; nor is the everlasting fire, a fire of bodily flames; nor is the worm, a bodily one.”—St. Jerome, in one passage, counts the theory of the non-physical fire as one of Origen’s errors; but elsewhere he mentions it without any unfavourable note, and even enumerates several Scripture-texts which favour it, and admits that “‘the worm which dieth not and the fire which is not quenched,’ is understood, by the majority of interpreters (a plerisque), of the conscience of sinners which tortures them.”[225]—St. Augustine, in 413 A.D., declares: “In the matter of the pains of the wicked, both the unquenchable fire and the intensely living worm are interpreted differently by different commentators. Some interpreters refer both to the body, others refer both to the soul; and some take the fire literally, in application to the body, and the worm figuratively, in application to the soul, which latter opinion appears the more credible.” Yet when, during the last years of his life, he came, somewhat tentatively, to hold an other-world Purgatory as well, he throughout assimilated this Purgatory’s fire to the fire of this-world sufferings. Thus in 422 A.D.: “Souls which renounce the wood, hay, straw, built upon that foundation (I Cor. iii, 11-15), not without pain indeed (since they loved these things with a carnal affection), but with faith in the foundation, a faith operative through love … arrive at salvation, through a certain fire of pain.… Whether men suffer these things in this life only, or such-like judgments follow even after this life—in either case, this interpretation of that text is not discordant with the truth.” “‘He shall be saved yet so as by fire,’ because the pain, over the loss of the things he loved, burns him. It is not incredible that some such thing takes place even after this life … that some of the faithful are saved by a certain purgatorial fire, more quickly or more slowly, according as they have less or more loved perishable things.”[226]

St. Thomas, voicing and leading Scholastic opinion, teaches that the fire of Purgatory is the same as that of Hell; and Cardinal Bellarmine, who died in 1621, tells us: “The common opinion of theologians is that the fire of Purgatory is a real and true fire, of the same kind as an earthly fire. This opinion, it is true, is not of faith, but it is very probable,”—because of the “consent of the scholastics, who cannot be despised without temerity,” and also because of “the eruptions of Mount Etna.”[227] Yet the Council of Florence had, in 1439, restricted itself to the quite general proposition that “if men die truly penitent, in the love of God, before they have satisfied … for their sins … their souls are purified by purgatorial pains after death”; thus very deliberately avoiding all commitment as to the nature of these pains.[228] Cardinal Gousset, who died in 1866, tells us: “The more common opinion amongst theologians makes the sufferings of Purgatory to consist in the pain of fire, or at least in a pain analogous to that of fire.”[229] This latter position is practically identical with Catherine’s.

As to the fire of Hell, although here especially the Scholastics, old and new, are unanimous, it is certain that there is no definition or solemn judgment of the Church declaring it to be material. On this point again we find St. Thomas and those who follow him involved in practically endless difficulties and in, for us now, increasingly intolerable subtleties, where they try to show how a material fire can affect an immaterial spirit. Bossuet, so severely orthodox in all such matters, preaching, before the Court, about sin becoming in Hell the chastisement of the sinner, does not hesitate to finish thus: “We bear within our hearts the instrument of our punishment. ‘I shall produce fire from thy midst, which shall devour thee’ (Ezek. xxviii, 18). I shall not send it against thee from afar, it will ignite in thy conscience, its flames will arise from thy midst, and it will be thy sins which will produce it.”[230]—And the Abbé F. Dubois, in a careful article in the Ecclesiastical Revue du Clergé Français of Paris, has recently expressed the conviction that “the best minds of our time, which are above being suspected of yielding to mere passing fashions, feel the necessity of abandoning the literal interpretation, judged to be insufficient, of the ancient symbols; and of returning to a freer exegesis, of which some of the Ancients have given us the example.”[231] Among these helpful “Ancients” we cannot but count Catherine, with her One God Who is the Fire of Pain and the Light of Joy to souls, according as they resist Him or will Him, either here or hereafter.

III. Catherine and Eternal Punishment.

Introductory: four doctrines and difficulties to be considered.

Taking now the three great after-life conditions separately, in the order of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, I would first of all note that some readers may be disappointed that Catherine did not, like our own English Mystic, the entirely orthodox optimist, Mother Juliana of Norwich—her Revelations belong to the year 1373 A.D.—simply proclaim that, whilst the teaching and meaning of Christ and His Church would come true, all, in ways known to God alone, would yet be well.[232] In this manner, without any weakening of traditional teaching, the whole dread secret as to the future of evil-doers is left in the hands of God, and a beautifully boundless trust and hope glows throughout those contemplations.

