(5) We can then summarize the influence exercised by John upon Catherine by saying that he encouraged her to conceive religion as an experience of eternity; as a true, living knowledge of things spiritual; indeed as a direct touch of man’s soul by God Himself, culminating in man’s certainty that God is Love. III. THE AREOPAGITE WRITINGS. Catherine’s close relations to the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Dionysius, are of peculiar interest, in their manifold agreement, difference, or non-responsiveness; and this although the ideas thus assimilated are mostly of lesser depth and importance than those derived from the New Testament writings just considered. They can be grouped conveniently under the subject-matters of God’s creative, providential, and restorative, outgoing, His action upon souls and all things extant, and of the reasons for the different results of this action; of certain symbols used to characterize that essential action of God upon His creatures; of the states and energizings of the soul, in so far as it is responsive to that action; of certain terms concerning these reactions of the soul; and of the final result of the whole process. I shall try and get back, in most cases, to the Areopagite’s Neo-Platonist sources, the dry, intensely scholastic Proclus, and that great soul, the prince of the non-Christian Mystics, Plotinus.[70] 1. _God’s general action._ As to God’s action, we have in Dionysius the Circle with the three stages of its movement,--a conception so dear to Catherine. “Theologians call Him the Esteemed and the Loved, and again Love and Loving-kindness, as being a Power at once propulsive and leading up” and back “to Himself; a loving movement self-moved, which pre-exists in the Good, and bubbles forth from the Good to things existing, and which again returns to the Good--as it were a sort of everlasting circle whirling round, because of the Good, from the Good, in the Good, and to the Good,--ever advancing and remaining and returning in the same and throughout the same.” This is “the power of the divine similitude” present throughout creation, “which turns all created things to their cause.”[71] The doctrine is derived from Proclus: “Everything caused both abides in its cause and proceeds from it and returns to it”; and “everything that proceeds from something returns, by a natural instinct, to that from which it proceeds.”[72] And Plotinus had led the way: “there” in the super-sensible world, experienced in moments of ecstasy, “in touch and union with the One, the soul begets Beauty, Justice, and Virtue: and that place and life is, for it, its principle and end: principle, since it springs from thence; end, because the Good is there, and because, once arrived there, the soul becomes what it was at first.”[73]