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Preface

The Strange History of This Book

In January 1999 I was preparing to teach an introductory
programming class in Java. I had taught it three times and I
was getting frustrated. The failure rate in the class was too high
and, even for students who succeeded, the overall level of
achievement was too low.

One of the problems I saw was the books. They were too big,
with too much unnecessary detail about Java, and not enough
high-level guidance about how to program. And they all
suffered from the trapdoor effect: they would start out easy,
proceed gradually, and then somewhere around Chapter 5 the
bottom would fall out. The students would get too much new
material, too fast, and I would spend the rest of the semester
picking up the pieces.

Two weeks before the first day of classes, I decided to write my

own book. My goals were:

Keep it short. It is better for students to read 10 pages than

not read 50 pages.
Be careful with vocabulary. I tried to minimize jargon and
define each term at first use.
 Build gradually. To avoid trapdoors, I took the most difficult
topics and split them into a series of small steps.
Focus on programming, not the programming language. I
included the minimum useful subset of Java and left out the
rest.

I needed a title, so on a whim I chose How to Think Like a

Computer Scientist.

My first version was rough, but it worked. Students did the

reading, and they understood enough that I could spend class
time on the hard topics, the interesting topics and (most
important) letting the students practice.

I released the book under the GNU Free Documentation

License, which allows users to copy, modify, and distribute the
book.

What happened next is the cool part. Jeff Elkner, a high school
teacher in Virginia, adopted my book and translated it into
Python. He sent me a copy of his translation, and I had the
unusual experience of learning Python by reading my own
book. As Green Tea Press, I published the first Python version
in 2001.

In 2003 I started teaching at Olin College and I got to teach

Python for the first time. The contrast with Java was striking.
Students struggled less, learned more, worked on more
interesting projects, and generally had a lot more fun.
Since then I’ve continued to develop the book, correcting
errors, improving some of the examples and adding material,
especially exercises.

The result is this book, now with the less grandiose title Think
Python. Some of the changes are:

I added a section about debugging at the end of each

chapter. These sections present general techniques for
finding and avoiding bugs, and warnings about Python
pitfalls.
I added more exercises, ranging from short tests of
understanding to a few substantial projects. Most exercises
include a link to my solution.
I added a series of case studies—longer examples with
exercises, solutions, and discussion.
I expanded the discussion of program development plans
and basic design patterns.
I added appendices about debugging and analysis of
algorithms.

The second edition of Think Python has these new features:

The book and all supporting code have been updated to

Python 3.
I added a few sections, and more details on the Web, to
help beginners get started running Python in a browser, so
you don’t have to deal with installing Python until you want
to.
 For “The turtle Module” I switched from my own turtle
graphics package, called Swampy, to a more standard
Python module, turtle, which is easier to install and more
powerful.
I added a new chapter called “The Goodies”, which
introduces some additional Python features that are not
strictly necessary, but sometimes handy.

I hope you enjoy working with this book, and that it helps you
learn to program and think like a computer scientist, at least a
little bit.

—Allen B. Downey
Olin College

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

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Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames,
and file extensions.

Bold
Indicates terms defined in the Glossary.

Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to
refer to program elements such as variable or function
names, databases, data types, environment variables,
statements, and keywords.
Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally
by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied
values or by values determined by context.

Using Code Examples

Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, etc.) is
available for download at
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython2/code.

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if
example code is offered with this book, you may use it in your
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We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution

usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For
example: “Think Python, 2nd Edition, by Allen B. Downey
(O’Reilly). Copyright 2016 Allen Downey, 978-1-4919-3936-9.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Jeff Elkner, who translated my Java book into
Python, which got this project started and introduced me to
what has turned out to be my favorite language.

Thanks also to Chris Meyers, who contributed several sections

to How to Think Like a Computer Scientist.

Thanks to the Free Software Foundation for developing the

GNU Free Documentation License, which helped make my
collaboration with Jeff and Chris possible, and Creative
Commons for the license I am using now.

Thanks to the editors at Lulu who worked on How to Think Like

a Computer Scientist.

Thanks to the editors at O’Reilly Media who worked on Think

Python.

Thanks to all the students who worked with earlier versions of

this book and all the contributors (listed below) who sent in
corrections and suggestions.

Contributor List
More than 100 sharp-eyed and thoughtful readers have sent in
suggestions and corrections over the past few years. Their
contributions, and enthusiasm for this project, have been a
huge help.

If you have a suggestion or correction, please send email to

feedback@thinkpython.com. If I make a change based on your
feedback, I will add you to the contributor list (unless you ask to
be omitted).

If you include at least part of the sentence the error appears in,
that makes it easy for me to search. Page and section numbers
are fine, too, but not quite as easy to work with. Thanks!

Lloyd Hugh Allen sent in a correction to Section 8.4.

Yvon Boulianne sent in a correction of a semantic error in

Chapter 5.
Fred Bremmer submitted a correction in Section 2.1.

