(3) And Catherine keeps, in an interesting manner, Hellenic, and specifically Platonic, formulation for the deepest of her experiences and teachings, since her standing designation of God and of Our Lord is never personal, “My Lover” or “My Friend”; but, as it were, elemental, “Love” or “My Love.” Her keen self-purifying instinct and reverence for God will have spontaneously inclined her thus to consider Him first as an Ocean of Being in which to quench and drown her small, clamorous individuality, and this as a necessary step towards reconstituting that true personality, which, itself spirit, would be penetrated and sustained by the Spirit, Christ, God. And then the Pauline-Joannine picturings of God as a quasi-place and extended substance (“from Him and in Him and to Him,” “in the Spirit,” “in Christ,” “God is Charity and he that abideth in Charity, abideth in Him”) will have strongly confirmed this trend. Yet Dionysius too must have greatly helped on this movement of her mind. For in Dionysius the standing appellations for God are, in true Neo-Platonist fashion, derived from extended or diffusive material substances or conditions, Light, Fire, Fountain, Ocean; and from that pervasive emotion, Love, strictly speaking Desire, Eros. Now this, for our modern and Christian feeling, curiously impersonal, general and abstract method goes back, through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato, who, above all in his _Symposium_, is dominated by the two tendencies and requirements, of identifying the First and Perfect with the most General and the most Abstract; and of making the very prerequisites and instruments of the search for It,--even the earthly Eros, still so far from the Heavenly Eros and from the Christian Agapē,--into occasions, effects or instalments of and for the great Reality sought by them. And since it is thus the love, the desire, the eros, of things beautiful, and true, and good,--a love first sensible, then intellectual, and at last spiritual, which makes us seek and find It, the Beauty, Truth, and Goodness which is First Cause and Final End of the whole series, this Cause and End will be considered not as a Lover but as Love Itself. It is plain, I think, that it is specially this second motive, this requirement of a pervading organization and circle of and within the life of spirits and of the Spirit, which has also determined Catherine to retain Plato’s terminology. IV. JACOPONE DA TODI’S “LODE.”