TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: Volume II is available as Project Gutenberg ebook
number 50206.
THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION
_All rights reserved._
[Illustration: _Walker & Boutall, ph, sc_
_St. Catherine of Genoa. (Caterina Fiesca Adorna.)_]
THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION AS STUDIED
IN SAINT CATHERINE OF
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS
BY BARON FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL
MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY
VOLUME FIRST
INTRODUCTION AND BIOGRAPHIES
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
MCMVIII
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
PREFACE
The following work embodies well-nigh all that the writer has been able
to learn and to test, in the matter of religion, during now some thirty
years of adult life; and even the actual composition of the book has
occupied a large part of his time, for seven years and more.
* * * * *
The precise object of the book naturally grew in range, depth and
clearness, under the stress of the labour of its production. This
object will perhaps be best explained by means of a short description
of the undertaking’s origin and successive stages.
Born as I was in Italy, certain early impressions have never left me;
a vivid consciousness has been with me, almost from the first, of the
massively virile personalities, the spacious, trustful times of the
early, as yet truly Christian, Renaissance there, from Dante on to the
Florentine Platonists. And when, on growing up, I acquired strong and
definite religious convictions, it was that ampler pre-Protestant,
as yet neither Protestant nor anti-Protestant, but deeply positive
and Catholic, world, with its already characteristically modern
outlook and its hopeful and spontaneous application of religion to
the pressing problems of life and thought, which helped to strengthen
and sustain me, when depressed and hemmed in by the types of devotion
prevalent since then in Western Christendom. For those early modern
times presented me with men of the same general instincts and outlook
as my own, but environed by the priceless boon and starting-point
of a still undivided Western Christendom; Protestantism, as such,
continued to be felt as ever more or less unjust and sectarian; and the
specifically post-Tridentine type of Catholicism, with its regimental
Seminarism, its predominantly controversial spirit, its suspiciousness
and timidity, persisted, however inevitable some of it may be, in its
failure to win my love. Hence I had to continue the seeking and the
finding elsewhere, yet ever well within the great Roman Church, things
more intrinsically lovable. The wish some day to portray one of those
large-souled pre-Protestant, post-Mediaeval Catholics, was thus early
and has been long at work within me.
And then came John Henry Newman’s influence with his _Dream of
Gerontius_, and a deep attraction to St. Catherine of Genoa’s doctrine
of the soul’s self-chosen, intrinsic purification; and much lingering
about the scenes of Caterinetta’s life and labours, during more than
twenty stays in her terraced city that looks away so proudly to the
sea. Such a delicately psychological, soaring, yet sober-minded
Eschatology, with its striking penetration and unfolding of the soul’s
central life and alternatives as they are already here and now, seemed
to demand an ampler study than it had yet received, and to require a
vivid presentation of the noble, strikingly original personality from
whom it sprang.
And later still came the discovery of the apparently hopeless
complication of the records of Catherine’s life and doctrine, and how
these had never been seriously analyzed by any trained scholar, since
their constitution into a book in 1552. Much critical work at Classical
and Scriptural texts and documentary problems had, by now, whetted my
appetite to try whether I could not at last bring stately order out of
this bewildering chaos, by perhaps discovering the authors, dates and
intentions of the various texts and glosses thus dovetailed and pieced
together into a very Joseph’s coat of many colours, and by showing
the successive stages of this, most original and difficult, Saint’s
life and legend. All this labour would, in any case, help to train
my own mind; and it would, if even moderately successful, offer one
more detailed example of the laws that govern such growths, and of the
critical method necessary for the tracing out of their operation.
But the strongest motive revealed itself, in its full force, later than
all those other motives, and ended by permeating them all. The wish
arose to utilize, as fully as possible, this long, close contact with
a soul of most rare spiritual depth,--a soul that presents, with an
extraordinary, provocative vividness, the greatness, helps, problems
and dangers of the mystical spirit. I now wanted to try and get down to
the driving forces of this kind of religion, and to discover in what
way such a keen sense of, and absorption in, the Infinite can still
find room for the Historical and Institutional elements of Religion,
and, at the same time, for that noble concentration upon not directly
religious contingent facts and happenings, and upon laws of causation
or of growth, which constitutes the scientific temper of mind and its
specific, irreplaceable duties and virtues. Thus, having begun to write
a biography of St. Catherine, with some philosophical elucidations,
I have finished by writing an essay on the philosophy of Mysticism,
illustrated by the life of Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna and her friends.
* * * * *
The book’s chief peculiarities seem to spring inevitably from its
fundamental standpoint: hence their frank enumeration may help towards
the more ready comprehension of the work.
The book has, throughout, a treble interest and spirit;
historico-critical, philosophical, religious. The historico-critical
constituent may attract critical specialists; but will such specialists
care for the philosophy? The philosopher may be attracted by the
psychological and speculative sections; but will the historical
analysis interest him at all? And the soul that is seeking spiritual
food and stimulation, will it not readily be wearied by the apparent
pettiness of all that criticism, and by the seemingly cold aloofness of
all that speculation?--And yet it is the most certain of facts that the
human soul is so made as to be unable to part, completely and finally,
with any one of these three great interests. Hence, I may surely hope
that this trinity of levels of truth and of life, which has so much
helped on the growth of my own mind and the constitution of my own
character, may, in however different a manner and degree, be found to
help others also. This alternation and interstimulation between those
three forces and interests within the same soul, and within this soul’s
ever-deepening life, is, in any case, too fundamental a feature of this
whole outlook for any attempt at its elimination here.
Then there is a look of repetition and of illogical anticipation about
the very structure of the book. For the philosophical First Part
says, in general, what the biographical Second Part says in detail;
this detail is, in reality, based upon the critical conclusions
arrived at in the Appendix, which follows the precise descriptions
of the biography; and then the Third, once more a philosophical,
Part returns, now fortified by the intervening close occupation
with concrete contingent matters, to the renewed consideration, and
deeper penetration and enforcement, of the general positions with
which the whole work began.--Yet is not this circular method simply a
frank application, to the problems in hand, of the process actually
lived through by us all in real life, wherever such life is truly
fruitful? For, in real life, we ever start with certain general
intellectual-emotive schemes and critical principles, as so many
draw-nets and receptacles for the capture and sorting out of reality
and of our experience of it. We next are brought, by choice or by
necessity, into close contact with a certain limited number of concrete
facts and experiences. And we then use these facts and experiences
to fill in, to confirm or to modify that, more or less tentative and
predominantly inherited, indeed ever largely conventional, scheme
with which we began our quest. In all these cases of actual life,
this apparently long and roundabout, indeed back-before, process is,
in reality, the short, because the only fully sincere and humble,
specifically human way in which to proceed. The order so often followed
in “learned” and “scientific” books is, in spite of its appearance of
greater logic and conciseness, far longer; for the road thus covered
has to be travelled all over again, according to the circular method
just described, if we would gain, not wind and shadow, but substance
and spiritual food.
Then again, there is everywhere a strong insistence upon History as
a Science, yet as a Science possessing throughout a method, type
and aim quite special to itself and deeply different from those of
Physical Science; and an even greater stress upon the important, indeed
irreplaceable function of both these kinds of Science, or of their
equivalents, in the fullest spiritual life. Here the insistence upon
History, as a Science, is still unusual in England; and the stress upon
the spiritually purifying power of these Sciences will still appear
somewhat fantastic everywhere.--Yet that conception of two branches
of ordered human apprehension, research and knowledge, each (in its
delicate and clear contrastedness of method, test, end and result)
legitimate and inevitable, so that either of them is ruined if forced
into the categories of the other, has most certainly come to stay.
And the attempt to discover the precise function and meaning of these
several mental activities and of their ethical pre-requisites, within
the full and spiritual life of the soul, and in view of this life’s
consolidation and growth, will, I believe, turn out to be of genuine
religious utility. For I hope to show how only one particular manner
of conceiving and of practising those scientific activities and
this spiritual life and consolidation allows, indeed requires, the
religious passion,--the noblest and deepest passion given to man,--to
be itself enlisted on the side of that other noble, indestructible
thing, severe scientific sincerity. This very sincerity would thus not
empty or distract, but would, on the contrary, purify and deepen the
soul’s spirituality; and hence this spirituality would continuously
turn to that sincerity for help in purifying and deepening the soul.
And, surely, until we have somehow attained to some such interaction,
the soul must perforce remain timid and weak; for without sincerity
everywhere, we cannot possibly develop to their fullest the passion for
truth and righteousness even in religion itself.
