V. Points Common to all Five Minds; and Catherine’s Main Difference from her Four Predecessors

If we now consider for a moment the general points common to the four writers just considered and to Catherine, we readily note that all five are profoundly reflective and interpretative in their attitude towards the given contingencies of traditional religion; that they all tend to find the Then and There of History still at work, in various degrees, Here and Now, throughout Time and Space, and in the last resort, above and behind both these categories, in a spaceless, timeless Present. And if only three, Paul, Jacopone, and Catherine, bear marks, throughout all they think and feel and do and are, of the cataclysmic conversion-crisis through which they had passed,—the temporally intermediate two, John and Dionysius, have also got, but in a more indirect form, much of a similar Dualism. All five are, in these and other respects, indefinitely closer to each other than any one of them is to the still richer, more complete, and more entirely balanced though less articulated, Synoptic teaching, which enfolds all that is abiding in those other five, whilst they, even if united, do not approximately exhaust the substance of that teaching.

And if we would briefly define the main point on which Catherine holds views additional to, or other than, those other four, we must point to her Purgatorial teaching, which has received but little or no direct suggestion from any one of them, and which, whatever may have been its literary precursors and occasions, gives, perhaps more than anything else, a peculiarly human and personal, original and yet still modern, touch to what would otherwise be, to our feeling, too abstract and antique a spiritual physiognomy.