Yet, as I hope to show as we go along, certain assumptions and conceptions, involved in the doctrine of Eternal Punishment, cannot be systematically excluded, or even simply ignored, without a grave weakening of the specifically Christian earnestness; and that, grand as is, in certain respects, the idea of the Apocatastasis, the Final Restitution of all Things and Souls—as taught by Clement and Origen—it is not, at bottom, compatible with the whole drift, philosophy, and tone, (even apart from specific sayings) of Our Lord. And this latter teaching—of the simply abiding significance and effect of our deliberate elections during this our one testing-time,—and not that of an indefinite series of chances and purifications with an ultimate disappearance of all difference between the results of the worst life and the best, answers to the deepest postulates and aspirations of the most complete and delicate ethical and spiritual sense. For minds that can discriminate between shifting fashions and solid growth in abiding truth, that will patiently seek out the deepest instinct and simplest implications underlying the popular presentations of the Doctrine of Abiding Consequences, and that take these implications as but part of a larger whole: this doctrine still, and now again, presents itself as a permanent element of the full religious consciousness.

It would certainly be unfair to press Catherine’s rare and incidental sayings on Hell into a formal system. Yet those remarks are deep and suggestive, and help too much to interpret, supplement, and balance her central, Purgatorial teaching, and indeed to elucidate her general religious principles, for us to be able to pass them over. We have already sufficiently considered the question as to the nature of the Fire; and that as to Evil Spirits is reserved for the next Chapter. Here I shall consider four doctrines and difficulties, together with Catherine’s attitude towards them: the soul’s final fate, dependent upon the character of the will’s act or active disposition at the moment of the body’s death; the total moral perversion of the lost; the mitigation of their pains; and the eternity of their punishment.

1. Eternity dependent on the earthly life’s last moment.

Now as to the soul’s final fate being made dependent upon the character of that soul’s particular act or disposition at the last moment previous to death, this teaching, prominent in parts of the Trattato and Vita, goes back ultimately to Ezekiel, who, as Prof. Charles interestingly shows, introduces a double individualism into the older, Social and Organic, Eschatology of the Hebrew Prophets. For Man is seen, by him, as responsible for his own acts alone, and as himself working out separately his own salvation or his own doom; and this individual man again is looked at, not in his organic unity, but as repeating himself in a succession of separate religious acts. The individual act is taken to be a true expression of the whole man at the moment of its occurrence: and hence, if this act is wicked at the moment of the advent of the Kingdom, the agent will rightfully be destroyed; but if it be righteous, he will be preserved.[233]—Now the profound truth and genuine advance thus proclaimed, who can doubt them? And yet it is clear that the doctrine here is solidly true, only if taken as the explicitation and supplement, and even in part as the corrective, of the previously predominant teaching. Take the Ezekielian doctrine as complete, even for its own time, or as final over against the later, the Gospel depth of teaching, (with its union of the social body and of individual souls, and of the soul’s single acts and of the general disposition produced by and reacting upon these acts), and you get an all but solipsistic Individualism and an atomistic Psychology, and you offend Christianity and Science equally.

It is evident that Catherine, if she can fairly be taxed with what, if pressed, would, in her doctrine rather than in her life, be an excessive Individualism, is, in her general teaching and practice, admirably free from Psychological Atomism; indeed did any soul ever understand better the profound reality of habits, general dispositions, tones of mind and feeling and will, as distinct from the single acts that gradually build them up and that, in return, are encircled and coloured by them all? Her whole Purgatorial doctrine stands and falls by this distinction, and this although, with a profound self-knowledge, she does not hesitate to make the soul express, in one particular act after death,—that of the Plunge,—an even deeper level of its true attitude of will and of its moral character than is constituted by those imperfect habits of the will, habits which it will take so much suffering and acceptance of suffering gradually to rectify.

Thus the passages in which Catherine seems to teach that God can and does, as it were, catch souls unawares, calling them away, and finally deciding their fate on occasion of any and every de facto volitional condition at the instant of death, however little expressive of the radical determination of that soul such an act or surface-state may be, will have, (even if they be genuine, and most of them have doubtlessly grown, perhaps have completely sprung up, under the pen of sermonizing scribes), to be taken as hortatory, hence as partly hyperbolical. And such an admission will in nowise deny the possibility for the soul to express its deliberate and full disposition and determination in a single act or combination of acts; nor that the other-world effects will follow according to such deep, deliberate orientations of the character: it will only deny that, at any and every moment, any and every act of the soul sufficiently expresses its deliberate disposition. Certainly it is comparatively rarely that the soul exerts its full liberty, in an act of true, spiritual self-realization; and an analogous rarity cannot but be postulated by religious philosophy for contrary acts, of an approximately equal fulness of deliberation and accuracy of representation, with regard to the soul’s volitional state. And yet the operative influence towards such rare, fully self-expressive acts of the right kind, and the aid towards similar, massive, and truly representative volitions of the wrong kind, afforded by even quite ordinary half-awake acts and habits of respectively good or evil quality are so undeniable, and it is so impossible to draw a general line as to where such wishes pass into full willings and deliberate states: that the prevalence of a hortatory attitude towards the whole subject is right and indeed inevitable.

2. The reprobate will of the lost.

As to Moral Perversion, the reprobate will of the lost, we find that Catherine approaches the question from two different, and at bottom, on this point, incompatible, systems; but some incidental and short sayings of hers give us suggestive hints towards a consistent position in this difficult matter.

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.