Jonah Cohen wrote the Perl scripts to convert the LaTeX

source for this book into beautiful HTML.
Michael Conlon sent in a grammar correction in Chapter 2
and an improvement in style in Chapter 1, and he initiated
discussion on the technical aspects of interpreters.
Benoit Girard sent in a correction to a humorous mistake in
Section 5.6.
Courtney Gleason and Katherine Smith wrote
horsebet.py, which was used as a case study in an
earlier version of the book. Their program can now be found
on the website.
Lee Harr submitted more corrections than we have room to
list here, and indeed he should be listed as one of the
principal editors of the text.
James Kaylin is a student using the text. He has submitted
numerous corrections.
David Kershaw fixed the broken catTwice function in
Section 3.10.
Eddie Lam has sent in numerous corrections to Chapters 1,
2, and 3. He also fixed the Makefile so that it creates an
index the first time it is run and helped us set up a
versioning scheme.
Man-Yong Lee sent in a correction to the example code in
Section 2.4.
David Mayo pointed out that the word “unconsciously” in
Chapter 1 needed to be changed to “subconsciously”.
Chris McAloon sent in several corrections to Sections 3.9
and 3.10.
Matthew J. Moelter has been a long-time contributor who
sent in numerous corrections and suggestions to the book.
Simon Dicon Montford reported a missing function definition
and several typos in Chapter 3. He also found errors in the
increment function in Chapter 13.
John Ouzts corrected the definition of “return value” in
Chapter 3.
Kevin Parks sent in valuable comments and suggestions as
to how to improve the distribution of the book.
David Pool sent in a typo in the glossary of Chapter 1, as
well as kind words of encouragement.
Michael Schmitt sent in a correction to the chapter on files
and exceptions.
Robin Shaw pointed out an error in Section 13.1, where the
printTime function was used in an example without being
defined.
Paul Sleigh found an error in Chapter 7 and a bug in Jonah
Cohen’s Perl script that generates HTML from LaTeX.
Craig T. Snydal is testing the text in a course at Drew
University. He has contributed several valuable suggestions
and corrections.
Ian Thomas and his students are using the text in a
programming course. They are the first ones to test the
chapters in the latter half of the book, and they have made
numerous corrections and suggestions.
Keith Verheyden sent in a correction in Chapter 3.

Peter Winstanley let us know about a longstanding error in

our Latin in Chapter 3.
Chris Wrobel made corrections to the code in the chapter on
file I/O and exceptions.
Moshe Zadka has made invaluable contributions to this
project. In addition to writing the first draft of the chapter on
Dictionaries, he provided continual guidance in the early
stages of the book.
Christoph Zwerschke sent several corrections and
pedagogic suggestions, and explained the difference
between gleich and selbe.
James Mayer sent us a whole slew of spelling and
typographical errors, including two in the contributor list.
Hayden McAfee caught a potentially confusing
inconsistency between two examples.
Angel Arnal is part of an international team of translators
working on the Spanish version of the text. He has also
found several errors in the English version.
Tauhidul Hoque and Lex Berezhny created the illustrations
in Chapter 1 and improved many of the other illustrations.
Dr. Michele Alzetta caught an error in Chapter 8 and sent
some interesting pedagogic comments and suggestions
about Fibonacci and Old Maid.
Andy Mitchell caught a typo in Chapter 1 and a broken
example in Chapter 2.
Kalin Harvey suggested a clarification in Chapter 7 and
caught some typos.
Christopher P. Smith caught several typos and helped us
update the book for Python 2.2.
David Hutchins caught a typo in the Foreword.
Gregor Lingl is teaching Python at a high school in Vienna,
Austria. He is working on a German translation of the book,
and he caught a couple of bad errors in Chapter 5.
Julie Peters caught a typo in the Preface.
Florin Oprina sent in an improvement in makeTime, a
correction in printTime, and a nice typo.
D. J. Webre suggested a clarification in Chapter 3.

Ken found a fistful of errors in Chapters 8, 9 and 11.

Ivo Wever caught a typo in Chapter 5 and suggested a

clarification in Chapter 3.
Curtis Yanko suggested a clarification in Chapter 2.

Ben Logan sent in a number of typos and problems with

translating the book into HTML.
Jason Armstrong saw the missing word in Chapter 2.

Louis Cordier noticed a spot in Chapter 16 where the code

didn’t match the text.
Brian Cain suggested several clarifications in Chapters 2
and 3.
Rob Black sent in a passel of corrections, including some
changes for Python 2.2.
Jean-Philippe Rey at Ecole Centrale Paris sent a number of
patches, including some updates for Python 2.2 and other
thoughtful improvements.
Jason Mader at George Washington University made a
number of useful suggestions and corrections.
Jan Gundtofte-Bruun reminded us that “a error” is an error.
Abel David and Alexis Dinno reminded us that the plural of
“matrix” is “matrices”, not “matrixes”. This error was in the
book for years, but two readers with the same initials
reported it on the same day. Weird.
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
direct expression of it occurs in 2 Cor. v, 1-4: “For we know that, if
our earthly house of this tent be dissolved, we have a building of
God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in
this also we groan, desiring to be clothed upon with our habitation
that is from heaven. We who are in this tabernacle do groan, being
burthened.” Now this passage is undoubtedly modelled by St. Paul
upon the Book of Wisdom, ix, 15: “For the corruptible body is a load
upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presseth down the mind
that museth upon many things.” And this latter saying again is as
certainly formed upon Plato (Phaedo, 81 c): “It behoves us to think
of the body as oppressive and heavy and earthlike and visible. And
hence the soul, being of such a nature as we have seen, when
possessing such a body, is both burthened and dragged down again
into the visible world.”[65] And it is this conception of the Hellenic
Athenian Plato (about 380 b.c.) which, passing through the
Hellenistic Alexandrian Jewish Wisdom-writer (80 b.c.?) and then
through the Hellenistically tinctured ex-Rabbi, Paul of Tarsus (52
a.d.), still powerfully, indeed all but continuously, influences the mind
of the Genoese Christian Catherine, especially during the years from
a.d. 1496 to 1510.