And then again a Catholic, one who would be a proudly devoted and
grateful son of the Roman Church, speaks and thinks throughout the
following pages. Yet it is his very Catholicism which makes him feel,
with a spontaneous and continuous keenness, that only if there are
fragments, earlier stages and glimpses of truth and goodness extant
wheresoever some little sincerity exists, can the Catholic Church
even conceivably be right. For though Christianity and Catholicism be
the culmination and fullest norm of all religion, yet to be such they
must find something thus to crown and measure: various degrees of, or
preparations for, their truth have existed long before they came, and
exist still, far and wide, now that they have come. Otherwise, Marcion
would have been right, when he denied that the Old Testament proceeds
from the same God as does the New; and three-fourths or more of the
human race would not, to this very moment, be bereft, without fault
of their own, of all knowledge of the Historic Christ and of every
opportunity for definite incorporation into the Christian Church,
since we dare not think that God has left this large majority of His
children without any and every glimpse and opportunity of religious
truth, moral goodness, and eternal hope. Yet such a recognition of some
light and love everywhere involves no trace of levelling down, or even
of levelling up; it is, in itself, without a trace of Indifferentism.
For if some kinds or degrees of light are thus found everywhere, yet
this light is held to vary immensely in different times and places,
from soul to soul, and from one religious stage, group or body to
another; the measure and culmination of this light is found in the
deepest Christian and Catholic light and holiness; and, over and above
the involuntary, sincere differences in degree, stage and kind, there
are held to exist, also more or less everywhere, the differences caused
by cowardice and opposition to the light,--cowardices and oppositions
which are as certainly at work within the Christian and Catholic Church
as they are amongst the most barbarous of Polytheists. I may well have
failed adequately to combine these twin truths; yet only in some such,
though more adequate apprehension and combination resides the hope for
the future of our poor storm-tossed human race,--in a deep fervour
without fanaticism, and a generous sympathy without indifference.
And lastly, a lay lover of religion speaks throughout, a man to
whom the very suspicion that such subjects should or could, on that
account, be foreign to him has ever been impossible. A deep interest
in religion is evidently part of our very manhood, a thing previous
to the Church, and which the Church now comes to develop and to save.
Yet such an interest is, in the long run, impossible, if the heart
and will alone are allowed to be active in a matter so supremely
great and which claims the entire man. “Where my heart lies, let my
brain lie also”: man is not, however much we may try and behave as
though he were, a mere sum-total of so many separable water-tight
compartments; he can no more fruitfully delegate his brains and his
interest in the intellectual analysis and synthesis of religion, than
he can commission others to do his religious feeling and willing, his
spiritual growth and combat, for him.--But this does not of itself
imply an individualistic, hence one-sided, religion. For only in close
union with the accumulated and accumulating experiences, analyses and
syntheses of the human race in general, and with the supreme life and
teaching of the Christian and Catholic Church in particular, will such
growth in spiritual personality be possible on any large and fruitful
scale: since nowhere, and nowhere less than in religion, does man
achieve anything by himself alone, or for his own exclusive use and
profit.
And such a layman’s views, even when thus acquired and expressed with a
constant endeavour to be, and ever increasingly to become, a unit and
part and parcel of that larger, Christian and Catholic whole, will ever
remain, in themselves and in his valuation of them, unofficial, and, at
best, but so much material and stimulation for the kindly criticism and
discriminating attention of his fellow-creatures and fellow-Christians
and (should these views stand such informal, preliminary tests) for the
eventual utilization of the official Church. To this officiality ever
remains the exclusive right and duty to formulate successively, for the
Church’s successive periods, according as these become ripe for such
formulations, the corporate, normative forms and expressions of the
Church’s deepest consciousness and mind. Yet this officiality cannot
and does not operate _in vacuo_, or by a direct recourse to extra-human
sources of information. It sorts out, eliminates what is false and
pernicious, or sanctions and proclaims what is true and fruitful, and a
development of her own life, teaching and commission, in the volunteer,
tentative and preliminary work put forth by the Church’s unofficial
members.
And just because both these movements are within, and necessary to,
one and the same complete Church, they can be and are different from
each other. Hence the following book would condemn itself to pompous
unreality were it to mimic official caution and emphasis, whilst ever
unable to achieve official authority. It prefers to aim at a layman’s
special virtues and function: complete candour, courage, sensitiveness
to the present and future, in their obscurer strivings towards the
good and true, as these have been in their substance already tested
in the past, and in so far as such strivings can be forecasted by
sympathy and hope. And I thus trust that the book may turn out to be as
truly Catholic in fact, as it has been Catholic in intention; I have
striven hard to furnish so continuous and copious a stream of actions
and teachings of Christian saints and sages as everywhere to give the
reader means of correcting or completing my own inferences; and I
sincerely submit these my own conclusions to the test and judgment of
my fellow-Christians and of the Catholic Church.
* * * * *
My obligations to scholars, thinkers and great spiritual souls are far
too numerous and great for any exhaustive recognition. Yet there are
certain works and persons to whom I am especially indebted; and these
shall here be mentioned with most grateful thanks.
In my Biographical and Critical Part Second, I have had, in Genoa
itself, the help of various scholars and friends. Signor Dottore
Ridolfo de Andreis first made me realize the importance of Vallebona’s
booklet. Padre Giovanni Semeria, the Barnabite, put me in touch with
the right persons and documents. The Cavallière L. A. Cervetto, of the
Biblioteca Civica, referred me to many useful works. The Librarian of
the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana copied out for me the inventory
of St. Catherine’s effects. And Signor Dottore Augusto Ferretto, of the
Archivio di Stato, made admirably careful, explicitated copies for me,
from the originals, so full of difficult abbreviations, of the long
series of legal documents which are the rock-bed on which my biography
is built.
The courteous help of the Head Librarian of the Genoese University
Library extended to beyond Genoa. For it was owing to his action,
in conjunction with that of the Italian Ministry, of the English
Embassy in Rome, and of the British Museum Authorities, that the three
most important of the manuscripts of St. Catherine’s life were most
generously deposited for my use at the latter institution. I was thus
enabled to study my chief sources at full leisure in London.
The Rev. Padre Calvino, Canon Regular of the Lateran, made many kind
attempts to trace any possible compositions concerning St. Catherine
among the Venerable Battista Vernazza’s manuscripts, preserved by the
spiritual descendants of Battista’s Augustinian Canonesses in Genoa; it
was not his fault that nothing could be found.
The Society of Bollandists lent me, for a liberal length of time,
various rare books. I shall indeed be proud if my Appendix wins their
approbation, since it deals with subject-matters and methods in which
they are past-masters. Father Sticker’s pages on St. Catherine, in
their _Acta Sanctorum_ (1752), are certainly not satisfactory; they
are, however, quite untypical of the Bollandists’ best work, or even of
their average performances.
My obligations in my Psychological and Philosophical Parts First and
Third are still more numerous and far more difficult to trace. Indeed
it is precisely where these obligations are the most far-reaching that
I can least measure them, since the influence of the books and persons
concerned has become part of the texture of my own mind.
But among the great religious spirits or stimulating thinkers of
Classical and Patristic times, I am conscious of profound obligations
to Plato generally; to Aristotle on two points; to St. Paul; to
Plotinus; to Clement of Alexandria; and to St. Augustine. And the
Areopagite Literature has necessarily been continuously in my mind.
Among Mediaeval writers St. Thomas Aquinas has helped me greatly, in
ways both direct and indirect; Eckhart has, with the help of Father H.
S. Denifle’s investigations, furnished much food for reflection by his
most instructive doctrinal excesses; and the extraordinarily deep and
daring spirituality of Jacopone da Todi’s poetry has been studied with
the greatest care.
The Renaissance times have given me Cardinal Nicolas of Coes, whose
great Dialogue _de Idiota_ has helped me in various ways. And in the
early post-Reformation period I have carefully studied, and have been
much influenced by, that many-sided, shrewdly wise book, St. Teresa’s
Autobiography. Yet it is St. John of the Cross, that massively virile
Contemplative, who has most deeply influenced me throughout this work.
St. Catherine is, I think, more like him, in her ultimate spirit, than
any other Saint or spiritual writer known to me; she is certainly far
more like him than is St. Teresa.
Later on, I have learnt much from Fénelon’s Latin writings concerning
Pure Love, of 1710 and 1712; together with Abbé Gosselin’s admirably
lucid _Analyse de la Controverse du Quiétisme_, 1820, and the Jesuit
Father Deharbe’s solid and sober _die vollkommene Liebe Gottes_, 1856.
