(3) Fire, as a symbol for God and His action, is thus praised by Dionysius: “The sacred theologians often describe the super-essential Essence in terms of Fire.… For sensible fire is, so to say, present in all things, and pervades them all without mingling with them, and is received by all things; … it is intolerable yet invisible; it masters all things by its own might, and yet it but brings the things in which it resides to (the development of) their own energy; it has a transforming power; it communicates itself to all who approach it in any degree; … it has the power of dividing (what it seizes); it bears upwards; it is penetrating; … it increases its own self in a hidden manner; it suddenly shines forth.”[83]--All these qualities, and the delicate transitions from fire to light and from light back to fire, and from heat immanent to heat applied from without, we can find again, vividly assimilated and experienced, in Catherine’s teaching and emotional life. But the Sun-light predominates in Dionysius, the Fire-heat in Catherine; and whereas the former explicitly attaches purification only to the Sun-light, the latter connects the cleansing chiefly with Fire-heat, no doubt because the Greek man is busy chiefly with the intellectually cognitive, and the Italian woman with the morally ameliorative, activities and interests of the mind and soul. 3. _The soul’s reaction._ (1) As to the soul’s reaction under God’s action, and its return to Him, we first get, in Dionysius, the insistence upon Mystical Quietude and Silence, which, according to him, are strictly necessary, since only like can know and become one with like, and God is “Peace and Repose” and, “as compared with every known progression, Immobility,” and “the one all-perfect source and cause of the Peace of all”; and He is Silence, “the Angels are, as it were, the heralds of the Divine Silence,”--teaching not unlike that of St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Jesus Christ … the Word which proceeds from Silence.”[84] Hence “in proportion as we ascend to the higher designations of God, do our expressions become more and more circumscribed”; and at last “we shall find, not a little speaking, but a complete absence of speech and of conception.”[85] As Proclus has it: “Let this Fountain of Godhead be honoured on our part by silence and by the union which is above silence.”[86] And Plotinus says: “This,” the Divine, “Light comes not from anywhere nor disappears any whither, but simply shines or shines not: hence we must not pursue after it, but must abide in quietness till it appears.” And when it does appear, “the contemplative, as one rapt and divinely inspired, abides here with quietude in a motionless condition, … being entirely stable, and becoming, as it were, stability itself.”[87]--All this still finds its echo in Catherine.--But the treble (cognitive) movement of the Angelic and human mind,--the circular, the straight-line, and the spiral,--which Dionysius, in