Catherine’s still more pessimistic figure of the body as a prison-

house and furnace of purification for the soul, is no doubt the
resultant of suggestions received, probably in part through
intermediary literature, from the following three passages:—(1)
Plato, in his Cratylus (400 b.c.), makes Socrates say: “Some declare
that the body (sōma) is the grave (sēma) of the soul, as she finds
herself at present. The Orphite poets seem to have invented the
appellation: they held that the soul is thus paying the penalty of sin,
and that the body is an enclosure which may be likened to a prison,
in which the soul is enclosed until the penalty is paid.” (2) St. Matt.
v, 25, 26, gives Our Lord’s words: “Be thou reconciled with thine
adversary whilst he is still with thee on the way … lest the Judge
hand thee over to the prison-warder, and thou be cast into prison.…
Thou shalt not go forth thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost
farthing.” And (3) St. Paul declares, 1 Cor. iii, 15: “Every man’s work
shall be tested by fire. If a man’s work be burnt, he shall suffer loss;
yet he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” These three
passages combined will readily suggest, to a soul thirsting for
purification and possessed of an extremely sensitive psycho-physical
organization with its attendant liability to fever heats, the picture of
the body as a flame-full prison-house,—a purgatory of the soul.
2. St. Paul’s conception of “Spirit.”
A very difficult complication and varying element is introduced into
St. Paul’s Anthropology by the term into which he has poured all that
is most original, deepest, most deliberate and abiding in his
teaching,—the Spirit, “Pneuma.” For somewhat as he uses the term
“Sarx,” the flesh, both in its loose popular signification of “mankind
in general”; and in a precise, technical sense of “the matter which
composes the earthly body”; so also he has, occasionally, a loose
popular use of the term “spirit,” when it figures as but a fourth
parallel to “mind,” “heart,” and “conscience”; and, usually, a very
strict and technical use of it, when it designates the Spirit, God
Himself.
(1) Now it is precisely in the latter case that his doctrine attains its
fullest depth and its greatest difficulty. For here the Spirit, the
Pneuma, is, strictly speaking, only one—the Spirit of God, God
Himself, in His action either outside or inside the human mind, Noûs.
And in such passages of St. Paul, where man seems to possess a
distinct pneuma of his own, by far the greater number only
apparently contradict this doctrine. For in some, so in 1 Cor. ii, the
context is dominated by a comparison between the divine and the
human consciousness, so that, in v. 11, man’s Noûs is designated
Pneuma, and in v. 16, and Rom. xi, 34, the Lord’s Pneuma is called
His Noûs. And the “spirit of the world” contrasted here, in v. 11, with
the “Spirit of God,” is a still further deliberate laxity of expression,
similar to that of Satan as “the God of this world,” 2 Cor. iv, 4. In
other passages,—so Rom. viii, 16; i, 9; viii, 10, and even in 1 Cor. v,
5 (the “spirit” of the incestuous Corinthian which is to be saved),—
we seem to have “spirit” either as the mind in so far as the object of
the Spirit’s communications, or as the mind transformed by the
Spirit’s influence. And if we can hear of a “defilement of the spirit,” 2
Cor. vii, 1, we are also told that we can forget the fact of the body
being the temple of the holy Spirit, 1 Cor. vi, 19; and that this
temple’s profanation “grieves the holy Spirit,” Eph. iv, 30. Very few,
sporadic, and short passages remain in which “the spirit of man”
cannot clearly be shown to have a deliberately derivative sense.
Catherine, in this great matter, completely follows St. Paul. For she
too has loosely-knit moods and passages, in which “spirito” appears
as a natural endowment of her own, parallel to, or identical with, the
“mente.” But when speaking strictly, and in her intense moods, she
means by “spirito,” the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, a Power which,
though in its nature profoundly distinct and different from her entire
self-seeking self, can and does come to dwell within, and to
supplant, this self. Indeed her highly characteristic saying, “my Me is
God,” with her own explanations of it, expresses, if pressed, even
more than this. In these moods, the term “mente” is usually absent,
just as in St. Paul.
Now in his formally doctrinal Loci, St. Paul defines the Divine
Pneuma and the human sarx, not merely as ontologically contrary
substances, but as keenly conflicting, ethically contradictory
principles. An anti-spiritual power, lust, possesses the flesh and the
whole outer man, whilst, in an indefinitely higher degree and
manner, the Spirit, which finds an echo in the mind, the inner man,
is a spontaneous, counter-working force; and these two energies
fight out the battle in man, and for his complete domination, Rom.
vi, 12-14; vii, 22, 23; viii, 4-13. And this dualistic conception is in
close affinity to all that was noblest in the Hellenistic world of St.
Paul’s own day; but is in marked contrast to the pre-exilic,
specifically Jewish Old Testament view, where we have but the
contrast between the visible and transitory, and the Invisible and
Eternal; and the consciousness of the weakness and fallibility of
“flesh and blood.” And this latter is the temper of mind that
dominates the Synoptic Gospels: “The spirit indeed is willing, but the
flesh is weak”; and “Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do,” are here the divinely serene and infinitely fruitful leading
notes.—And Catherine, on this point, is habitually on the Synoptist
side: man is, for her, far more weak and ignorant than forcibly and
deliberately wicked. Yet her detailed intensity towards the successive
cloaks of self-love is still, as it were, a shadow and echo of the
fierce, and far more massive, flesh-and-spirit struggle in St. Paul.
3. The Angry and the Loving God.
And, as against the intense wickedness of man, we find in St. Paul
an emphatic insistence—although this is directly derived from the
