II. The Joannine Writings

On moving now from the Pauline to the Joannine writings, we shall find that Catherine’s obligations to these latter are but rarely as deep, yet that they cover a wider reach of ideas and images. I take this fresh source of influence under the double heading of the general relations of the Joannine teaching to other, previous or contemporary, conceptions; and of this same teaching considered in itself.

1. Joannine teaching contrasted with other systems.

(1) As to the general relations towards other positions, we get here, towards Judaism and Paganism, an emphatic insistence upon the novelty and independence of Christianity as regards not only Paganism, but even the previous Judaism, “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,” i, 17; and upon the Logos, Christ, as “the Light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,” “unto his own,” i.e. men in general; for this Light “was in the world, and the world was made by Him,” i, 9-11. There is thus a divinely-implanted, innate tendency towards this light, extant in man prior to the explicit act of faith, and operative outside of the Christian body: “Every man who is from the truth, heareth my voice,” xviii, 37: “he who doeth the truth, cometh to the light,” in, 21: “begotten,” as he is, not of man but “of God,” i, 13; 1 John iii, 9. And thus Samaritans, Greeks, and Heathens act and speak in the best dispositions, iv, 42; xii, 20-24; x, 16; whilst such terms and sayings as “the Saviour of the World,” “God so loved the world,” iv, 42, iii, 16, are the most universalistic declarations to be found in the New Testament.—And this current dominates the whole of Catherine’s temper and teaching: this certainty as to the innate affinity of every human soul to the Light, Love, Christ, God, gives a tone of exultation to the musings of this otherwise melancholy woman. Whereas the Joannine passages of a contrasting exclusiveness and even fierceness of tone, such as “all they that came before Me, were thieves and robbers,” x, 8; “ye are from your father, the devil,” viii, 44; “ye shall die in your sins,” viii, 21; “your sin remains,” ix, 41, are without any parallel among Catherine’s sayings. Indeed it is plain that Catherine, whilst as sure as the Evangelist that all man’s goodness comes from God, nowhere, except in her own case, finds man’s evil to be diabolic in character.

(2) With regard to Paulinism, the Joannine writings give us a continuation and extension of the representation of the soul’s mystical union with Christ, as a local abiding in the element Christ. Indeed it is in these writings that we find the terms “to abide in” the light, 1 John ii, 10, in God, 1 John iv, 13, in Christ, 1 John ii, 6, 24, 27, iii, 6, 24, and in His love, John xv, 9, 1 John iv, 16; the corresponding expressions, “God abideth in us,” 1 John iv, 12, 16, “Christ abideth in us,” 1 John iii, 24, and “love abideth in us,” 1 John iv, 16; the two immanences coupled together, where the communicant “abideth in Me and I in him,” vi, 56, and where the members of His mystical body are bidden to “abide in Me and I in you,” xv, 4; and the supreme pattern of all these interpenetrations, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me,” xiv, 10.—And it is from here that Catherine primarily gets the literary suggestions for her images of the soul plunged into, and filled by, an ocean of Light, Love, Christ, God; and again from here, more than from St. Paul, she gets her favourite term μένειν (It. restare), around which are grouped, in her mind, most of the quietistic-sounding elements of her teaching.

(3) As to the points of contact between the Joannine teaching and Alexandrianism, we find that three are vividly renewed by Catherine.

Philo had taught: “God ceases not from acting: as to burn is the property of fire, so to act is the property of God,” Legg. Alleg. I, 3. And in John we find: “God is a Spirit,” and “My Father worketh ever and I work ever,” iv, 24; v, 17. And God as pure Spiritual Energy, as the Actus Purus, is a truth and experience that penetrates the whole life of Catherine.

The work of Christ is not dwelt on in its earthly beginnings; but it is traced up and back, in the form of a spiritual “Genesis,” to His life and work as the Logos in Heaven, where He abides “in the bosom of the Father,” and whence He learns what He “hath declared” to us, i, 18; just as, in his turn, the disciple whom Jesus loved “was reclining” at the Last Supper “on the bosom of Jesus,” and later on “beareth witness concerning the things” which he had learnt there, xiii, 23; xxi, 24. So also Catherine transcends the early earthly life of Christ altogether, and habitually dwells upon Him as the Light and as Love, as God in His own Self-Manifestation; and upon the ever-abiding sustenance afforded by this Light and Life and Love to the faithful soul reclining and resting upon it.

