(3) As to the Body, we have already noted St. Paul’s doctrine, intermediate between the Palestinian and Alexandrian Jewish teaching, that it will rise indeed, but composed henceforth of “glory” and no more of “flesh.” It is this his requirement of a body, however spiritual, which underlies his anxiety to be “found clothed, not naked,” at and after death, 2 Cor. v, 3. Indeed, in this whole passage, v, 1-4, “our earthly house of this habitation,” and “a building of God not made with hands,” no doubt mean, respectively, the present body of flesh and the future body of glory; just as the various, highly complex, conceptions of “clothed,” “unclothed,” “clothed upon,” refer to the different conditions of the soul with a body of flesh, without a body at all, and with a body of glory.--Now this passage, owing to its extreme complication and abstruseness of doctrine, has come down to us in texts and versions of every conceivable form; and this uncertainty has helped Catherine towards her very free utilization of it. For she not only, as ever, simply ignores all questions of a risen body, and transfers the concept of a luminous ethereal substance from the body to the soul itself, and refers the “nakedness,” “unclothing,” “clothing,” and “clothing upon” to conditions obtaining, not between the soul and the body, but between the soul and God; but she also, in most cases, takes the nakedness as the desirable state, since typical of the soul’s faithful self-exposure to the all-purifying rays of God’s light and fire, and interprets the “unclothing” as the penitential stripping from off itself of those pretences and corrupt incrustations which prevent God’s blissful action upon it.