The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2) — John Shaqi
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
This love of God, again, is seen to be present everywhere, and, of
Itself, everywhere to effect happiness. The dispositions of souls are
indeed held to vary within each soul and between soul and soul, and to
determine the differences in their reception, and consequently in the
effect upon them, of God’s one universal love: but the soul’s reward
and punishment are not something distinct from its state, they are but
that very state prolonged and articulated, since man can indeed go
against his deepest requirements but can never finally suppress them.
Heaven, Purgatory, Hell are thus not places as well as states, nor do
they begin only in the beyond: they are states alone, and begin already
here. And Grace and Love, and Love and Christ, and Christ and Spirit,
and hence Grace and Love and Christ and Spirit are, at bottom, one, and
this One is God. Hence God, loving Himself in and through us, is alone
our full true self. Here, in this constant stretching out and forward
of her whole being into and towards the ocean of light and love, of
God the All in All, it is not hard to recognize a soul which finds
happiness only when looking out and away from self, and turning, in
more or less ecstatic contemplation and action, towards that Infinite
Country, that great Over-Againstness, God.
And, in her sensitive shrinking from the idea of an angry God, we
find the instinctive reaction of a nature too naturally prone itself
to angry claimfulness, and which had been too much driven out of
its self-occupation by the painful sense of interior self-division
consequent upon that jealousy, not to find it intolerable to get out
of that little Scylla of her own hungry self only to fall into a great
Charybdis, an apparent mere enlargement and canonization of that same
self, in the angry God Himself.
And if her second peculiarity, the concentration of the fight upon an
unusually isolated and intense false self, had introduced an element of
at least relative Rigorism and contraction into her spirituality, this
third peculiarity brings a compensating movement of quasi-Pantheism,
of immense expansion. Here the crushed plant expands in boundless
air, light and warmth; the parched seaweed floats and unfolds itself
in an immense ocean of pure waters--the soul, as it were, breathes
and bathes in God’s peace and love. And it is evident that the great
super-sensible realities and relations adumbrated by such figures, did
not, with her, lead to mere dry or vague apprehensions. Even in this
period, although here with a peaceful, bracing orderliness and harmony,
the reality thus long and closely dwelt on and lived with was, as it
were, physically seen and felt in these its images by a ready response
of her immensely docile psycho-physical organism.
6. _Catherine possessed two out of the three conditions apparently
necessary for stigmatization._
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