The Deep Sea
At the close of The Dialogue, Catherine addresses God as a “deep sea,” and describes her relationship to that sea in a single, carefully balanced sentence: the more she enters it, the more she discovers; and the more she discovers, the more she seeks. The structure of the sentence is circular, but the circle does not close – each turn through it produces more of the thing being sought, not less.
This is a strange description of desire if taken as a description of ordinary appetite. Hunger satisfied becomes fullness; fullness is the end of hunger, not its renewal. Catherine describes something else: an entering that produces discovery, and a discovery that produces more seeking, in a sequence that has no terminus internal to itself. The desire does not run down as it is fed. It runs up.
A Desire That Outruns Satisfaction
Catherine's "deep sea" is not an isolated image in The Dialogue; it is consistent with the book's larger account of the soul, in which the soul is described as having been made with a capacity that nothing within creation can fill, and as discovering this incapacity precisely at the moments when it seems closest to fulfillment. The pattern recurs across the Christian contemplative tradition under different names – Augustine's restless heart, the "intermittent love" of the mystics – but Catherine's formulation is unusually exact: it is not that satisfaction fails to arrive, but that satisfaction itself becomes the engine of further desire.
What makes this significant for TLA is that the same structure – desire that increases with what should satisfy it, restlessness that survives every attainment – recurs constantly in secular literature, in characters whose creators have no theological vocabulary for what they are describing. A character who achieves the goal that structured an entire narrative, and finds the achievement somehow insufficient, is encountering exactly the pattern Catherine names. The difference is that Catherine knows what the pattern is for.
Genesis 3 and the Shape of Unsatisfiable Longing
Genesis 3 narrates the rupture of a relationship in which, prior to the serpent's intervention, the text gives no indication of any unmet need in the man and the woman – no lack, no restlessness, no desire outrunning its object. After the rupture, the text is full of such things: shame that hiding cannot cover, blame that resolves nothing, a curse that touches the ground itself. The restlessness Catherine describes in The Dialogue, and that secular fiction so often stages without naming, is this same rupture, considered from the inside – what it feels like to be a creature made for an end that the rupture has placed permanently out of reach by its own resources.
A revolutionary reading of this restlessness treats it as a problem to be solved by better objects of desire, more refined pleasures, more successful attainments – the assumption that the structure of desire is sound and only its targets have been poorly chosen. Catherine's "deep sea" forecloses this reading. If the structure itself is one of increase-through-satisfaction, then no object within creation, however well-chosen, can ever be enough, because the structure was never made to terminate in a created object. It was made, Catherine's tradition holds, for God himself – and Genesis 3:15 names the means by which the rupture that placed God out of reach is, in the fullness of time, undone: not a better human attainment, but the seed of the woman, by whom the deep sea becomes, at last, a sea the creature can enter without the entering itself becoming a new form of want.