Among modern philosophers I have been especially occupied with, and
variously stimulated or warned by, Spinoza, with his deep religious
intuition and aspiration, and his determinist system, so destructive
because taken by him as ultimate; Leibniz, with his admirably
continuous sense of the multiplicity in every living unity, of the
organic character, the _inside_ of everything that fully exists, and
of the depth and range of our subconscious mental and emotional life;
Kant, with his keen criticisms and searching analyses, his profound
ethical instincts, and his curious want of the specifically religious
sense and insight; Schopenhauer, with his remarkable recognition of the
truth and greatness of the Ascetic element and ideal; Trendelenburg,
with his continuous requirement of an operative knowledge of the chief
stages which any principle or category has passed through in human
history, if we would judge this principle with any fruit; Kierkegaard,
that certainly one-sided, yet impressively tenacious re-discoverer
and proclaimer of the poignant sense of the Transcendent essential to
all deep religion, and especially to Christianity, religion’s flower
and crown; and Fechner, in his little-known book, so delightfully
convincing in its rich simplicity, _die drei Motive und Gründe des
Glaubens_, 1863.
Of quite recent or still living writers, two have been used by me
on a scale which would be unpardonable, had the matters treated
by them been the direct subjects of my book. In Part First whole
pages of mine are marked by me as little but a _précis_ of passages
in Dr. Eduard Zeller’s standard _Philosophy of the Greeks_. I have
myself much studied Heracleitus, Parmenides, Plato and Plotinus; and
I have, also in the case of the other philosophers, always followed
up and tested such passages of Zeller as I have here transcribed.
But I did not, for by far the most part, think it worth while, on
these largely quite general and practically uncontested matters, to
construct fresh appreciations of my own, rather than to reproduce,
with due consideration and acknowledgments, the conclusions of such an
accepted authority. And already in Part First, but especially in Part
Third, I have utilized as largely, although here with still more of
personal knowledge and of careful re-examination, considerable sections
of Professor H. J. Holtzmann’s _Lehrbuch der Neutestamentlichen
Theologie_, 1897--sections which happen to be, upon the whole, the
deepest and most solid in that great but often daring work. The
same Professor Holtzmann is, besides, a most suggestive religious
philosopher; and his penetrating though very difficult book _Richard
Rothe’s Speculatives System_, 1899, has also been of considerable use.
Other recent or contemporary German writers to whom I owe much, are
Erwin Rhode, in his exquisite great book, _Psyche_, 2nd ed., 1898;
Professor Johannes Volkelt, in his penetratingly critical _Kant’s
Erkenntnisstheorie_, 1879; Professor Hugo Münsterberg, in his largely
planned although too absolute _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, Vol. I.,
1900; Professor Heinrich Rickert, in his admirably discriminating
_Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung_, 1902; and also
two friends whose keen care for religion never flags--Professors
Rudolf Eucken of Jena and Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg. Eucken’s
_Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker_, 1st ed., 1890; _der Kampf
um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt_, 1896; and the earlier sections of
_der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion_, 1902, have greatly helped me.
And Troeltsch’s _Grund-probleme der Ethik_, 1902, has considerably
influenced certain central conceptions of my book, notwithstanding the
involuntary, rough injustice manifested by him, especially elsewhere,
towards the Roman Church.
Among present-day French writers, my book owes most to Professor
Maurice Blondel’s, partly obscure yet intensely alive and religiously
deep, work _L’Action_, 1893; to Dr. Pierre Janet’s carefully
first-hand observations, as chronicled in his _Etat Mental des
Hystériques_, 1894; to Monsieur Emil Boutroux’s very suggestive paper
_Psychologie du Mysticisme_, 1902; to various pregnant articles of the
Abbé L. Laberthonnière in the _Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne_,
1898-1906; and to M. Henri Bergson’s delicately penetrating _Essai sur
les Données Immédiates de la Conscience_, 2nd ed., 1898.
And amongst living Englishmen, the work is most indebted to Professor
A. S. Pringle-Pattison, especially to his eminently sane _Hegelianism
and Personality_, 2nd ed., 1893; to Professor James Ward, in his
strenuous _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, 1st ed., 1899; to the Reverend
George Tyrrell’s _Hard Sayings_, 1898, and _The Faith of the Millions_,
2 vols., 1901, so full of insight into Mysticism; and, very especially,
to Dr. Edward Caird, in his admirably wide and balanced survey, _The
Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, 1904.
But further back than all the living writers and friends lies the
stimulation and help of him who was later on to become Cardinal Newman.
It was he who first taught me to glory in my appurtenance to the
Catholic and Roman Church, and to conceive this my inheritance in a
large and historical manner, as a slow growth across the centuries,
with an innate affinity to, and eventual incorporation of, all the
good and true to be found mixed up with error and with evil in this
chequered, difficult but rich world and life in which this living
organism moves and expands. Yet the use to which all these helps have
here been put, has inevitably been my own doing: nowhere except in
direct quotations have I simply copied, and nowhere are these helpers
responsible for what here appears.
And then there have been great souls, whom I cannot well name here, but
whom I would nevertheless refer to in reverent gratitude; souls that
have taught me that deepest of facts and of lessons,--the persistence,
across the centuries, within the wide range of the visible and indeed
also of the invisible Church, of that vivid sense of the finite and the
Infinite, of that spacious joy and expansive freedom in self-donation
to God, the prevenient, all-encompassing Spirit, of that massively
spontaneous, elemental religion, of which Catherine is so noble an
example. Thus a world-renouncing, world-conquering, virile piety,
humble and daring, humane, tender and creatively strong, is at no time
simply dead, but it merely sleepeth; indeed it ever can be found,
alive, open-eyed irresistible, hidden away here and there, throughout
our earthly space and time.
* * * * *
In matters directly connected with the publication of the work I have
especially to thank Messrs. Sciutto of Genoa, the photographers to
whom I owe the very successful photographs from which the plates that
stand at the head of my volumes have been taken; Mr. Sidney E. Mayle,
publisher, of Hampstead, for permission to use the photogravure of
St. Catherine’s portrait which appeared as an illustration to a paper
of mine, in his scholarly _Hampstead Annual_, 1898; Miss Maude Petre,
who helped me much towards achieving greater lucidity of style, by
carefully reading and criticizing all my proofs; and my publisher,
who has not shrunk from undertaking the publication of so long a work
on so very serious, abstruse-seeming a subject. Even so, I have had
to suppress the notes to my chapter on “Catherine’s Teaching,” which
throughout showed the critical reasons that had determined my choice of
the particular sayings, and the particular text of the sayings, adopted
by me in the text; and have had to excise quite a third of my Appendix,
which furnished the analysis of further, critically instructive texts
of the _Vita e Dottrina_, the _Dicchiarazione_ and the _Dialogo_. If a
new edition is ever called for, this further material might be added,
and would greatly increase the cogency of my argument.
* * * * *
The work that now at last I thus submit to the reader, is doubtless
full of defects; and I shall welcome any thoughtful criticism of any
of its parts as a true kindness. Yet I would point out that all these
parts aim at being but so many constituents of a whole, within which
alone they gain their true significance and worth. Hence only by one
who has studied and pondered the book as a whole, will any of its parts
be criticized with fairness to that part’s intention. To gain even but
a dozen of such readers would amply repay the labour of these many
years.
I take it that the most original parts are Chapter Eight, with its
analysis of Battista Vernazza’s interesting Diary; the Appendix, with
its attempts at fixing the successive authors and intentions that
have built up the _Vita e Dottrina_; Chapter Nine, which attempts to
assign to psycho-physical matters, as we now know them, their precise
place and function within the vast life-system, and according to the
practical tests, of the great Mystical Saints; and Chapter Fifteen,
with its endeavour to picture that large Asceticism which alone
can effect, within the same soul, a fruitful co-habitation of, and
interaction between, Social Religion, the Scientific Habit of Mind, and
the Mystical Element of Religion.
* * * * *
Kirkegaard used to claim that he ever wrote _existentially_, pricked on
by the exigencies of actual life, to attempt their expression in terms
of that life, and in view of its further spiritual development. More
than ever the spiritual life appears now as supremely worth the having,
and yet it seems to raise, or to find, the most formidable difficulties
or even deadlocks. I can but hope that these pages may have so largely
sprung from the exigencies of that life itself,--that they may have
caught so much of the spirit of the chief livers of the spiritual life,
especially of St. Catherine of Genoa and of St. John of the Cross, and,
above all, of the One Master and Measure of Christianity and of the
Church,--as to stimulate such life, its practice, love and study, in
their readers, and may point them, spur them on, through and beyond all
that here has been attempted, missed or obscured, to fuller religious
insight, force and fruitfulness.
FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL.
_Kensington_, _Easter 1908._
“Grant unto men, O God, to perceive in little things the
indications, common-seeming though they be, of things both
small and great.”
ST. AUGUSTINE, _Confessions_, Bk. XI, ch. xxiii, 1.
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME
The frontispiece photogravure reproduces an oil-painting preserved
in the sacristy of the Santissima Annunciata in Portorio, the Church
of the Pammatone Hospital in Genoa. This painting is probably a copy
(perhaps not older than 1737) of the portrait which hangs in the
superioress’s room in the same hospital, and which is presumably the
picture referred to by documents as extant in 1512, eighteen months
after Catherine’s death. The copy has been reproduced in preference to
the original, because the original has been considerably and clumsily
restored, whereas the copy gives us the older portrait as it existed
before this restoration.
PAGE
PART I.--INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I.--THE THREE CHIEF FORCES OF WESTERN
CIVILIZATION 3-49
Introductory 3-10
I. The First of the Three Forces: Hellenism, the Thirst
for Richness and Harmony 10-25
II. The Second of the Three Forces: Christianity, the Revelation
of Personality and Depth 25-39
III. The Third Force: Science, the Apprehension and Conception
of Brute Fact and Iron Law 39-48
IV. Summing up: Hellenism or Harmonization, Christianity
or Spiritual Experience, and Science or Acceptance
of a Preliminary Mechanism, all three necessary to
Man 48, 49
CHAPTER II.--THE THREE ELEMENTS OF RELIGION 50-82
Introductory 50
I. The Three Elements, as they successively appear in the
Child, the Youth, and the Adult Man 50-53
II. Each Element ever accompanied by some amount of the
other two. Difficulty of the Transition from one Stage
to the other 53-55
III. Parallels to this Triad of Religious Elements 55-58
IV. Distribution of the Three Elements amongst Mankind
and throughout Human History 58-65
V. Causes operative in all Religion towards minimizing or
suppressing one or other Element, or towards denying
the need of any Multiplicity 65-70
VI. The Special Motives operating in each Element towards
the suppression of the other Elements 70-77
VII. Three Final Objections to such a conception of Religion,
and their Answers 77-82
PART II.--BIOGRAPHICAL
CHAPTER III.--CATHERINE FIESCA ADORNA’S LIFE, UP
TO HER CONVERSION; AND THE CHIEF PECULIARITIES
PREDOMINANT THROUGHOUT HER CONVERT YEARS. 85-127
Introductory 85, 86
I. Proposed Study of the Mystical-Volitional Element in
a Particular, Concrete Instance: St. Catherine of
Genoa 86-90
II. The Materials and Aids towards such a Study 90-93
III. Peculiarities of the Genoese Climate and Geographical
Position; of the Ligurian Character; and of the Times
into which Catherine was born. Her Family, Father
and Mother 93-97
IV. Catherine’s Life, up to the Preliminaries of her Conversion:
Autumn 1447 to Mid-March 1474 97-104
V. Her Conversion, with its immediate Preliminaries and
Consequences, March 1474 104-109
VI. The Two Conceptions concerning the Character and
_Rationale_ of her Penitential Period and of her whole
Convert Life. The Position adopted here 109-113
VII. Catherine and the Holy Eucharist 113-116
VIII. Catherine and Confession and Direction 117-123
IX. Catherine and Indulgences 123-126
X. Peculiarities concerning the Invocation of Saints and
Intercessory Prayer 126, 127
CHAPTER IV.--CATHERINE’S LIFE FROM 1473 TO 1506, AND
ITS MAIN CHANGES AND GROWTH 128-174
I. First Period of Catherine’s Convert Life: Giuliano’s
Bankruptcy and Conversion; their Work among the
Poor, March 1473 to May 1477 128-131
II. Catherine and Tommasa Fiesca: their Difference of
Character and _attrait_. Peculiarity of Catherine’s Penitence
and Health during this Time 131-133
III. Change in the Temper of Catherine’s Penitence, from
May 1474 onwards 133-135
IV. Catherine’s Great Fasts 135-137
V. Second, Central Period of Catherine’s Convert Life,
1477-1499: its Special Spiritual Features 138-141
VI. Catherine and Giuliano move into the Hospital in 1479,
never again to quit it. She is Matron from 1490 to
1495 141-143
VII. Catherine and the Plague. The Outbreak of 1493 143-145
VIII. Catherine and Ettore Vernazza, 1493-1495 145-147
IX. Catherine’s Health breaks down, 1496; other Events of
the same Year 147-149
X. Events of 1497 149-154
XI. Beginning of her Third, Last Period; End of the
Extraordinary Fasts; First Relations with Don Marabotto 155-159
XII. Her Conversations with her Disciples; “Caterina Serafina.”
Don Marabotto and the Possessed Maid 159-162
XIII. Catherine’s Sympathy with Animal-and Plant-Life: her
Love of the Open Air. Her Deep Self-knowledge as to
the Healthiness or Morbidness of her Psycho-physical
States 163-166
XIV. Catherine’s Social Joys and Sorrows, 1501-1507 166-174
CHAPTER V.--CATHERINE’S LAST FOUR YEARS, 1506-1510.
SKETCH OF HER CHARACTER, DOCTRINE, AND
SPIRIT 175-250
I. Catherine’s External Interests and Activities up to May
1510. Occasional slight Deviations from her old Balance.
Immensely close Interconnection of her whole
Mental and Psycho-physical Nature. Impressions as
connected with the Five Senses 175-181
II. More or less _Maladif_ Experiences and Actions 182-200
III. Catherine’s History from May to September 9, 1510 200-211
IV. The Last Six Days of Catherine’s Life, September 10-15 211-219
V. Sketch of Catherine’s Spiritual Character and Significance 220-250
CHAPTER VI. CATHERINE’S DOCTRINE 251-294
Introductory 251-260
I. God as Creative Love. The Creature’s True and False
Self; True and False Love 260-266
I. Sin, Purification, Illumination 266-272
III. The Three Categories and the Two Ways 273-280
IV. The Other Worlds 281-294
CHAPTER VII.--CATHERINE’S REMAINS AND CULTUS; THE
FATE OF HER TWO PRIEST FRIENDS AND OF HER
DOMESTICS; AND THE REMAINING HISTORY OF
ETTORE VERNAZZA 295-335
Introductory 295, 296
I. The Burial and the Events immediately surrounding it.
September 15 to December 10, 1510 296-300
II. The Different Removals of the Remains, and the Chief
Stages of her Official Cultus 300-306
III. The Fate of Catherine’s Priest Friends 307-311
IV. The Fate of Catherine’s Three Maid-servants 311-314
V. The Two Vernazzas: their Debt to Catherine, and
Catherine’s Debt to them 314, 315
VI. Ettore Vernazza’s Life, from 1509 to 1512 316-321
VII. Ettore in Rome and Naples; his Second Will; his
Work in the Genoese Prisons 321-329
VIII. Ettore again in Naples; his Death in Genoa, June 1524;
Peculiarities of his Posthumous Fame 329-335
CHAPTER VIII.--BATTISTA VERNAZZA’S LIFE 336-367
Introductory 336, 337
I. Battista’s Life, from April 1497 to June 1510 337-339
II. Battista and her God-father, Tommaso Moro 339-344
III. Battista’s _Colloquies_, November 1554 to Ascension Day
1555 344-358
IV. Some further Letters of Battista, 1575-1581 358-366
V. Battista’s Death, May 1587 366, 367
CONCLUSION TO VOLUME I
WHEREIN LIES THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL PERSUASIVENESS 367-370
APPENDIX TO PART II
CHRONOLOGICAL ACCOUNT AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF
THE MATERIALS FOR THE RE-CONSTITUTION OF
SAINT CATHERINE’S LIFE AND TEACHING 371-466
Introduction: The Three Laws that govern the Growth of
Religious Biography; Complexity of the Materials for
Catherine’s Life 371-376
FIRST DIVISION: ACCOUNT AND ANALYSIS OF THE DOCUMENTS
PREVIOUS, AND IMMEDIATELY SUBSEQUENT
TO, THE “VITA E DOTTRINA” WITH THE “DICCHIARAZIONE,”
IN SEVEN STAGES 376-433
I. First Stage: August 1456 to September 12, 1510, all
Legal 376-380
II. Second Stage: Five further Official and Legal Documents,
1511-1526; and Four Mortuary Dates, 1524-1587 380, 381
III. Third Stage: Bishop Giustiniano’s Account of Catherine’s
Life, Remains, and Biography, 1537 382-384
IV. Fourth Stage: The Two Oldest Extant Manuscripts of
the “Vita e Dottrina” with the “Dicchiarazione.”