And the contrast between the Spiritual and the Material, the Abiding and the Transitory, is symbolized throughout John, in exact accord with Philo, under the spacial categories of upper and lower, and of extension: “Ye are from below, I am from above,” viii, 23; “He that cometh from above, is above all,” iv, 31; and “in my Father’s house,” that upper world, “there are many mansions,” abiding-places, xiv, 2. Hence all things divine here below have descended from above: regeneration, iii, 3; the Spirit, i, 32; Angels, i, 51; the Son of God Himself, iii, 13: and they mount once more up above, so especially Christ Himself, iii, 13; vi, 62. And the things of that upper world are the true things: “the true light,” “ the true adorers,” “the true vine,” “the true bread from Heaven,” i, ix; iv, 23; xv, 1; vi, 32: all this in contrast to the shadowy semi-realities of the lower world.—Catherine is here in fullest accord with the spacial imagery generally; she even talks of God Himself, not only as in a place, but as Himself a place, as the soul’s “loco.” But she has, for reasons explained elsewhere, generally to abandon the upper-and-lower category when picturing the soul’s self-dedication to purification, since, for this act, she mostly figures a downward plunge into suffering; and she gives us a number of striking sayings, in which she explicitly re-translates all this quantitative spacial imagery into its underlying meaning of qualitative spiritual states.

(4) As to the Joannine approximations and antagonisms to Gnosticism, Catherine’s position is as follows. In the Synoptic accounts, Our Lord makes the acquisition of eternal life depend upon the keeping of the two great commandments of the love of God and of one’s neighbour, Luke x, 26-28, and parallels. In John Our Lord says: “this is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent,” xvii, 3. To “know,” γινώσκειν, occurs twenty-five times in 1 John alone. Here the final object of every soul is to believe and to know: “they received and knew truly and believed,” xvii, 8; “we have believed and have known,” vi, 69; or “we have known and have believed,” 1 John iv, 16. And Catherine also lays much stress upon faith ending, even here below, in a certain vivid knowledge; but this knowledge is, with her, less doctrinally articulated, no doubt in part because there was no Gnosticism fronting her, to force on such articulation.

And the Joannine writings compare this higher mental knowledge to the lower, sensible perception: “He who cometh from heaven, witnesseth to what he hath seen and heard,” iii, 31; “when He shall become manifest, we shall see Him as He is,” 1 John iii, 2. And they have three special terms, in common with Gnosticism, for the object of such knowledge: Life, Light, and Fulness (Plerōma),—the latter, as a technical term, appearing in the New Testament only in John i, 16, and in the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians. Catherine, also, is ever experiencing and conceiving the mental apprehensions of faith, as so many quasi-sensible, ocular, perceptions; and Life and Light are constantly mentioned, and Fulness is, at least, implied in the psycho-physical concomitants or consequences of her thinkings.

On the other hand, she does not follow John in the intensely dualistic elements of his teaching,—the sort of determinist, all but innate, distinction between “the darkness,” “the men who loved the darkness rather than the light,” and the Light itself and those who loved it, i, 4, 5; iii, 19,—children of God and children of the devil—the latter all but incapable of being saved, viii, 38-47; x, 26; xi, 52; xiv, 17. Rather is she like him in his all but complete silence as to “the anger of God,”—a term which he uses once only, iii, 36, as against the twenty-two instances of it in St. Paul.

