(1) We have seen how she dwells much, Plotinus-like, upon the soul’s stripping itself of all its numerous garments, and exposing itself naked to the rays of God’s healing light. Yet in the original Platonic scheme these garments are put on by the soul in its descent from spirit into matter, and are stripped off again in its ascent back out of matter into spirit; in both cases, they stand for the body and its effects. In Catherine, even more than in Plotinus, the garments stand for various evil self-attachments and self-delusions of the soul; and against these evils and dangers the Synoptists furnish endless warnings. And yet she insists upon purity, clear separation, complete abstraction of the soul, in such terms as still to show plainly enough the originally Neo-Platonist provenance of much of her form; for in the Neo-Platonists we get, even more markedly than here, a like insistence upon the natural dissimilarity of the body and the soul, and a cognate longing to get away from it in ecstasy and death. But whilst in the Neo-Platonists there is, at the bottom of all this, a predominant belief that the senses are the primary source and occasion of all sin, so that sin is essentially the contamination of spirit by matter: in Catherine, (although she shares to the full Plotinus’s thirst for ecstasy, as the escape from division and trouble into unity and peace), impurity stands primarily for self-complacency,--belief in, and love of, our imaginary independence of even God Himself; and purity means, in the first instance, the loving Him and His whole system of souls and of life, and one’s own self only in and as part of that system.