Old Testament and Rabbinical tradition—upon the anger and
indignation of God, Rom. ii, 8, and frequently.—Here Catherine is in
explicit contrast with him, in so far as the anger would be held to
stand for an emotion not proceeding from love and not ameliorative
in its aim and operation. This attitude sprang no doubt, in part, from
the strong influence upon her of the Dionysian teaching concerning
the negative character of evil; possibly still more from her
continuous pondering of the text, “As a father hath compassion upon
his children, so hath the Lord compassion on them that fear Him; for
He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust,” Ps. ciii,
13, 14,—where she dwells upon the fact that we are all His children
rather than upon the fact that we do not all fear Him; but certainly,
most of all, from her habitual dwelling upon the other side of St.
Paul’s teaching, that concerning the Love of God.
Now the depth and glow of Paul’s faith and love goes clearly back
to his conversion, an event which colours and influences all his
feeling and teaching for some thirty-four years, up to the end. And
similarly Catherine’s conversion-experience has been found by us to
determine the sequence and all the chief points of her Purgatorial
teaching, some thirty-seven years after that supreme event.
Already Philo had, under Platonic influence, believed in an Ideal
Man, a Heavenly Man; had identified him with the Logos, the Word
or Wisdom of God; and had held him to be in some way ethereal
and luminous,—never arriving at either a definitely personal or a
simply impersonal conception of this at one time intermediate Being,
at another time this supreme attribute of God. St. Paul, under the
profound impression of the Historic Christ and the great experience
on the road to Damascus, perceives the Risen, Heavenly Jesus as
possessed of a luminous, ethereal body, a body of “glory,” Acts xxii,
11. And this Christ is, for St. Paul, identical with “the Spirit”: “the
Lord is the Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; and “to be in Christ” and “Christ is in
us” are parallel terms to those of “to be in the Spirit” and “the Spirit
is within us” respectively. In all four cases we get Christ or the Spirit
conceived as an element, as it were an ocean of ethereal light, in
which souls are plunged and which penetrates them. In Catherine
we have, at her conversion, this same perception and conception of
Spirit as an ethereal light, and of Christ as Spirit; and up to the end
she more and more appears to herself to bathe, to be submerged in,
an ocean of light, which, at the same time, fills her within and
penetrates her through and through.
But again, and specially since his conversion, St. Paul thinks of
God as loving, as Love, and this conception henceforth largely
supplants the Old Testament conception of the angry God. This
loving God is chiefly manifested through the loving Christ: indeed
the love of Christ and the love of God are the same thing. And this
Christ-Love dwells within us.[66] And Catherine, since her mind has
perceived Love to be the central character of God, and has adopted
fire as love’s fullest image, cannot but hold,—God and Love and
Christ and Spirit being all one and the same thing,—that Christ-
Spirit-Fire is in her and she in It. The yellow light-image, which all
but alone typifies God’s friendliness in the Bible, is thus turned into a
red fire-image. And yet this latter in so far retains with Catherine
something of its older connotation of anger, that the Fire and Heat
appear in her teaching more as symbols of the suffering caused by
the opposition of man’s at least partial impurity to the Spirit, Christ,
Love, God, and of the pain attendant upon that Spirit’s action, even
where it can still purify; whereas the Light and Illumination mostly
express the peaceful penetration of man’s spirit by God’s Spirit, and
the blissful gain accruing from such penetration.
 4. The Risen Christ and the Heavenly Adam.
St. Paul dwells continuously upon the post-earthly, the Risen
Christ, and upon Him in His identity with the pre-earthly, the
Heavenly Man: so that the historical Jesus tends to become, all but
for the final acts in the Supper-room and upon the Cross, a
transitory episode;—a super-earthly biography all but supplants the
earthly one, since His death and resurrection and their immediate
contexts are all but the only two events dwelt upon, and form but
the two constituents of one inseparable whole.—Here Catherine is
deeply Pauline in her striking non-occupation with the details of the
earthly life (the scene with the Woman at the Well being the single
exception), and in her continuous insistence upon Christ as the life-
giving Spirit. Indeed, even the death is strangely absent. There is
but the one doubtful contrary instance, in any case a quite early and
sporadic one, of the Vision of the Bleeding Christ. The fact is that, in
her teaching, the self-donation of God in general, in His mysterious
love for each individual soul, and of Christ in particular, in His
Eucharistic presence as our daily food, take all their special depth of
tenderness from her vivid realization of the whole teaching, temper,
life, and death of Jesus Christ; and that teaching derives its
profundity of feeling only from all this latter complexus of facts and
convictions.
5. Reconciliation, Justification, Sanctification.
(1) St. Paul has two lines of thought concerning Reconciliation. In
the objective, juridical, more Judaic conception, the attention is
concentrated on the one moment of Christ’s death, and the
consequences appear as though instantaneous and automatic; in the
other, the subjective, ethical, more Hellenistic conception, the
attention is spread over the whole action of the Christ’s incarnational
self-humiliation, and the consequences are realized only if and when
we strive to imitate Him,—they are a voluntary and continuous
process. Catherine’s fundamental conversion-experience and all her
later teachings attach her Reconciliation to the entire act of
ceaseless Divine “ecstasy,” self-humiliation, and redemptive
immanence in Man, of which the whole earthly life and death of
