(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