Manuscript A (October 1547 to February 1548), and
Manuscript B 384-395
V. Fifth Stage: Manuscript C (copy of a MSS. of 1550?),
first appearance of the “Dialogo,” “Chapter” First 395-410
VI. Sixth Stage: First Printed Edition of the
“Vita-Dottrina-Dicchiarazione,” 1551; Examination of all it
possesses in addition to Manuscripts A, B, and C, apart
from the “Dialogo” 411-417
VII. Seventh Stage: The Second “Chapter” of the “Dialogo,”
which appears for the first time in the Printed “Vita,”
1551 417-424
VIII. Seventh Stage continued: Minute Analysis of one Passage
from the Second “Chapter” 424-427
IX. Seventh Stage concluded: Character and Authorship of
this Second “Chapter” 427-433
SECOND DIVISION: ANALYSIS, ASSIGNATION, AND APPRAISEMENT
OF THE “VITA-DOTTRINA-DICCHIARAZIONE”
CORPUS, IN EIGHT SECTIONS 433-466
I. The “Dicchiarazione”: the Two Stages of its Existence 434-440
II. The Earlier “Dicchiarazione,” and its Theological
Glosses 440-447
III. Five Conclusions concerning the History of the
“Dicchiarazione” 447-449
IV. The “Vita”-Proper, its Divisions and Parts, and its
Chief Secondary and Authentic Constituents 449-453
V. Age and Authorship of the Literature retained 453-457
VI. Analysis of the Conversion-Narratives 458-462
VII. The Sayings-Passages: Three Tests for discriminating
Authentic from Secondary Sayings 462, 463
VIII. Conclusion: At least Six Stages in the Upbuilding of the
Complete Book of 1551. The Slight Changes introduced
since then. First Claims to Authorship for Catherine 463-466
“He is not far from every one of us; for in Him we live, and
move, and have our being.”--Acts xvii, 27, 28.
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”--2
Corinthians iii, 17.
THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
PART I
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
THE THREE CHIEF FORCES OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
INTRODUCTORY.
1. _An enigma of life: the Universal and Abiding does not move the
will; and what does move it is Individual and Evanescent._
Amongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seemingly most
radical and abiding of interior antinomies and conflicts experienced
by the human race and by individuals, there is one which everything
tends to make us feel and see with an ever-increasing keenness and
clearness. More and more we want a strong and interior, a lasting yet
voluntary bond of union between our own successive states of mind,
and between what is abiding in ourselves and what is permanent within
our fellow-men; and more and more we seem to see that mere Reasoning,
Logic, Abstraction,--all that appears as the necessary instrument
and expression of the Universal and Abiding,--does not move or win
the will, either in ourselves or in others; and that what does thus
move and win it, is Instinct, Intuition, Feeling, the Concrete and
Contingent, all that seems to be of its very nature individual and
evanescent. Reasoning appears but capable, at best, of co-ordinating,
unifying, explaining the material furnished to it by experience of all
kinds; at worst, of explaining it away; at best, of stimulating the
purveyance of a fresh supply of such experience; at worst, of stopping
such purveyance as much as may be. And yet the Reasoning would appear
to be the transferable part in the process, but not to move; and the
experience alone to have the moving power, but not to be transmissible.
2. _Our personal experience as regards our own convictions._
Experience indeed and its resultant feeling are always, in the first
instance, coloured and conditioned by every kind of individual
many-sided circumstances of time and place, of race and age and sex,
of education and temperament, of antecedent and environment. And it
is this very particular combination, just this one, so conditioned
and combined, coming upon me just at this moment and on this spot,
just at this stage of my reach or growth, at this turning of my way,
that carries with it this particular power to touch or startle, to
stimulate or convince. It is just precisely through the but imperfectly
analyzable, indeed but dimly perceived, individual connotation of
general terms; it is by the fringe of feeling, woven out of the past
doings and impressions, workings and circumstances, physical, mental,
moral, of my race and family and of my own individual life; it is
by the apparently slight, apparently far away, accompaniment of a
perfectly individual music to the spoken or sung text of the common
speech of man, that I am, it would seem, really moved and won.
And this fringe of feeling, this impression, is, strictly speaking, not
merely untransferable, but also unrepeatable; it is unique even for the
same mind: it never was before, it never will be again. Heraclitus, if
we understand that old Physicist in our own modern, deeply subjective,
largely sentimental way, would appear to be exactly right: you cannot
twice step into the same stream, since never for two moments do the
waters remain identical; you yourself cannot twice step the same man
into the same river, for you have meanwhile changed as truly as itself
has done, Πάντα ῥεῖ: all things and states, outward and inward, appear
indeed in flux: only each moment seems to bring, to each individual,
for that one moment, his power to move and to convince.
3. _Our experience in our attempt to win others._
And if we transmit this emotion or conviction to another mind, or if we
seem to be able to trace such transmission when it has been actually
effected in ourselves or in others, we shall find that, in proportion
as one mind feeds, not forces, another, the particular bond and
organization of the mental and emotional picture which cost us so much,
moved us so much, has, in each case, been snapped and broken up; the
whole has been again resolved into its constituent elements, and only
some of these elements have been taken up into the already existing
organization of the other mind, or have joined together in that mind,
to form there a combination which is really new. Even a simple scent or
sound or sight comes charged to each of us with many but most differing
connotations, arousing or modifying or supplanting old or new ideas
and impressions in the most subtle, complex, and individual manner.
Insist upon another mind taking over the whole of this impression,
and you will have rightly and necessarily aroused an immediate or
remote hostility or revolt against the whole of what you bring. Hence
here too we are again perplexed by the initial enigma: the apparently
insurmountable individuality of all that affects us, and the equally
insurmountable non-affectingness of all that is clearly and certainly
transmissible from any one man to another.
4. _This mysterious law appears to obtain in precise proportion to the
depth and importance of the truths and realities in view._
And if we seem boxed up thus, each one away from our fellow, in all our
really moving and determining inclinations and impressions, judgments
and affections, with regard to matters on which we feel we can afford
to differ deeply and to be much alone; we appear to be more and not
less so, in exact proportion as the importance of the subject-matter
increases. In moral and spiritual, in religious and fundamental
matters, we thirst more, not less, for identity of conviction and of
feeling; and we are, or seem to be, more, not less, profoundly and
hopelessly at variance with each other than anywhere else.
And more than this: the apparent reason of this isolation seems but to
aggravate the case, because here more than anywhere else imagination,
feeling, intuition seem indeed to play a predominant, determining part;
and yet here more than anywhere else we feel such a predominance to
be fraught with every kind of danger. Thus here especially we feel as
incapable of suppressing, indeed of doing without these forces, as of
frankly accepting, studying, and cultivating them. Now and then we
take alarm and are in a panic at any indication that these springs and
concomitants of life are at work within us; yet we persist in doing
little or nothing to find sufficient and appropriate food and scope
and exercise for the right development and hence the real purification
of these elemental forces, forces which we can stunt but cannot kill.
Nothing, we most rightly feel, can be in greater or more subtle and
dangerous opposition to manly morality or enlightened religion than
the seeking after or revelling in emotion; nothing, we most correctly
surmise, can equal the power of strong feeling or heated imagination to
give a hiding-place to superstition, sensuality, dreamy self-complacent
indolence, arrogant revolt and fanaticism; nothing, even where such
things seem innocent, appears less apt than do these fierce and
fitful, these wayward and fleeting feelings, these sublimities and
exquisitenesses, to help on that sober and stable, consistent and
persistent, laborious upbuilding of moral and religious character,
work, and evidence which alone are wanted more and more. Indeed, what
would seem better calculated than such emotion to strain the nerves,
to inflame the imagination, to blunt common-sense and that salt of the
earth, the saving sense of the ridiculous, to deaden the springs of
research and critical observation, to bring us, under the incalculably
sapping influences of physical abnormalities, close up to where sanity
shades off into madness, and ethical elevation breaks down into
morbidness and depravity?
