Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 89

The second writer, the penultimate Redactor of the book as we now have it, finds three successive levels in her whole life’s constant growth and upward movement, and discovers a type of each in some love-impelled figure or scene of the Bible. And so the writer gets his periods symbolized respectively by the two New Testament scenes of Christ’s feet, and the Penitent Magdalen drawn by Him to them, and of Christ’s breast, and the Beloved Disciple reposing peacefully upon it; and by the Old Testament poetic picture, and its allegorical interpretation, of Christ’s (the true Solomon’s) mouth, and the Bride’s kiss. And some four years are assigned to the first period, “many” years to the second, and her last years to the last: 1478 and 1499 would be the approximate dates dividing off these periods. We shall find this scheme to proceed from Battista Vernazza.

Time-honoured though it be, this symbolism in no way fits Catherine’s case. For, excepting during the short first period, her direct and formal occupation with the Sacred Humanity is, throughout her convert life, practically confined to the Eucharistic Presence; and again, her words and contemplations are (as indeed the unhappiness of her marriage experience would lead one to expect and as the whole temper of her mind and devotion require) quite remarkably free from all affinity to the Canticle of Canticles. And yet this, in so far inappropriate, framework helps to emphasize the all-important fact of the constant growth and deepening ever at work within her life.

Indeed, the short, general characterization of each of these successive periods which follows after each symbol here, is derived from passages of the Vita which are doubtless based upon direct communication by herself. Thus the detailed sight of her own particular sins and of God’s particular graces towards herself, characteristic of the relatively short first period, is succeeded by the second, long and profoundly lonely, period of an apparent union of the divine and of the human personalities, in which all distinct perception of her own acts appears to have usually been lost,—a union which can lead her to the point of saying: “I have no longer either soul or heart of my own; but my soul and my heart are those of my Love.” Yet in her third and last period, the consciousness of her own acts and of their differentiation is described as fully reappearing within her mind. For though we are presented here with a kind of immersion in the Divinity, in which she appears so to lose herself interiorly and exteriorly as to be able to say with St. Paul: “I live no longer, but Christ lives in me”; and though we are told that she was no longer able to discern between the good and evil of her acts, by means of any direct examination of them: yet her acts are now again perceived to be her own; to be some of them good and some of them faulty; and are seen, as several and as differing, by her own self, but “in God.”[55] So did the Lady of Shallot, all turned away though she was from the world of sight, see in her mirror the different figures as, good and bad, they moved on their way, more truly and clearly than she had ever seen them formerly by any direct perception.