direct imitation of Proclus, carefully develops throughout three sections, is quite absent from Catherine’s mind.[88] (2) We next get, in Dionysius, the following teachings as to Mystical Vision and Union. “The Unity-above-Mind is placed above the minds; and the Good-above-word is unutterable by word.” “There is, further, the most divine knowledge of Almighty God, which is known through not knowing … when the mind, having stood apart from all existing things, and having then also dismissed itself, has been made one with the super-luminous rays.” “We must contemplate things divine by our whole selves standing out of our whole selves, and becoming wholly of God.” “By the resistless and absolute ecstasy, in all purity, from out of thyself and all things, thou wilt be carried on high, to the super-essential ray of the divine darkness.” “It is during the cessation of every mental energizing, that such a union of the deified minds and of the super-divine light takes place.”[89] And the original cause and final effect of such a going forth from self, are indicated in words which were worked out in a vivid fulness by Catherine’s whole convert life: “Divine Love is ecstatic, not permitting any lovers to belong to themselves, but only to those beloved by them. And this love, the superior beings show by being full of forethought for their inferiors; those equal in rank, by their mutual coherence; and the inferior by a looking back and up to the superior ones.”[90] Dionysius here everywhere follows Proclus. Yet the noblest Neo-Platonist sayings are again furnished by Plotinus: “We are not cut off or severed from the Light, but we breathe and consist in It, since It ever enlightens and bears us, as long as It is what It is.” In the moments of Union, “we are able to see both Him and ourself,--ourself in dazzling splendour, full of spiritual light, or rather one with the pure Light Itself … our life’s flame is then enkindled.” “There the soul rests, after it has fled up, away from evil, to the place which is free from evils … and the true life is there.” “Arrived there, the soul becomes that which she was at first.”[91] And if Plotinus has thus already got the symbolism of place, he is as fully aware as Catherine herself that, for purposes of vivid presentation, he is spacializing spiritual, that is, unextended, qualitative states and realities. “Things incorporeal do not get excluded by bodies; they are severed only by otherness and difference: hence, when such otherness is absent, they, not differing, are near each other.” And already, as with Catherine, there is the apparent finality, and yet also the renewed search for more. “The seer and the seen have become one, as though it were a case not of vision but of union.” “When he shall have crossed over as the image to its Archetype, then he will have reached his journey’s end.” And yet this “ecstasy, simplification, and donation of one’s self,” this “quiet,” is still also “a striving after contact,” “a