And she is full to overflowing of the great central, profoundly un- and anti-Gnostic, sensitively Christian teachings of St. John: as to the Light, the only-begotten Son, having been given by God, because God so loved the world; as to Jesus having loved his own even to the end; as to the object of Christ’s manifestation of His Father’s name to men, being that God’s love for Christ, and indeed Christ Himself, might be within them; and as to how, if they love Him, they will keep His commandments,—His commandment to love each other as He has loved them, iii, 21; iii, 16; xiii, 1; xvii, 26; xiv, 15; xv, 17. In this last great declaration especially do we find the very epitome of Catherine’s life and spirit, of her who can never think of Him as Light and Knowledge only, but ever insists on His being Fire and Love as well; and who has but one commandment, that of Love-impelled, Love-seeking loving.

(5) And lastly, in relation to organized, Ecclesiastical Christianity, the Joannine writings dwell, as regards the more general principles, on points which, where positive, are simply presupposed by Catherine; and, where negative, find no echo within her.

The Joannine writings insist continually upon the unity and inter-communion of the faithful: “There shall be one fold, one shepherd”; Christ’s death was in order “that He might gather the scattered children of God into one”; He prays to the Father that believers “may be one, as we are one”; and He leaves as His legacy His seamless robe, x, 16; xi, 52; xvii, 21; xix, 24. And these same writings have a painfully absolute condemnation for all outside of this visible fold: “The whole world lies in evil”; its “Prince is the Devil”; “the blood of Jesus cleanseth us from all sin,” within the community alone; false prophets, those who have gone forth from the community, are not to be prayed for, are not even to be saluted, 1 John, v, 19; John xii, 31; John i, 7; v, 16; 2 John, 10. For the great and necessary fight with Gnosticism has already begun in these writings.

But Catherine dies before the unity of Christendom is again in jeopardy through the Protestant Reformation, and she never dwells—this is doubtless a limit—upon the Christian community, as such. And her enthusiastic sympathy with the spiritual teachings of Jacopone da Todi, who, some two centuries before, had, as one of the prophetic opposition, vehemently attacked the intensely theocratic policy of Pope Boniface VIII, and had suffered a long imprisonment at his hands; her tender care for the schismatic population of the far-away Greek island of Chios; and her intimacy with Dre. Tommaso Moro, who, later on, became for a while a Calvinist; all indicate how free from all suspiciousness towards individual Catholics, or of fierceness against other religious bodies and persons, was her deeply filial attachment to the Church.

In the Synoptists Our Lord declares, as to the exorcist who worked cures in His name, although not a follower of His, that “he that is not against us, is for us,” and refuses to accede to His disciples’ proposal to interfere with his activity, Mark ix, 38-41; and He points, as to the means of inheriting eternal life, to the keeping of the two great commandments, as these are already formulated in the Old Testament, and insists that this neighbour, whom here we are bidden to love, is any and every man, Luke x, 25-37. The Joannine writings insist strongly upon the strict necessity of full, explicit adhesion: the commandment of love which Our Lord gives is here “My commandment,” “a new commandment,” one held “from the beginning”—in the Christian community; and the command to “love one another” is here addressed to the brethren in their relations to their fellow-believers only, xiii, 34; xiii, 35; xv, 12, 17. Catherine’s feeling, in this matter, is clearly with the Synoptists.

2. Joannine teaching considered in itself.

If we next take the Joannine teachings in themselves, we shall find the following interesting points of contact or contrast to exist between John and Catherine.

(1) In matters of Theology proper, she is completely penetrated by the great doctrine, more explicit in St. John even than in St. Paul, that “God is Love,” 1 John iv, 8; and by the conceptions of God and of Christ “working always” as Life, Light, and Love.—But whereas, in the first Epistle of John, God Himself is “eternal life” and “light,” v, 20; i, 5; and, in the Gospel, it is Christ Who, in the first instance, appears as Life and as Light, xi, 25; viii, 12: Catherine nowhere distinguishes at all between Christ and God. And similarly, whereas in St. John “God doth not give” unto Christ “the Spirit by measure”; and Christ promises to the disciples “another Paraclete,” i.e. the Holy Spirit, iii, 34; xiv, 16; and indeed the Son and the Spirit appear, throughout, as distinct from one another as do the Son and the Father: in Catherine we get, practically everywhere, an exclusive concentration upon the fact, so often implied or declared by St. Paul, of Love, Christ, being Himself Spirit.

