The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
(2) There is a second simplification in Catherine which, though here
St. Augustine leads the way, is less common among Christians: her three
other-world “places” are not, according to her ultimate thought, three
distinct spacial extensions and localities, filled, respectively, with
ceaselessly suffering, temporarily suffering, and ceaselessly blessed
souls; but they are, (notwithstanding all the terms necessitated by
such spacial picturings as “entering,” “coming out,” “plunging into”),
so many distinct states and conditions of the soul, of a painful,
mixed, or joyful character. We shall have these her ultimate ideas very
fully before us presently. But here I would only remark that this her
union of a picturing faculty, as vivid as the keenest sense-perception,
and of a complete non-enslavement to, a vigorous utilization of,
these life-like spacial projections, by a religious instinct and
experience which never forgets that God and souls are spirits, to whom
our ordinary categories of space and extension, time and motion, do
not and cannot in strictness apply, is as rare as it is admirable;
and that, though her intensely anti-corporeal and non-social attitude
made such a position more immediately easy for her than it can be for
those who remain keenly aware of the great truths involved in the
doctrines of the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints,
this her trend of thought brings into full articulation precisely the
deepest of our spiritual apprehensions and requirements, whilst it is
not her fault if it but further accentuates some of our intellectual
perplexities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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