href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@50206@[email protected]#Page_351" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">351-366

III. The Scientific Habit and Mysticism 367-386 IV. Final Summary and Return to the Starting-point of the Whole Inquiry: the Necessity, and yet the Almost Inevitable Mutual Hostility, of the Three Great Forces of the Soul and of the Three Corresponding Elements of Religion 387-396 Index 397

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THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION

PART III
CRITICAL

CHAPTER IX
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS

Introductory.

1. Plan of Part Three.

The picture of Catherine’s life and teaching which was attempted in the previous volume will, I hope, have been sufficiently vivid to stimulate in the reader a desire to try and go deeper, and to get as near as may be to the driving forces, the metaphysical depths of her life. And yet it is obvious that, if we would understand something of these, we must proceed slowly and thoroughly, and must begin with comparatively superficial questions. Or rather, we must begin by studying her temperamental and psycho-physical endowment and condition, and then the literary influences that stimulated and helped to mould these things, as though all this were not secondary and but the material and occasion of the forces and self-determinations to be considered later on.

2. Defects of ancient psycho-physical theory.

Now as to those temperamental and neural matters, to which this chapter shall be devoted, the reader will, no doubt long ago, have discovered that it is precisely here that not a little of the Vita e Dottrina is faded and withered beyond recall, or has even become positively repulsive to us. The constant assumption, and frequent explicit insistence, on the part of more or less all the contributors, upon the immediate and separate significance, indeed the directly miraculous character, of certain psycho-physical states—states which, taken thus separately, would now be inevitably classed as most explicable neural abnormalities,—all this atmosphere of nervous high-pitch and tremulousness has now become a matter demanding a difficult historical imagination and magnanimity, if we would be just to those who held such views, and would thus benefit to the full from these past positions and misconceptions.

Thus when we read the views of perhaps all her educated attendants: “this condition, in which her body remained alive without food or medicine, was a supernatural thing”; “her state was clearly understood to be supernatural when, in so short a time, so great a change was seen”; and “she became yellow all over,—a manifest sign that her humanity was being entirely consumed in the fire of divine love”:[1] we feel indeed that we can no more follow. And when we read, as part of one of the late additions, the worthless legends gathered from, or occasioned by, the uneducated Argentina: “in proof that she bore the stigmata within her,—on putting her hands in a cup of cold water, the latter became so boiling hot that it greatly heated the very saucer beneath it”:[2] we are necessarily disgusted. And when, worst of all, she is made, by a demonstrable, probably double misinterpretation of an externally similar action, to burn her bare arm with a live charcoal or lighted candle, with intent to see which fire, this external one or that interior one of the divine love, were the greater:[3] we can, even if we have the good fortune of being able, by means of the critical analysis of the sources, to put this absurd story to the discredit of her eulogists, but feel the pathos of such well-meant perversity, which took so sure a way for rendering ridiculous one who, take her all in all, is so truly great.[4]

3. Slow growth of Neurology.

We should, of course, be very patient in such matters: for psycho-physical knowledge was, as yet, in its very infancy, witness the all-important fact that the nerves were, in our modern sense of the term, still as unknown as they were to the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity, with which “neuron” and “nervus” ever meant “muscle” or “ligament” and, derivatively, “energy,” but never consciously what they now mean in the strict medical sense. Thus the Vita (1551) writes: “There remained no member or muscle (nervo) of her body that was not tormented by fire within it”; “one rib was separated from the others, with great pains in the ligaments (nervi) and bones”; and “all her body was excruciated and her muscles (nervi) were tormented”:[5] where, in the first and last case, visible muscular convulsive movements are clearly meant. St. Teresa, in her own Life (1561 or 1562), writes: “Nervous pains, according to the physicians, are intolerable; and all my nerves were shrunk”; and “if the rapture lasts, all the nerves are made to feel it.”[6] Even Fénelon (died 1715) can still write of the human body: “The bones sustain the flesh which envelops them; the nerves” (ligaments, minor muscles) “which are stretched along them, constitute all their strength; and the muscles, by inflation and elongation at the points where the nerves are intertwined with them, produce the most precise and regular movements.”[7] Here the soul acts directly upon the muscles, and, through these and their dependent ligaments, upon the bones and the flesh.

4. Permanent values of the ancient theory.

And yet that old position with regard to the