“Presence,” “presenza,” παρουσιά, is another favourite term, as with Catherine so also with Dionysius and Proclus. Thus the Areopagite: “The presence of the spiritual light causes recollection and unity in those that are being enlightened with it,” “His wholly inconceivable presence.”[97] And Proclus: “Every perfect spiritual contact and communion is owing to the presence of God.”[98] And the conception of a sudden presence goes back, among the Neo-Platonists, to Plato and the Greek Mysteries, in which the God was held suddenly to arrive and to take part in the sacred dance. Such rings of sacred dancers, “choirs,” are still characteristic of Dionysius--_e.g._ _Heavenly Hierarchy_, vii, 4--but they are quite wanting in Catherine.--But “contact,” “touch,” ἐπαφή,--said of God’s direct action upon the soul,--a conception so intensely active in Catherine’s mind and life, is again a favourite term with Dionysius and Proclus. The former declares this “touch” to be neither “sensible” nor “intelligible” and that “we are brought into contact with things unutterable”; the latter talks of “perfect spiritual contact.”[99] The symbols of “Nakedness” and “Garments,” as indicative respectively of the soul’s purity and impurity or self-delusion, are, though most prominent in Catherine, rare in Dionysius. But his declaration: “The nakedness of the (Angels’) feet indicates purification from the addition of all things external and assimilation to the divine simplicity” exactly expresses her idea.[100] And Proclus has it more fully: The soul, on descending into the body, forsakes unity, “and around her, from all sides, there grow multiform kinds of existence and manifold garments”; “love of honour is the last garment of souls”; and “when,” in mounting up, “we lay aside our passions and garments which, in coming down, we had put on, we must also strip off that last garment, in order that, having become (entirely) naked, we may establish ourselves before God, having made ourselves like to the divine life.”[101]