(2) The Joannine Soteriology has, I think, influenced Catherine as follows. Christ’s redemptive work appears, in the more original current of that teaching, under the symbols of the Word, Light, Bread, as the self-revelation of God. For in proportion that this Logos-Light and Bread enlightens and nourishes, does He drive away darkness and weakness, and, with them, sin, and this previously to any historic acts of His earthly life. And, in this connection, there is but little stress laid upon penance and the forgiveness of sins as compared with the Synoptic accounts, and the term of turning back, στρέφειν, is absent here.—But that same redemptive work appears, in the more Pauline of the two Joannine currents, as the direct result of so many vicarious, atoning deeds, the historic Passion and Death of Our Lord. Here there is indeed sin, a “sin of the world,” and specially for this sin is Christ the propitiation: “God so loved the world, as to give His only-begotten Son”—Him “the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world,” i, 29; 1 John ii, 2; John ii, 16; i, 29, 36.

Catherine, with the probably incomplete exception of her Conversion and Penance-period, concentrates her attention, with a striking degree of exclusiveness, upon the former group of conceptions. With her too the God-Christ is—all but solely—conceived as Light which, in so far as it is not hindered, operates the healing and the growth of souls. And in her great picture of all souls inevitably hungering for the sight of the One Bread, God, she has operated a fusion between two of the Joannine images, the Light which is seen and the Bread which is eaten: here the bare sight (in reality, a satiating sight) of the Bread suffices. If, for the self-manifesting God-Christ, she has, besides the Joannine Light-image, a Fire-symbol, which has its literary antecedents rather in the Old Testament than in the New, this comes from the fact that she is largely occupied with the pain of the impressions and processes undergone by already God-loving yet still imperfectly pure souls, and that fierce fire is as appropriate a symbol for such pain as is peaceful light for joy.

Now this painfulness is, in Catherine’s teaching, the direct result of whatever may be incomplete and piecemeal in the soul’s state and process of purification. And this her conception, of Perfect Love being mostly attained only through a series of apparently sudden shifts, each seemingly final, is no doubt in part moulded upon the practically identical Joannine teaching as to Faith.

True, we have already seen that her conception of the nature of God’s action upon the soul, and of the soul’s reaction under this His touch, is more akin to the rich Synoptic idea of a disposition and determination of the soul’s whole being, (a cordial trust at least as much as an intellectual apprehension and clear assent), than to the Joannine view, which lays a predominant stress upon mental apprehension and assent. And again, she nowhere presents anything analogous to the Joannine, already scholastic, formulations of the object of this Faith and Trust,—all of them explicitly concerned with the nature of Christ.

But, everywhere in the Joannine writings, the living Person and Spirit aimed at by these definitions is considered as experienced by the soul in a succession of ever-deepening intuitions and acts of Faith. Already at the Jordan, Andrew and Nathaniel have declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God, i, 41, 49; yet they, His disciples, are said to have believed in Him at Cana, in consequence of His miracle there, ii, 11. Already at Capernaum Peter asserts for the twelve, “We have believed and known that Thou art the Holy One of God,” vi, 69; yet still, at the Last Supper, Christ exhorts them to believe in Him, xiv, 10, 11, and predicts future events to them, in order that, when these predictions come true, their faith may still further increase, xiii, 19; xiv, 29. And, as far on as after the Resurrection we hear that the Beloved Disciple “saw” (the empty tomb) “and believed,” xx, 8, 29. We thus get in John precisely the same logically paradoxical, but psychologically and spiritually most accurate and profound, combination of an apparent completeness of Faith at each point of special illumination, with a sudden re-beginning and impulsive upward shifting of the soul’s Light and Believing, which is so characteristic of Catherine’s experience and teaching as to the successive levels of the soul’s Fire, Light and Love. And the opposite movement—of the fading away of the Light and the Faith—can be traced in John, as the corresponding doctrine of the going out of the Fire, Light and Love within the Soul can be found in Catherine.

