The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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СКАЧАТЬ with the Conversion scene, had described her soul as, there and then, at the culmination of holiness,—here says: “And although God, at the moment when,” four days before, “He had given her that love and pain, had there and then pardoned her all her sins, consuming them in the fire of His love; yet He, wishing her to satisfy the claims of justice, led her by the way of satisfaction, in such wise as to cause this special contrition, illumination, and conversion to last about fourteen months,” and it is no doubt implied by him that frequent confession was practised throughout this time.[54]

      Thus we get an impressive instance of the rich and complex experience on which the Catholic doctrine is built, as to how, on the one hand, pure and perfect love ever instantly obliterates all sin; how, on the other hand, such perfect love, in those who explicitly know and accept the Church’s claims, involves a determination to confess all such grave sins as may have been committed; and how, finally, such subsequent confession is itself operative within the soul. For as between the soul and the body, so between the Mystical and Sacramental, there is a real and operative connection, though one which, however inadequately known by us, we know to be one not of simple identity or coextension.

      And the experiences and doctrines here specially considered appear to require the conception of contrition and pardon as but the necessary expression and effect of true, operative love; and to demand the conclusion that purification participates in the essentially positive nature of love, its cause. The removal of bodily impurity is a negative act, and, as such, is limited and unrepeatable; but spiritual purification would thus, as something positive, be capable of indefinite increase and repetition. And hence the deep philosophical justification of repeated contrition and confession for the same sins, even though already pardoned. We shall find that such a view is also to be found in St. Catherine’s own doctrine, though there is nothing to show that the thought of this paragraph is derived from Catherine herself. I take it to proceed from Cattaneo Marabotto.

      2. The later conception.

      The second writer, the penultimate Redactor of the book as we now have it, finds three successive levels in her whole life’s constant growth and upward movement, and discovers a type of each in some love-impelled figure or scene of the Bible. And so the writer gets his periods symbolized respectively by the two New Testament scenes of Christ’s feet, and the Penitent Magdalen drawn by Him to them, and of Christ’s breast, and the Beloved Disciple reposing peacefully upon it; and by the Old Testament poetic picture, and its allegorical interpretation, of Christ’s (the true Solomon’s) mouth, and the Bride’s kiss. And some four years are assigned to the first period, “many” years to the second, and her last years to the last: 1478 and 1499 would be the approximate dates dividing off these periods. We shall find this scheme to proceed from Battista Vernazza.

      Time-honoured though it be, this symbolism in no way fits Catherine’s case. For, excepting during the short first period, her direct and formal occupation with the Sacred Humanity is, throughout her convert life, practically confined to the Eucharistic Presence; and again, her words and contemplations are (as indeed the unhappiness of her marriage experience would lead one to expect and as the whole temper of her mind and devotion require) quite remarkably free from all affinity to the Canticle of Canticles. And yet this, in so far inappropriate, framework helps to emphasize the all-important fact of the constant growth and deepening ever at work within her life.

      Indeed, the short, general characterization of each of these successive periods which follows after each symbol here, is derived from passages of the Vita which are doubtless based upon direct communication by herself. Thus the detailed sight of her own particular sins and of God’s particular graces towards herself, characteristic of the relatively short first period, is succeeded by the second, long and profoundly lonely, period of an apparent union of the divine and of the human personalities, in which all distinct perception of her own acts appears to have usually been lost,—a union which can lead her to the point of saying: “I have no longer either soul or heart of my own; but my soul and my heart are those of my Love.” Yet in her third and last period, the consciousness of her own acts and of their differentiation is described as fully reappearing within her mind. For though we are presented here with a kind of immersion in the Divinity, in which she appears so to lose herself interiorly and exteriorly as to be able to say with St. Paul: “I live no longer, but Christ lives in me”; and though we are told that she was no longer able to discern between the good and evil of her acts, by means of any direct examination of them: yet her acts are now again perceived to be her own; to be some of them good and some of them faulty; and are seen, as several and as differing, by her own self, but “in God.”[55] So did the Lady of Shallot, all turned away though she was from the world of sight, see in her mirror the different figures as, good and bad, they moved on their way, more truly and clearly than she had ever seen them formerly by any direct perception.

      3. Position adopted in this study concerning Catherine’s spiritual growth.

      Now these periods of interior, experimental, mystical vicissitude and growth have also their corresponding variations of religious analysis and speculation, and of external actions and events; and these variations are not only the concomitants and expressions of the inner growth, but are also, in part, the subject-matter and occasion for the next stage of mystical experience. And since Catherine’s special characteristic consists precisely in the richness and variety of her life at any one moment, and in the successive, ever-accelerated enrichment which it achieves almost up to the end, any obliteration of this successive growth, or any one-sided attention to any one aspect of her life during any one of its chief periods, will readily take all life-likeness out of her portrait.

      Yet to achieve anything like this comprehension is most difficult, if only because it has to be attempted with the aid of materials which, where their registration is contemporary with the events chronicled, belong, all but the legal documents, to the last fifteen years of her life; and because, even within this last period, they are rarely furnished with any reference to their exact place within that period. There is throughout the book a most natural and instructive, indeed in its way most legitimate and even necessary, insistence upon the apparently complete independence and aloofness, the transcendence of her inner life. And this insistence goes so far that a self-sufficing Eternity, a completely unchanging Here and Now, floating outside and above even the necessary and normal affections, actions, and relations of human life and fellowship, seems, especially from after her conversion till up to the beginning of her physical incapacitation,[56] to have taken the place of the characteristically human struggle in and through time and space, with and through our fellow-creatures. As in Leibniz we get a divinely pre-established harmony between the dispositions and the acts of the body and those of the soul, which appear indeed as though indestructibly interrelated, but which, in reality, operate throughout without one instant’s direct interaction: so here, the external is not indeed represented as neglected by her, nor as anything but in complete harmony with her inner life, and as indeed inspired by God, yet her own mind and soul are but reluctantly permitted to appear as expressing themselves in it, as requiring and affected by it. She appears as having got outside of, and away from, all the visible and purely human, rather than deeper into and behind it; to have achieved the ignoring of it rather than its conversion and transfiguration and its appointment to its own intrinsic place and function in the full economy of the soul’s new life.

      And yet all this is, even in the minds of the authors, but one aspect of this complex life, and one which, taken alone, would at once do injustice to its other aspect, the grand depth and range of its immanental quality. And even in as much as the transcendental aspect is really attributable to the predominant trend of Catherine’s own character and teaching, it in no way invalidates the fact of the actual astonishing many-sidedness and balance of her life, especially before her last few years, but will be found to proceed essentially from her rare mode of achieving this many-sidedness and balance, or, more strictly still, from her own feeling as to this mode, and her analysis and theory of it. We have no direct concern with this her reflection at present: what she actually СКАЧАТЬ