Christ are the centre and culmination; but though the human soul’s
corresponding action is conceived as continuous, once it has begun,
she loves to dwell upon this whole action as itself the gift of God and
the consequence of His prevenient act.
(2) As to Justification, we have again, in St. Paul, a
preponderatingly Jewish juridical conception of adoption, in which a
purely vicarious justice and imputed righteousness seem to be
taught; and an ethical conception of immanent justice, based on his
own experience and expressed by means of Hellenistic forms,
according to which “the love of God is poured out in our hearts,”
Rom. v, 5. And he often insists strenuously upon excluding every
human merit from the moment and act of justification, insisting upon
its being a “free gift” of God.—Catherine absorbs herself in the
second, ethical conception, and certainly understands this love of
God as primarily God’s, the Spirit’s, Christ’s love, as Love Itself
poured out in our hearts; and she often breaks out into angry
protests against the very suggestion of any act, or part of an act,
dear to God, proceeding from her natural or separate self, indeed, if
we press her expressions, from herself at all.
(3) As to Sanctification, St. Paul has three couples of contrasted
conceptions. The first couple conceives the Spirit, either Old
Testament-wise, as manifesting and accrediting Itself in
extraordinary, sudden, sporadic, miraculous gifts and doings—e.g. in
ecstatic speaking with tongues; or,—and this is the more frequent
and the decisive conception,—as an abiding, equable penetration
and spiritual reformation of its recipient. Here the faithful “live and
walk in the spirit,” are “driven by the spirit,” “serve God in the spirit,”
are “temples of the Spirit,” Gal. v, 25; Rom. viii, 14; vii, 6; 1 Cor. vi,
19: the Spirit has become the creative source of a supernatural
character-building.[67]—Here Catherine, in contrast to most of her
friends, who are wedded to the first view, is strongly attached to the
second view, perhaps the deepest of St. Paul’s conceptions.
 The second couple conceives Sanctification either juridically, and
moves dramatically from act to act,—the Sacrifice on the Cross and
the Resurrection of the Son of God, the sentence of Justification and
the Adoption as sons of God; or ethically, and presupposes
everywhere continuous processes,—beginning with the reception of
the Spirit, and ending with “the Lord of the Spirit.”—Here Catherine
has curiously little of the dramatic and prominently personal
conception: only in the imperfect soul’s acutely painful moment, of
standing before and seeing God immediately after death, do we get
one link in this chain, in a somewhat modified form. For the rest, the
ethical and continuous conception is present practically throughout
her teaching, but in a curious, apparently paradoxical form, to be
noticed in a minute.
And the third couple either treats Sanctification as, at each
moment of its actual presence, practically infallible and complete:
“We who have died to sin, how shall we further live in it?” “Freed
from sin, ye have become the servants of Justice”; “now we are
loosed from the law of death, so as to serve in newness of spirit”;
“those who are according to the flesh, mind the things of the flesh;
but they that are according to the Spirit, mind the things of the
Spirit,” Rom. vi, 2, 18; vii, 6; viii, 5. Or it considers Sanctification as
only approximately complete, so long as man has to live here below,
not only in the Spirit, Rom. viii, 9, but also in the flesh, Gal. ii, 20.
The faithful have indeed crucified the flesh once for all, Gal. v, 24:
yet they have continually to mortify their members anew, Col. iii, 5,
and by the Spirit to destroy the works of the flesh, Rom. viii, 13. The
“fear of the Lord,” “of God,” does not cease to be a motive for the
sanctified, 2 Cor. v, 11; vii, 1. To “walk in the Spirit,” “in the light,”
has to be insisted on (1 Thess. v, 4-8; Rom. xiii, 11-14; 2 Cor. vi,
14), as long as the eternal day has not yet arisen for us. And even in
Romans, chapter vi, we find admonitions, vv. 12, 13, 19, which, if
we press the other conception, are quite superfluous.[68]
And here Catherine, in her intense sympathy with each of these
contrasted conceptions, offers us a combination of both in a state of
unstable equilibrium and delicate tension. I take it that it is not her
immensely impulsive and impatient temperament, nor survivals of
the Old Testament idea as to instantaneousness being the special
characteristic of divine action, but her deep and noble sense of the
givenness and pure grace of religion, and of God’s omnipotence
being, if possible, exceeded only by His overflowing, self-
communicative love, which chiefly determine her curious
presentation and emotional experience of spiritual growth and life as
a movement composed of sudden shiftings upwards, with long,
apparently complete pauses in between. For here this form (of so
many instants, of which each is complete in itself) stands for her as
the least inadequate symbol, as a kind of shattered mirror, not of
time at all, but of eternity; whilst the succession and difference
between these instants indicates a growth in the apprehending soul,
which has, in reality, been proceeding also in between these instants
and not only during them. And this remarkable scheme presents her
conviction that, in principle, the work of the all-powerful, all-loving
Spirit cannot, of itself, be other than final and complete, and yet
that, as a matter of fact, it never is so, in weak, self-deceptive, and
variously resisting man, but ever turns out to require a fresh and
deeper application. And this succession of sudden jerks onwards and
upwards, after long, apparently complete pauses between them,
gives to her fundamentally ethical and continuous conception
something of the look of the forensic, dramatic series, with its
separate acts,—a series which would otherwise be all but
unrepresented in her picture of the soul’s life on this side of death
and of its life (immediately after its vivid sight of God and itself, and