5. _The experience of the human race: the two series of personalities,
movements, races._
And the secular experience of the race would seem fully to bear
out such suspicions. For have we not there a double series of
personalities, events, and movements far too long and widespread not
to be conclusive? On the one hand, there are those that seem to spring
from dimly lit or dark feeling, to arise,--as it were, hydra-like, to
sting and madden, or mist-like, to benumb all life, and turn it into
mere drift and dreaming,--from out of the obscure, undrained, swampy
places of human ignorance and passion. On the other hand, there are
those that are formed and fashioned by clear, transparent thought; and
these flourish in the cultivated, well-drained plains of human science
and strict demonstration.
Among the first series, you have the Pantheistic schools and
personalities of the decaying Roman Empire, Plotinus the Ecstatic, and
Jamblichus, and such other dreamers, straining up into the blue; the
somewhat similar, largely subterranean, Jewish and Christian sects
and tendencies of the Middle Ages; the Anabaptist and other like
groups, individualistic, fantastic, in considerable part anomistic and
revolutionary, of the Reformation period; and such phenomena as the
Eternal-Gospel troubles and the Quietistic controversy in the Roman
Church. And above all, in the East, we have, from time immemorial,
whole races, (in the midst of a world crying aloud for help and
re-fashioning, but which is left to stagnate and decay,) still dreaming
away their lives in Buddhistic abstraction and indifference.
Among the second, the light, clear series, you have whole races,
the luminous, plastic, immensely active Greek, the strong-willed,
practical, organizing Roman, and the Anglo-Saxon determined “to stand
no nonsense”; you have an Aristotle, sober, systematic; one side at
least of the great Mediaeval Scholastic movement, culminating in
St. Thomas, so orderly and transparent; above all, modern Physical
Science, first subjecting all phenomena to rigorous quantitative and
mathematical analysis and equation, and then reacting upon philosophy
as well, and insisting, there and everywhere, upon clearness, direct
comparableness, ready transferableness of ideas and their formulae, as
the sole tests of truth. Descartes; Kepler, Galileo; Hobbes, Spinoza
are, in increasing degrees, still perhaps the most perfect types of
this clear and cool, this ultimately mathematical and Monistic tendency
and position.
6. _The dark, intuitive personalities and schools, apparently a mere
stop-gap, transition, or reaction against the clear, discursive ones._
And further, the personalities and schools of the interiorly
experimental, emotional kind seem to appear upon the scene but as
stop-gaps or compensations for the other series, in periods of
transition or reaction, of uncertainty or decay. So at the break-up
of the Roman Empire (Neo-Platonism); so at the end of the Patristic
period and just before the official acceptance of Scholasticism (St.
Bernard); so during the foundering of the Mediaeval fabric of life and
thought in the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
(Pico, Paracelsus); so in the German Romanticism of sixty years
ago, as a reaction against the survivals of the eighteenth-century
Rationalism; so now again in our own day, more slightly, but not less
really, in a revival of spiritual philosophy. It looks then as though
the experimental-emotional strain could only thrive fitfully, on the
momentary check or ruin of the clear and “scientific” school; as
though it were a perhaps inevitable disease breaking in occasionally
upon the normal health of the human mind. For the eventual result
of the world’s whole movement surely seems to be the reclamation of
ever-increasing stretches of knowledge and theory from the dominion of
vague, irresponsible, untestable feeling, and their incorporation in
the domain of that unbroken, universal determinism, of those clear and
simple, readily analyzable, verifiable, communicable, and applicable
laws which, more and more, are found to rule phenomena wheresoever we
may look.
7. _This seems especially to apply to the Intuitive-Emotional element
of Religion._
And if the prima facie trend of centuries of thought and conflict
appears to rule out of court even such a fringe of individual
experience and emotion as ever accompanies and stimulates all religion:
the verdict of history, indeed of any survey of contemporary life,
if only this be sufficiently large, would seem fatal to any type
of religion in which this individual experience and emotion would
form religion’s core and centre, as in the case of the specifically
experimental-emotional school generally, and of the Mystics in
particular.
To take some such survey, let us look, to begin with, outside of where
Catholic discipline and unity somewhat obscure, at first sight, even
the legitimate and indeed the really existing diversities of school
and tendency. In the Church’s organism each divergence has ever been
more largely tempered and supplemented by the others; and since the
Reformation, indeed in part even more recently, owing to an entirely
intelligible and in part inevitable, reaction, even most legitimate
and persistent divergencies, which flourished in rich and enriching
variety throughout the Middle Ages, have largely ceased to appear in
any obvious and distinct embodiments. Let us look then first to where
such diversities grow unchecked, and indeed generally tend to excess
and caricature. Let us take contemporary English Protestantism, and
then Foreign Protestantism in the large lines of its history. In both
cases the experimental-emotional strain and group will seem to compare
unfavourably with its competitors.
For if we look about us in England, we seem to have little difficulty
in classing the tendencies within the Established Church under the
headings of High, Broad, and Low; indeed we can readily extend this
treble classification to all the various schools and bodies of English
Protestantism. We can easily conceive of the greater portion of English
Nonconformity as but a prolongation and accentuation of the Evangelical
school in the Established Church: the readiness and ease with which
the former at certain moments unite and coalesce with the latter, show
quite conclusively how close is the affinity between them. We almost
as readily think of the Unitarian and Theistic bodies as prolongations
and further sublimations of the Anglican Broad Church view, though
here, no doubt, the degrees and kinds of difference are more numerous
and important. And if it would be hard to find an extension, still more
an accentuation, of the Anglican High Church party amongst the English
Nonconformists, a strain largely identical with the sacerdotal current
elsewhere has always existed in the Presbyterian churches. Nor must
we forget the powerful and constant, both repellent and attractive,
influence exercised by Rome upon even those outside of her obedience.
To be quite philosophical, the survey ought to include all types of
English Christianity; and, in that case, the High Church position would
rank rather as a dilution, as a variety, incomplete and inconsistent
though it be, of the type represented most strikingly and emphatically
by Rome, than as a variant of the types having their centres at
Wittenberg and Geneva.
And if we next turn to German Protestantism, especially to the
simultaneous variations of its short-lived, fluid, formative period,
we shall there too find this treble tendency. The Evangelical strain
will be represented here by the numerous Illuminist and Anabaptist
personalities, groups and movements to which Luther himself had
given occasion, which but emphasized or caricatured his own earlier
Mysticism; but which, when they threatened, by their revolutionary,
communistic fanaticism and violence, completely to discredit and ruin
his own movement, he suppressed with such ruthless and illogical
severity. And the Broad Church strain will here be found emphasized and
caricatured in Socinianism, and in such milder forms of Rationalism as
prepared the way for it or followed in its wake. And finally, the High
Church strain is not so hard to discover in much of the doctrine and
in some of the forms and externals of Orthodox, official Lutheranism.
Indeed in foreign Protestantism generally,--in Zwinglianism, in
Calvinism, and in its other bodies and sects, we can trace various
forms of, and degrees of approximation to, one or other of these three
types, the Historical, the Experimental, the Rational.
Now looking at the scene of battle, for the moment quite generally,
it would seem as though, of these three types and tendencies, the
Emotional and Experimental had proved itself decidedly the weakest
for good, the strongest for evil of the three, and this both in the
past and in the present, both in England and abroad. We have here in
England, in the past, the Puritan excesses in Ireland, Scotland, and
England itself; and later on and down to the present, the largely
dreary and unlovely, narrow and unjust monotony of Evangelicalism. We
have there abroad, in the past, the Peasants’ War and the Anabaptist
Saturnalia at Münster; and later on and down to the present, that
Pietism which has so often barred the way to a just appreciation of
Historical Christianity and to a candid acceptance of rational methods
and results, and this without its being able to find any constructive
or analytic working principle of its own. Both in England and in
Germany, indeed throughout the cultivated West, only the Historical,
Traditional school on the one hand, and the Rationalistic, Scientific
school on the other hand, seem to count at all: it is they which alone
seem to gain ground, or at least to hold it, at the Universities and
amongst the thinking, ruling classes generally.
8. _Yet this adverse judgment will appear largely misleading, if we
study the matter more fully._
And yet this first aspect of things will, I think, turn out to be
largely deceptive, to be but one side and one teaching of that
noble inheritance, that great output of life and experience, past
and present, which is ready to our hand for ever-renewed study and
assimilation in human history and society, and which, taken as
it really is,--as the indefinite prolongation of our own little
individual direct experiences,--can alone help us to give to these
latter experiences a full, life-regulating value. Let us take then the
foregoing objections, and let us do so as but so many starting-points
and openings into our great subject. This preliminary discussion will
but prepare the ground and method for the following detailed study,
and for the final positions of the whole book. Indeed even the book’s
opening question can be answered only by the whole book and at our
labour’s end.
