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).”