its act of free-election) in the Beyond.
6. Pauline Social Ethics.
As to Social Ethics, St. Paul’s worldward movement is strongly
represented in Catherine’s teaching. Her great sayings as to God
being servable not only in the married state, but in a camp of
(mercenary) soldiers; and as to her determination violently to
appropriate the monk’s cowl, should this his state be necessary to
the attainment of the highest love of God, are full of the tone of
Rom. xiv, 14, 20, “nothing is common in itself, but to him who
considereth anything to be common, to him it is common,”—“all
things are clean”; and of 1 Cor. x, 26, 28, “the earth is the Lord’s,
and the fulness thereof.” And her sense of her soul’s positive relation
to nature, e.g. trees, was no doubt in part awakened by that striking
passage, Rom. viii, 19, “the expectation of the creature awaiteth the
revelation of the sons of God; for the creature was made subject to
vanity not willingly.”
On the other hand, it would be impossible confidently to identify
her own attitude concerning marriage with that of St. Paul, since, as
we know, her peculiar health and her unhappiness with Giuliano
make it impossible to speak here with any certainty of the mature
woman’s deliberate judgment concerning continence and marriage.
Yet her impulsive protestation, in the scene with the monk, against
any idea of being debarred by her state from as perfect a love of
God as his,—whilst, of course, not in contradiction with the Pauline
and generally Catholic positions in the matter, seems to imply an
emotional attitude somewhat different from that of some of the
Apostle’s sayings. Indeed, in her whole general and unconscious
position as to how a woman should hold herself in religious things it
is interesting to note the absence of all influence from those Pauline
sayings which, herein like Philo (and indeed the whole ancient
world) treat man alone as “the (direct) image and glory (reflex) of
God,” and the woman as but “the glory (reflex) of the man,” 1 Cor.
xi, 7. Everywhere she appears full, on the contrary, of St. Paul’s
other (more characteristic and deliberate) strain, according to which,
as there is “neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free” before God, so
“neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the
man, in the Lord,” 1 Cor. xi, 11.—And in social matters generally,
Catherine’s convert life and practice shows, in the active
mortifications of its first penitential part, in her persistent great
aloofness from all things of sense as regards her own gratification,
and in the ecstasies and love of solitude which marked the zenith of
her power, a close sympathy with, and no doubt in part a direct
imitation of, St. Paul’s Arabian retirement, chastisement of his body,
and lonely concentration upon rapt communion with God. Yet she as
strongly exemplifies St. Paul’s other, the outward movement, the
love-impelled, whole-hearted service of the poorest, world-forgotten,
sick and sorrowing brethren. And the whole resultant rhythmic life
has got such fine spontaneity, emotional and efficacious fulness, and
expansive joy about it, as to suggest at once those unfading
teachings of St. Paul which had so largely occasioned it,—those
hymns in praise of that love “which minds not high things but
consenteth to the humble,” Rom. xii, 16; “becomes all things to all
men,” 1 Cor. ix, 22; “weeps with those that weep and rejoices with
those that rejoice,” ibid. xii, 26; and which, as the twin love of God
and man, is not only the chief member of the central ethical triad,
but, already here below, itself becomes the subject which exercises
the other two virtues, for it is “love” that “believeth all things,
hopeth all things,” even before that eternity in which love alone will
never vanish away, ibid. xiii, 7, 8. Here Catherine with Paul triumphs
completely over time: their actions and teaching are as completely
fresh now, after well-nigh nineteen and four centuries, as when they
first experienced, willed, and uttered them.
7. Sacramental Teachings.
In Sacramental matters it is interesting to note St. Paul’s close
correlation of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist: “All (our fathers) were
baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same
spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink,” 1 Cor. x, 3; “in
one Spirit we have all been baptized into one body, and we have all
been made to drink one Spirit,” Christ, His blood, ibid. xii, 13. And
Catherine is influenced by these passages, when she represents the
soul as hungering for, and drowning itself in, the ocean of spiritual
sustenance which is Love, Christ, God: but she attaches the similes,
which are distributed by St. Paul among the two Rites, to the Holy
Eucharist alone. Baptism had been a grown man’s deliberate act in
Paul’s case,—an act immediately subsequent to, and directly
expressive of, his conversion, the culminating experience of his life;
and, as a great Church organizer, he could not but dwell with an
equal insistence upon the two chief Sacraments.
 Catherine had received baptism as an unconscious infant, and the
event lay far back in that pre-conversion time, which was all but
completely ousted from her memory by the great experience of
some twenty-five years later. And in the latter experience it was
(more or less from the first and soon all but exclusively) the sense of
a divine encirclement and sustenance, of an addition of love, rather
than a consciousness of the subtraction of sins or of a divine
purification, that possessed her. In her late, though profoundly
characteristic Purgatorial teaching, the soul again plunges into an
ocean; but now, since the soul is rather defiled than hungry, and
wills rather to be purified than to be fed, this plunge is indeed a kind
of Baptism by Immersion. Yet we have no more the symbol of water,
for the long state and effects to which that swift act leads, but we
have, instead, fire and light, and, in one place, once again bread and
the hunger for bread. And this is no doubt because, in these
Purgatorial picturings, it is her conversion-experience of love under