I. THE FIRST OF THE THREE FORCES: HELLENISM, THE THIRST FOR RICHNESS
AND HARMONY.
We revert then to the apparent interior antinomy from which we
started,--the particular concrete experience which alone moves us and
helps to determine our will, but which, seemingly, is untransferable,
indeed unrepeatable; and the general, abstract reasoning which _is_
repeatable, indeed transferable, but which does not move us or help
directly to determine the will. And we here begin by the study of the
antinomy, as this has been explicated for us by Hellenism, the earliest
and widest of the three main mental, indeed spiritual, forces that are
operative within each of us Westerns, on and on.
1. _The antinomy in the pre-Socratics._
Heraclitus appeared to us an impressive exponent of the former truth,
of the apparent utter evanescence of these particular impressions
and experiences, of the complete shiftingness of the very faculty
within us and of the environment without us, by which and in which we
apprehend them. An ever-changing self in the midst of an ever-changing
world, basing its persuasiveness and persuadableness, indeed even its
conscious identity with itself and its communion with others, upon the
ever-changing resultants of all these changes: this would surely seem
to be a house built not upon the sand but upon the quicksands.
Now we have to remember that Parmenides had, already in early Greek
times, been equally emphatic, perhaps equally impressive, on the other
side of this very question,--on the impossibility of Becoming, of
Change; and on the certainty and knowableness of the utter Oneness
and Permanence of all Being.[1] All that really _is_, he maintained,
excludes all Becoming: the very notion of Being is incompatible with
that of Becoming: the first is utterly without the second. All real
Becoming would be equivalent to the real existence of Non-Being. Hence
all Multiplicity and Becoming is necessarily but apparent, and masks
an underlying absolute Unity and Permanence, which can be reached by
the intellect alone. And this position of Parmenides was felt to be
so strong, that all the subsequent Greek Physicists took their stand
upon it: the four unchangeable elements of Empedocles, the Atoms of
Leucippus and Democritus (atoms of eternally unchanging shape and
size, and of one absolutely uniform and unchanging quality) are but
modifications of the doctrine of Parmenides concerning the Oneness and
Unchangeableness of Being.
But even Heraclitus himself is far removed from denying all Oneness,
all Permanence. For, according to him, a permanent law of permutation
runs through and expresses itself in the shiftingness of all things
perceptible by sense; or rather one eternal physical substance, Fire,
of ceaselessly active properties, is continually manifesting itself,
in a regular succession of appearances, from fire to air, from air to
water, from water to earth, and then backwards up again to fire.
And when once the Greeks begin to break away from all this
Hylozoism,--these systems which uniformly, from Thales to Democritus,
attempt to explain all things by some one living or moving Matter,
without the intervention of Spirit or of Mind,--Spirit appears in
Anaxagoras as the One, and as present, everywhere and in varying
degrees, as the principle of the motion of that co-eternal matter
which is here, on the contrary, conceived of as but apparently
homogeneous anywhere, and as really composed of an indefinite number
and combination of qualitatively differing constituents.
Thus in all its schools, even before Socrates and Plato, Greek
philosophy clung to the One and the One’s reality, however differently
it conceived the nature of this Unity, and however much it may have
varied as to the nature and reality of the Many, or as to the relation
and the bond subsisting between that Unity and this Multiplicity. Only
at the end of this first period do the Sophists introduce, during a
short time marked by all the symptoms of transition, uncertainty,
and revolution, the doctrine, of the unknowableness, indeed of the
unreality, of the One, and with it of the exclusive reality of mere
Multiplicity, of evanescent Appearances.
2. _In Socrates._
But Socrates opens out the second and greatest period of Greek
philosophy, by reverting to, indeed by indefinitely deepening, the
general conviction that Oneness underlies Multiplicity. And he does
so through the virtual discovery of, and a ceaseless insistence upon,
two great new subject-matters of philosophy: Dialects and Ethics. It
is true that in both these respects the Sophists had prepared the
ground: they had, before him and all around him, discussed everything
from every then conceivable point of view; and they had, at the same
time, helped to withdraw man’s attention from pure speculation about
physical nature to practical occupation with himself. But the Sophistic
Dialectic had ended in itself, in universal negation and scepticism;
and the Sophistic Anthropology had, partly as cause, partly as effect
of that scepticism, more and more completely narrowed and dragged down
all human interest, capacity, and activity to a selfish, materialistic
self-aggrandizement and a frank pleasure-seeking. Socrates indeed took
over both these subjects; but he did so in a profoundly different
spirit, and worked them into a thoroughly antagonistic view of
knowledge and of life.
Socrates begins, like the Sophists, with the Multiplicity of impression
and opinion, which we find occasioned by one and the same question
or fact; and like them he refuses to take the Physicists’ short cut
of immediate and direct occupation with things and substances, say
the elements. Slowly and laboriously he works his way, by the help of
Dialectics, (for these have now become a means and not an end,) around
and through and into the various apprehensions, and, at last, out of
and beyond them, to a satisfactory concept of each thing. And the very
means taken to arrive at this concept, and the very test which is
applied to the concept, when finally arrived at, for gauging the degree
of its finality, both these things help to deepen profoundly the sense
of a certain Multiplicity in all Oneness and of a certain Oneness in
all Multiplicity. For the means he takes are a careful and (as far as
may be) exhaustive and impartial discussion and analysis of all the
competing and conflicting notions and connotations occasioned by each
matter in dispute; and the test he applies to the final concept, in
view of gauging the degree of its finality, is how far this concept
reconciles and resolves within its higher unity all such various and
contrary aspects suggested by the thing, as have stood the brunt of
the previous discussion and have thereby proved themselves true and
objective.
Socrates again, like the Sophists, turns his attention away from
Physics to Ethics; he drops speculation about external nature, and
busies himself with the interior life and development of man. But the
world in which Socrates’ method necessarily conceives and places man,
and the work and standard which he finds already latent in each man,
for that man to do and to endorse in himself and in the world, are
both entirely different from those of the Sophists, and occasion a
still further, indeed the greatest of all possible deepenings of the
apprehension of Oneness and of Multiplicity.
For the world of Socrates is a world in which Reality and Truth reign
and are attainable by man; never does he even ask whether truth _is_
or can be reached by us, but only what it is and where it lies and
how it can be attained. And since Socrates instinctively shares the
profoundly Greek conviction that Reality and Truth are necessarily
not only one but unchanging, he assumes throughout that, since Truth
and Reality do exist, Oneness and unchanging Being must exist also.
And thus the Oneness of Reality and the Multiplicity of Appearance
are re-established by him in Greek philosophy. And their apprehension
is indefinitely deepened and extended, since, whatever _is_ being
knowable, and knowable only through Dialectics, and Dialectics having
left us with concepts each in a sense a one and a many, Life itself,
Reality and all Nature must, somehow and to some extent, be also a one
and a many. And man according to Socrates is required, already as a
simple consequence of such convictions, to discover and acknowledge and
organize the One and the Many in his own interior life and faculties.
For if his senses tell him of the Many, and his reason alone tells him
of the One, and the Many are but appearances and the One alone is fully
real,--then it will be in and through his reason that he is and will be
truly man.
Thus immediately within himself does man have a continuous, uniquely
vivid experience of the One and the Many, and of the necessity,
difficulty, and fruitfulness of their proper organization; and from
hence he will reflect them back upon the outer world, adding thus
indefinitely, by means of Ethics, to the delicacy and depth of
his apprehension of such Oneness and Multiplicity as, by means of
Dialectics, he has already found there. But further, he now thus
becomes conscious, for the first time at all adequately, of the
difference between his own body and his own mind. And here he has no
more a Oneness _and_ a Multiplicity, he is directly conscious of a
Oneness _in_ Multiplicity, of a ruling and organizing power of the mind
in and over the body; and the One here is unseen and spiritual, and
the Many is here found to be an organism of forces and of functions
designed, with profound wisdom, to correspond with and to subserve
the soul. And this Microcosm is readily taken as a key and an analogy
wherewith to group and explain the appearances of the world without.