Again, both John and Catherine are penetrated with the sense that this Faith and Love is somehow waked up in souls by a true touch of God, a touch to which they spontaneously respond, because they already possess a substantial affinity to Him. “His,” the Good Shepherd’s, “sheep hear His voice,” x, 16; they hear it, because they are already His: the Light solicits and is accepted by the soul, because the soul itself is light-like and light-requiring, and because it proceeds originally from this very Light which would now reinforce the soul’s own deepest requirements. This great truth appears also in those profound Joannine passages: “No man can come to Me, unless the Father Who sent Me draw him”; and “I have manifested Thy name, to those men whom Thou didst give Me from out of the world,” vi, 44; xvii, 6.

And this attractive force is also a faculty of Christ: “I shall draw all men unto Myself,” xii, 32. And note how Catherine, ever completely identifying God, Christ, Light, Love, and, where these work in imperfectly pure souls, Fire, is stimulated by the last-quoted text to extend God’s, Christ’s, Love’s drawing, attraction, to all men; to limit only, in various degrees, these various men’s response to it; and to realize so intensely that a generous yielding to this our ineradicable deepest attrait is our fullest joy, and the resisting it is our one final misery, as to picture the soul, penitent for this its mad resistance, plunging itself, now eagerly responsive to that intense attraction, into God and a growing conformity with Him.

(3) As to points concerning the Sacraments where Catherine is influenced by John, we find that here again Baptismal conceptions are passed over by her. She does not allude to the water in the discourse to Nicodemus, iii, 5, although she is full of other ideas suggested there; but she dwells upon the water in the address to the Woman at the Well, iv, 10-15, that “living water,” which is, for her, the spirit’s spiritual sustenance, Love, Christ, God, and insensibly glides over into the images and experiences attaching, for her, to the Holy Eucharist.

But, as to this the greatest of the Sacraments and the all-absorbing devotion of her life, her symbols and concepts are all suggested by the Fourth Gospel, in contrast to the Synoptists and St. Paul. For the Holy Eucharist is, with her, ever detached from any direct memory of the Last Supper, Passion, and Death, the original, historical, unique occasions which still form its setting in the pre-Joannine writings, although those greatest proofs of a divinely boundless self-immolation undoubtedly give to her devotion to the Blessed Sacrament its beautiful enthusiasm and tenderness. The Holy Eucharist ever appears with her, as with St. John, attached to the scene of the multiplication of the breads,—a feast of joy and of life, with Christ at the zenith of His earthly hope and power. For not “a shewing of the death” in “the eating of this bread,” 1 Cor. xi, 26, is dwelt on by John; but we have: “I am the Bread of Life; he that eateth this bread, shall live for ever,” John vi, 51, 52.

And Catherine follows John in thinking predominantly of the single soul, when dwelling upon the Holy Eucharist. For if John presents a great open-air Love-Feast in lieu of Paul’s Upper Chamber and Supper with the twelve, he, as over against Paul’s profoundly social standpoint, has, throughout this his Eucharistic chapter, but three indications of the plural as against some fourteen singulars.

And, finally, John’s change from the future tense, with its reference to a coming historic institution, “the food which … the Son of Man will give you,” vi, 27, to the present tense, with its declaration of an eternal fact and relation, “I am” (now and always) “the living bread which hath come down from heaven,” vi, 51, will have helped Catherine towards the conception of the eternal Christ-God offering Himself as their ceaseless spiritual food to His creatures, possessed as they are by an indestructible spiritual hunger for Himself. For if the Eucharistic food, Bread, Body, has already been declared by St. Paul to be “spiritual,” 2 Cor. iii, 17, in St. John also it has to be spiritual, for it is here “the true bread from heaven” and “the bread of life”; and Christ declares here “it is the Spirit that giveth life, the flesh (alone) profiteth nothing,” vi, 61, 69. Hence Catherine is, again through the Holy Eucharist and St. John, brought back to her favourite Pauline conception of the Lord as Himself “Spirit,” “the Life-giving Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; 1 Cor. xv, 45.

(4) And if we conclude with the Joannine Eschatology, we shall find that Catherine has penetrated deep into the following conceptions, which undoubtedly, even in their union, present us with a less rich outlook than that furnished by the Synoptists, but which may be said to constitute the central spirit of Our Lord’s teaching.