the symbols of light and of fire, and her forty years of daily
hungering for the Holy Eucharist and Love Incarnate, which furnish
the emotional colours and the intellectual outlines.
8. Eschatological matters.
In Eschatological matters the main points of contact and of
contrast appear to be four; and three of the differences are
occasioned by St. Paul’s preoccupation with Christ’s Second Coming,
with the Resurrection of the body, and with the General Judgment,
mostly as three events in close temporal correlation, and likely to
occur soon; whilst Catherine abstracts entirely from all three.
(1) Thus St. Paul is naturally busy with the question as to the
Time when he shall be with Christ. In 1 Thess. iv, 15, he speaks of
“we who are now living, who have been left for the coming of the
Lord,” i.e. he expects this event during his own lifetime; whilst in
Phil. i, 23, he “desires to be dissolved and to be with Christ,” i.e. he
has ceased confidently to expect this coming before his own death.
But Catherine dwells exclusively, with this latter conception, upon
the moment of death, as that when the soul shall see, and be finally
confirmed in its union with, Love, Christ, God; for into her earthly
lifetime Love, Christ, God, can and do come, but invisibly, and she
may still lose full union with them for ever.
(2) As to the Place, it is notoriously obscure whether St. Paul
thinks of it, as do the Old Testament and the Apocalypse, as the
renovated earth, or as the sky, or as the intervening space. The risen
faithful who “shall be caught in the clouds to meet Christ,” 1 Thess.
iv, 16, seem clearly to be meeting Him, in mid-air, as He descends
upon earth; and “Jerusalem above,” Gal. iv, 26, may well, as in Apoc.
iii, 12; xxi, 2, be conceived as destined to come down upon earth.
But Catherine, though she constantly talks of Heaven, Purgatory,
Hell as “places,” makes it plain that such “places” are for her but
vivid symbols for states of soul. God Himself repeatedly appears in
her sayings as “the soul’s place”; and it is this “place,” the soul’s true
spiritual birthplace and home, which, ever identical and bliss-
conferring in itself, is variously experienced by the soul, in exact
accordance with its dispositions,—as that profoundly painful, or that
joyfully distressing, or that supremely blissful “place” which
respectively we call Hell, and Purgatory, and Heaven.
(3) As to the Body, we have already noted St. Paul’s doctrine,
intermediate between the Palestinian and Alexandrian Jewish
teaching, that it will rise indeed, but composed henceforth of “glory”
and no more of “flesh.” It is this his requirement of a body, however
spiritual, which underlies his anxiety to be “found clothed, not
naked,” at and after death, 2 Cor. v, 3. Indeed, in this whole
passage, v, 1-4, “our earthly house of this habitation,” and “a
building of God not made with hands,” no doubt mean, respectively,
the present body of flesh and the future body of glory; just as the
various, highly complex, conceptions of “clothed,” “unclothed,”
“clothed upon,” refer to the different conditions of the soul with a
body of flesh, without a body at all, and with a body of glory.—Now
this passage, owing to its extreme complication and abstruseness of
doctrine, has come down to us in texts and versions of every
conceivable form; and this uncertainty has helped Catherine towards
her very free utilization of it. For she not only, as ever, simply ignores
all questions of a risen body, and transfers the concept of a luminous
ethereal substance from the body to the soul itself, and refers the
“nakedness,” “unclothing,” “clothing,” and “clothing upon” to
conditions obtaining, not between the soul and the body, but
between the soul and God; but she also, in most cases, takes the
nakedness as the desirable state, since typical of the soul’s faithful
self-exposure to the all-purifying rays of God’s light and fire, and
interprets the “unclothing” as the penitential stripping from off itself
of those pretences and corrupt incrustations which prevent God’s
blissful action upon it.
(4) And, finally, as to the Judgment, we have in St. Paul a double
current,—the inherited Judaistic conception of a forensic retribution;
Christ, the divine Judge, externally applying such and such statutory
rewards and punishments to such and such good and evil deeds,—so
in Rom. ii, 6-10; and the experimental conception, helped on to
articulation by Hellenistic influences, of the bodily resurrection and
man’s whole final destiny as the necessary resultant and
manifestation of an internal process, the presence of the Spirit and
of the power of God,—so in the later parts of Romans, in Gal. vi, 8,
and in 1 Cor. vi, 14; 2 Cor. xiii, 4.—Among Catherine’s sayings also
we find some passages—but these the less characteristic and mostly
of doubtful authenticity,—where reward and punishment, indeed the
three “places” themselves, appear as so many separate institutions
of God, which get externally applied to certain good and evil deeds.
But these are completely overshadowed in number, sure authenticity,
emotional intensity, and organic connection with her other teachings,
by sayings of the second type, where the soul’s fate is but the
necessary consequence of its own deliberate choice and gradually
formed dispositions, the result, inseparable since the first from its
self-identification with this or that of the various possible will-
attitudes towards God.
(5) We can then sum up the main points of contact and of
difference between Paul and Catherine, by saying that, in both
cases, everything leads up to, or looks back upon, a great
culminating, directly personal experience of shortest clock-time
duration, whence all their doctrine, wherever emphatic, is but an
attempt to articulate and universalize this original experience; and
that if in Paul there remains more of explicit occupation with the last
great events of the earthly life of Jesus, yet in both there is the
same insistence upon the life-giving Spirit, the eternal Christ,
manifesting His inexhaustible power in the transformation of souls,
on and on, here and now, into the likeness of Himself.

