Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 109

Time wears on, and Catherine is still in the same house, and with the same health, and with the same companions and occupations, penances and prayers. But the interior dispositions and emotional promptings, and the mental apprehension of them all, are gradually changing and are growing wider and freer and less particularized. “She now began to experience a more affective way, so that she was often as though beside herself; and” though still “moved by a great interior thirst after self-hatred, and by a penetrating contrition, she would often lie prostrate on the ground”; she would do so, “hardly knowing what she was doing, yet somehow gaining thus some relief for her heart,” overflowing as it was with a boundless, profound, but now more and more general, sorrow and tender love.[94] The note of a spontaneous, expansive, instinctive love is now growing in predominance in her prayer and human intercourse; and her very penances, though still performed, are now often practised from a general unreflective instinct of love-impelled self-hatred, without any conscious application to any particular inclinations or sins.

For as to her intercourse with others, she will probably already now have practised many an act of that beautiful and characteristic, impulsive, expansive tenderness, of which we shall have a good many examples from the end of her second period. And as to the character of her mortifications, we hear the following: “Whilst engaged on such great and numerous mortifications of all her senses, she was sometimes asked, ‘Why are you doing this (particular) thing?’ And she would answer, ‘I do not know, except that I feel myself interiorly drawn to do so, without any opposition from within. And I think that this is the will of God; but it is not His will, that I should propose to myself any (particular) object in so doing.’”[95] I take it that, with this growing intermittence in the sight of her particular sins, her Confessions, though still practised, will have become less frequent, and her Holy Communions more so.