Like John, who has but two mentions of “the Kingdom of God,” iii, 3, 5, and who elsewhere ever speaks of “Life,” Catherine has nowhere “the Kingdom,” but everywhere “Life.” Like him she conceives the process of Conversion as a “making alive” of the moribund, darkened, cold soul, by the Light, Love, Christ, God, v, 21-29, when He, Who is Himself “the Life,” xi, 25, and “the Spirit,” iv, 24, speaks to the soul “words” that are “spirit and life,” vi, 63; for then the soul that gives ear to His words “hath eternal life,” v, 24.

Again Catherine, for the most part, appropriates and develops that one out of the two Joannine currents of doctrine concerning the Judgment, which treats the latter as already determined and forestalled by Man’s present personal attitude towards the Light. The judgment is thus simply a discrimination, according to the original meaning of the noun κρίσις—like when God in the beginning “discriminated the light from the darkness,” Gen. i, 5; a discrimination substantially effected already here and now, “he that believeth in Him, is not judged; he that believeth not, is already judged,” iii, 18. But the other current of doctrine, so prominent in the Synoptists, is not absent from St. John,—the teaching as to a later, external and visible, forensic judgment. And Catherine has a similar intermixture of two currents, yet with a strong predominance of the immanental, present conception of the matter.

And even for that one volitional act in the beyond, which, according to her doctrine, has a certain constitutive importance for the whole eternity of all still partially impure souls—for that voluntary plunge—we can find an analogue in the Joannine writings, although here there is no reference to the after life. For throughout the greater part of his teaching—from iii, 15, 16, apparently up to the end of the Gospel,—the possession of spiritual Life is consequent upon the soul’s own acts of Faith, and not, as one would expect from his other, more characteristic teaching, upon its Regeneration from above, iii, 3. And the result of such acts of Faith is a “Metabasis,” a “passing over from death to life,” v, 24; 1 John iii, 14. Catherine will have conceived such an act of Faith as predominantly an act of Love, and the act as itself already that Metabasis; and will, most characteristically, have quickened the movement, and have altered its direction from the horizontal to the vertical, so that the “passing, going over,” becomes a “plunge down into” Life. For indeed the Fire she plunges into is, in her doctrine, Life Itself; since it is Light, Love, Christ, and God.

Catherine, once more, is John’s most faithful disciple, where he declares that Life to stream out immediately from the life-giving object of Faith into the life-seeking subject of that Faith, from the believed God into the believing soul: “I am the Bread of Life; he who cometh to Me, shall not hunger”; “he who abideth in Me, and I in him, beareth much fruit”; vi, 35; xv, 5.

And finally, she follows John closely where he insists upon Simultaneity and Eternity as contrasted with Succession and Immortality, so as even to abstract from the bodily resurrection. He who “hath passed over from death to life” (already) “possesses eternal life”; “every one who liveth and believeth in Me, shall not die for ever (at any time)”; “this,” already and of itself, “is eternal life, to know Thee, the one true God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent”; and the soul’s abiding in such an experience is Christ’s own joy, transplanted into it, and a joy which is full, v, 24; xi, 26; xvii, 3; xv, 11. And there is here such an insistence upon an unbroken spiritual life, in spite of and right through physical death, that, to Martha’s declaration that her brother will arise at the last day, xi, 24, Jesus answers, “I am the Resurrection and the Life: he who believeth in Me, even if he die” the bodily death, “shall live” on in his soul; indeed “every man who liveth” the life of the body, “and who believeth in Me, shall not die for ever (at any time)” in his soul, xi, 25, 26. John’s other line of thought, in which the bodily resurrection is prominent, remains without any definite or systematic response in Catherine’s teaching.

(5) We can then summarize the influence exercised by John upon Catherine by saying that he encouraged her to conceive religion as an experience of eternity; as a true, living knowledge of things spiritual; indeed as a direct touch of man’s soul by God Himself, culminating in man’s certainty that God is Love.