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.[69]
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.

III. The Areopagite Writings.

Catherine’s close relations to the Areopagite, the Pseudo-

Dionysius, are of peculiar interest, in their manifold agreement,
difference, or non-responsiveness; and this although the ideas thus
assimilated are mostly of lesser depth and importance than those
derived from the New Testament writings just considered. They can
be grouped conveniently under the subject-matters of God’s
creative, providential, and restorative, outgoing, His action upon
souls and all things extant, and of the reasons for the different
results of this action; of certain symbols used to characterize that
essential action of God upon His creatures; of the states and
energizings of the soul, in so far as it is responsive to that action; of
certain terms concerning these reactions of the soul; and of the final
result of the whole process. I shall try and get back, in most cases,
to the Areopagite’s Neo-Platonist sources, the dry, intensely
scholastic Proclus, and that great soul, the prince of the non-
Christian Mystics, Plotinus.[70]
1. God’s general action.
As to God’s action, we have in Dionysius the Circle with the three
stages of its movement,—a conception so dear to Catherine.
“Theologians call Him the Esteemed and the Loved, and again Love
and Loving-kindness, as being a Power at once propulsive and
leading up” and back “to Himself; a loving movement self-moved,
which pre-exists in the Good, and bubbles forth from the Good to
things existing, and which again returns to the Good—as it were a
sort of everlasting circle whirling round, because of the Good, from
the Good, in the Good, and to the Good,—ever advancing and
remaining and returning in the same and throughout the same.” This
is “the power of the divine similitude” present throughout creation,
“which turns all created things to their cause.”[71] The doctrine is
derived from Proclus: “Everything caused both abides in its cause
and proceeds from it and returns to it”; and “everything that
proceeds from something returns, by a natural instinct, to that from
which it proceeds.”[72] And Plotinus had led the way: “there” in the
super-sensible world, experienced in moments of ecstasy, “in touch
and union with the One, the soul begets Beauty, Justice, and Virtue:
and that place and life is, for it, its principle and end: principle, since
it springs from thence; end, because the Good is there, and
because, once arrived there, the soul becomes what it was at
first.”[73]
And Dionysius has the doctrine, so dear to Catherine, that “the
Source of Good is indeed present to all, but all are not,” by their
intention, “present to It; yet, by our aptitude for Divine union, we
all,” in a sense, “are present to It.” “It shines, on Its own part,
equally upon all things capable of participation in It.”[74] Already
Plotinus had finely said: “The One is not far away from any one, and
yet is liable to be far away from one and all, since, present though It
be, It is” efficaciously “present only to such as are capable of
receiving It, and are so disposed as to adapt themselves to It and,
as it were, to seize and touch It by their likeness to It, … when, in a
word, the soul is in the state in which it was when it came from
It.”[75]
We have again in Dionysius the combination, so characteristic of
Catherine, of a tender respect for the substance of human nature, as
good and ever respected by God, and of a keen sense of the
pathetic weakness of man’s sense-clogged spirit here below.
“Providence, as befits its goodness, provides for each being suitably:
for to destroy nature is not a function of Providence.” “All those who
cavil at the Divine Justice, unconsciously commit a manifest
injustice. For they say that immortality ought to be in mortals, and
perfection in the imperfect … and perfect power in the weak, and
that the temporal should be eternal … in a word, they assign the
properties of one thing to another.”[76]
2. Symbols of God’s action.
(1) As to the symbols of God’s action, we have first the Chain or
Rope, Catherine’s “fune,” that “rope of His pure Love,” of which “an
end was thrown to her from heaven.”[77] This symbol was no doubt
suggested by Dionysius: “Let us then elevate our very selves by our
prayers to the higher ascent of the Divine … rays; as though a
luminous chain (rope, σειρά) were suspended from the celestial
heights and reached down hither, and we, by ever stretching out to
it up and up … were thus carried upwards.”[78] And this passage
again goes back to Proclus, who describes the “chain (rope) of love”
as “having its entirely simple and hidden highest point fixed amongst
the very first ranks of the Gods”; its middle effluence “amongst the
Gods higher than the (sensible) world”; and its third, lowest, part, as
“divided multiformly throughout the (sensible) world.” “The divine
Love implants one common bond (chain) and one indissoluble
friendship in and between each soul (that participates in its power),
and between all and the Beautiful Itself.”[79] And this simile of a
chain from heaven, which in Dionysius is luminous, and in Catherine
and Proclus is loving, goes back, across Plato (Theaetetus 153c and
Republic, X, 61b, 99c) to Homer, where it again is luminous (golden).
For, in the Iliad, viii, 17-20, Zeus says to the Gods in Olympus, “So
as to see all things, do you, O Gods and Goddesses all, hang a
golden chain from heaven, and do you all seize hold of it”—so as
thus to descend to earth.
(2) We have next the symbol of the Sun and its purifying, healing
Light, under which God and His action are rapturously proclaimed by
Dionysius. “Even as our sun, by its very being, enlightens all things
able to partake of its light in their various degrees, so also the Good,
by its very existence, sends unto all things that be, the rays of its
entire goodness, according to their capacity for them. By means of
these rays they are purified from all corruption and death … and are
separated from instability.” “The Divine Goodness, this our great sun,
enlightens … nourishes, perfects, renews.” Even the pure can thus
be made purer still. “He, the Good, is called spiritual light … he
cleanses the mental vision of the very angels: they taste, as it were,
the light.”[80] All this imagery goes back, in the first instance, to
Proclus. For Proclus puts in parallel “sun” and “God,” and “to be
enlightened” and “to be deified”; makes all purifying forces to
coalesce in the activity of the Sun-God, Apollo Katharsios, the
Purifier, who “everywhere unifies multiplicity … purifying the entire
heaven and all living things throughout the world”; and describes
how “from above, from his super-heavenly post, Apollo scatters the
arrows of Zeus,—his rays upon all the world.”[81] The Sun’s rays,
here as powerful as the bolts of Zeus, thus begin to play the part still
assigned to them in Catherine’s imagery of the “Saëtte” and “Radii”
of the divine Light and Love. And the substance of the whole symbol
goes back, through fine sayings of Plotinus and through Philo, to
Plato, who calls the Sun “the offspring of the Good and analogous to
it,” and who (doubtless rightly) takes Homer’s “golden chain” to be
nothing but the Sun-rays,—thus identifying the two symbols.[82]
 (3) Fire, as a symbol for God and His action, is thus praised by
Dionysius: “The sacred theologians often describe the super-
essential Essence in terms of Fire.… For sensible fire is, so to say,
present in all things, and pervades them all without mingling with
them, and is received by all things; … it is intolerable yet invisible; it
masters all things by its own might, and yet it but brings the things
in which it resides to (the development of) their own energy; it has a
transforming power; it communicates itself to all who approach it in
any degree; … it has the power of dividing (what it seizes); it bears
upwards; it is penetrating; … it increases its own self in a hidden
manner; it suddenly shines forth.”[83]—All these qualities, and the
delicate transitions from fire to light and from light back to fire, and
from heat immanent to heat applied from without, we can find
again, vividly assimilated and experienced, in Catherine’s teaching
and emotional life. But the Sun-light predominates in Dionysius, the
Fire-heat in Catherine; and whereas the former explicitly attaches
purification only to the Sun-light, the latter connects the cleansing
chiefly with Fire-heat, no doubt because the Greek man is busy
chiefly with the intellectually cognitive, and the Italian woman with
the morally ameliorative, activities and interests of the mind and
soul.
3. The soul’s reaction.
(1) As to the soul’s reaction under God’s action, and its return to
Him, we first get, in Dionysius, the insistence upon Mystical Quietude
and Silence, which, according to him, are strictly necessary, since
only like can know and become one with like, and God is “Peace and
Repose” and, “as compared with every known progression,
Immobility,” and “the one all-perfect source and cause of the Peace
of all”; and He is Silence, “the Angels are, as it were, the heralds of
the Divine Silence,”—teaching not unlike that of St. Ignatius of
Antioch, “Jesus Christ … the Word which proceeds from Silence.”[84]
Hence “in proportion as we ascend to the higher designations of
God, do our expressions become more and more circumscribed”;
and at last “we shall find, not a little speaking, but a complete