(2) Again, as to Triads, it is interesting to note that Catherine has nothing about the three stages or ways of the inner life,--purgative, illuminative, unitive,--of which Dionysius is full, and which are already indicated in Proclus; for we can find but two in her life, the purgative and unitive, and in her teaching these two alone appear, mostly in close combination, sometimes in strong contrast. Nor has she anything about the three degrees or kinds of prayer,--Meditation, Contemplation, Union,--as indicated in Dionysius: “It behoves us, by our prayers, to be lifted into proximity with the Divine Trinity; and then, by still further approaching it, to be initiated…; and (lastly) to make ourselves one with it”; and as taught by Proclus: “Knowledge leads, then follows proximity, and then union.”[102] With her we only get Contemplation and Union.--Nor do we get in her anything about thrice three choirs of Angels, or three orders of Christian Ministrants, or three classes of Christian people, or thrice three groups of Sacraments and Sacramental acts. For she is too intensely bent upon immediate intercourse with God, and too much absorbed in the sense of profound unity and again of innumerable multiplicity, to be attracted by Dionysius’s Neo-Platonist ladder of carefully graduated intermediaries, or by his continuous interest in triads of every kind. Catherine thus follows the current in Dionysius which insists upon direct contact between the soul and the transcendent God, and ignores the other, which bridges over the abyss between the two by carefully graduated intermediaries: these intermediaries having become, with her, successive stages of purification and of ever more penetrating union of the one soul with the one God. 5. _Deification, especially through the Eucharist._ As to the end of the whole process, we find that Deification, so frequently implied or suggested by Catherine, is formally taught by Dionysius: “A union of the deified minds” (ἐκθεουμένων); the heavenly and the earthly Hierarchy have the power and task “to communicate to their subjects, according to the dignity of each, the sacred deification” (ἐκθέωσις); “we are led up, by means of the multiform of sensible symbols, to the uniform Deification.”[103] “The One is the very God,” says Proclus, “but the Mind (the Noûs) is the divinest of beings, and the soul is divine, and the body is godlike.… And every body that is God-like is so through the soul having become divine; and every soul that is divine, is so through the Mind being very divine; and every Mind that is thus very divine, is so through participation in the Divine One.”[104] There are preformations of this doctrine in Plotinus and echoes of it throughout Catherine’s sayings.