(1) If we start from the history of the nomenclature which, (though present only partially in Catherine’s sayings, for she nowhere uses the term “passivity”), runs, with however varying a completeness, right through the Christian Mystics more or less from the first, we shall find that it consists, roughly, of three stages, and, throughout, of two currents. There is the Pre-Pauline and Pre-Philonian stage; the stage of Paul, Philo, and John, through Clement and Origen, on to Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine; and the stage from the Pseudo-Dionysius onward, down to Nicolas of Coes inclusive, and which, to this hour, still largely influences us all.--And there are the two currents. The one tends so to emphasize the sense and reality of the soul’s simple receptivity, and of what the soul receives at such, apparently, purely receptive times, as to ignore, or even practically deny, the undeniable fact that this very receptivity is, inevitably, an act of its own. Its decisive terms are Passivity, Fixedness, Oneness. The other current realizes that Grace does not destroy, violate, or supplant Nature, either entirely or in part, but that it awakens, purifies, and completes it, so that every divine influx is also ever a stimulation of all the good and true energy already, even though latently, present in the soul. And its characteristic terms are “Action” (as distinguished from “Activity”), Growth, Harmony. (2) And we should note with care that these two currents are not simply Heathen and Christian respectively. For if that great, indeed all but central, term and conception of “Action” has been wisely generalized by most Christian Mystics, as the truly Christian substitute for the strongly Neo-Platonist term “Passivity”: that term and conception of “Action” was first fixed and elucidated by Aristotle, who, as Mr. Schiller well puts it, “has packed into his technical term ‘Energeia,’ and especially into the combination ‘Unmoving Energy,’ all that was most distinctive, most original, most fundamental, and most profound in his philosophy”;[123] whilst the second term, “Passivity,” goes on figuring in Christian Mystics and Mystical Theologies--(in spite of its demonstrably dangerous suggestions and frequently scandalous history)--because the religious, especially the Christian, consciousness requires a term for the expression of one element of all its deepest experiences, that character of “giveness” and of grace, of merciful anticipation by God, which marks all such states, in exact proportion to their depth and to the soul’s awakeness.