Much appears in that outer world as unreduced to system; but then
similarly within us much is still in a state of chaos, of revolt. In
that world no one ruler can be directly perceived; but then similarly
within us, the one ruling mind is perceptible only in its effects. And
this inner organization, ever required more than realized, is not a
matter of abstract speculation, of subtle induction, adjournable at
will; it is a clamorous consciousness, it is a fact that continually
requires acts to back it or to break it. Strengthen it, and you have
interior expansion and life; weaken it, and you bring on shrinkage and
death. For the passions are there, active even if _we_ refuse to be
active, active against us and above us, if not under us and for us;
and their submission to the reason, to effort, cannot fail, once our
attention is fully turned that way, more than anything else to keep
alive and to deepen our sense of the organization of all that lives, of
the presence of the One _and_ the Many, of the One _in_ the Many, in
all that truly lives at all.
3. _In Plato._
Now this dialectical method and this ethical subject-matter get
applied, investigated, and developed, with ever-increasing complexity
and interaction, by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the three spiritual
generations of this, the greatest period of Greek Philosophy. And the
more penetrating the method becomes, and the more deeply it probes the
subject-matter, the more intense and extensive is found to be this
Unity in Multiplicity both within man and without him.
In the teaching of Socrates both the method and the apprehension of
Unity and Multiplicity are as yet, so to speak, in bud. Dialectics are
here still chiefly a Method, and hardly as yet a Metaphysic as well.
The soul here is as yet but simply one, and virtue is also simply one,
and simply and directly identical with knowledge, and hence directly
teachable: the very possibility that the will may not or indeed cannot
follow, necessarily, automatically, the clear perception of what is
really good for it, is one quite foreign to the mind of Socrates,
indeed to all Greek thinkers up to the very end of the classical
philosophy.
In Plato the methods and the results are both, as it were, in
flower. Dialectics have here become both a systematic method, and
a metaphysical system: not only are Ideas true, and the only means
for reaching truth, but they alone are true, they alone fully _are_,
and exist as separate self-subsisting realities. And as in the world
within, Goodness is, in this profoundly ethical system, seen and willed
and striven for as supreme, so also in the world without, is the Idea
of Goodness considered as existing supreme from all eternity, and as
somehow the Cause of all that truly _is_.
It is true that Plato nowhere succeeds in finding in his system
a fitting place for a Personal God: for, among other reasons,
the Platonic Ideas are all, from the lowest to the highest, but
Hypostasized Concepts of Kinds, and are hence, quite consistently,
considered to be perfect and supreme, in precise proportion as they are
general. The highest Idea will thus of necessity be the most general,
the most devoid of all determination, and hence the least personal of
them all.
It is true also that in his Metaphysics generally he insists so much
upon the complete severance and self-sufficingness of the Ideas as
over against Appearances, that he prepares his own inevitable failure
again to bridge over the gulf that he himself has thus dug too deep
and broad. Especially is his half-suggestion misleading, that the
transition to Phenomenal Multiplicity is but a further extension of
the Multiplicity already observable in the world of Ideas. For these
two Multiplicities are evidently entirely different in kind. Each Idea
is conceived as necessarily eternal, unchanging, complete and perfect
in its own way; whereas each appearance is conceived as necessarily
temporal, changing, incomplete, and imperfect even in its own way.
It is true again, that, in Psychology, Plato breaks up the Soul
into the three parts of the Reason, the Irascible Passions, and the
Concupiscible Passions, and that he discriminates between them even
as to their place of residence in the body. And correspondingly
he distinguishes, in Ethics, the four Cardinal Virtues, Prudence,
Fortitude, Temperance, and Justice: he distributes the first three
virtues among the three parts of the soul, allotting ever one of these
virtues specially to one part; and makes Justice to be the general
virtue that sees to each part carrying out its own special work and
virtue, and respecting the work of the other two. And thus we seem to
get away from the Oneness of the soul and the Oneness of virtue, as
already taught by Socrates.
It is finally true that not only does Matter remain unexplained and
treated as though in itself a mere nothing; but that it is considered,
nevertheless, as somehow strong enough to hinder and hamper the Idea
which really constitutes that Matter’s sole reality. Hence also
springs Plato’s saddening aloofness from and contempt for all trades
and handicrafts, for all the homely tastes, joys, and sorrows at all
peculiar to the toiling majority. And herein he but considerably
deepens and systematizes one of the weakest and most ruinous traditions
of his class, age, and people, and falls far short of Socrates, with
his deep childlike love of homely wisdom and of technical skill and
productiveness. Indeed Matter is considered to be the one occasion
of all sin, just as ignorance is considered to be the one true cause
of sin. For although Plato throughout holds and proclaims free-will,
in the definite sense of freedom of choice; and although he, in some
passages, declares the ignorance which (according to him) is the
necessary condition of a wrong choice, to be itself voluntary and
culpable and to spring from an avoidable attachment to the world of
sense: yet he clings, nevertheless, to the Socratic position that all
ignorance and immorality are involuntary, that no man does or can act
against what he sees to be for his own good.
All this would of itself suffice to show how and why the Platonic
system has, as such, long ceased to live or to be capable of
resuscitation. And yet even some of the apparent weaknesses just
referred to are nearly or even entirely strong points in his scheme. So
with his treble division of the Soul, if we but soften the distinction
of actual parts into a difference of function or of object. For,
already in Plato’s own judgment, these parts admit of and require a
regular hierarchy of subordination: the Irascible part is the natural
ally, if properly tamed and broken in by the Reason, of this Reason
against the Concupiscible part: it is the winged steed amongst the two
horses of the chariot of the soul, and the charioteer, the Reason,
has to see to it that this his winged steed flies not recklessly, but
lends all its strength to keep its heavy, wingless, downwards-tending
yoke-fellow from plunging them all into the deep and dark. Hence all
this really makes for a true, because rich and laborious, Unity in
Multiplicity. The same applies to the scheme of the four Cardinal
Virtues; for here also there is a balancing and interaction of forces
and of duties, which together are well fitted to deepen and fruitfully
to unify the soul.
But above all, there are four main conceptions which, with varying
degrees and kinds of clearness, consistency, and proof, run throughout
the Dialogues, and which not all the ever-increasing perception of the
complexity of their implications, nor all the never-ending costingness
of their reproduction, have long kept mankind from accepting and
working into their own inner life and into their outlook and labour
upon the world without.
There is, first, the sense of the Universal nature of philosophy.
Philosophy is here not a science alongside of other sciences, nor
a sect existing with a view to the advantage of its members, nor a
substitute for religion or science, art or action; but it stands
for the totality of all mental activity, the nearest approach to an
adequate realization of the reasonable nature of man. Hence philosophy
has constant relations with all departments of human thought and
action; or rather they all, with their several methods and ideals,
come to enrich and stimulate philosophy, whilst philosophy, in return,
reacts upon them all, by clarifying and harmonizing them each with
itself and each with all the others.
There is, next, the constant conviction of the reality of moral
accountableness on the one hand, and of the strength of the passions
and of the allurements of sense on the other, of the costing ethical
character of the search for light and truth, of the ceaseless necessity
of a turning of the whole man, of conversion. “As the bodily eye
cannot turn from darkness to light without the turning of the whole
body, so too when the eye of the soul is turned round, the whole soul
must be turned from the world of generation unto that of Being, and
become able to endure the sight of Being, and of the brightest and
best part of Being, that is to say of the Good.”[2] Hence Philosophy
is a Redemption, a Liberation, a Separation of the soul from the
body, a Dying and seeking after death, a constant Purification and
Recollection of the soul; and the four Cardinal Virtues are so many
purifications;[3] and men who have once come to lay the blame of their
own confusion and perplexity upon themselves, will hate themselves and
escape from themselves into Philosophy, in order to become different
and get rid of their former selves.[4]
There is, in the third place, the dominant consciousness of
Multiplicity in Unity and of Unity in Multiplicity, and of the
necessity of the soul’s ever moving from one to the other--moving out
of itself and into the world of Multiplicity, of sense and exterior
work; and moving back into itself, into the world of Unity, of spirit
and interior rest. Hence there is and ought to be a double movement
of the soul. And this double action does not continue on the same
plane, but the moving, oscillating soul is, according to the faithful
thoroughness or cowardly slackness of these its movements, ever either
mounting higher in truth and spirit, or falling lower away into the
sensual and untruthful. For these its ascensions are “effortful,”
painful, gradual; they are never fully finished here below, and they
nowhere attain to that absolute knowledge which is possessed by God
alone.[5] “We ought,” he tells us, “to strive and fly as swiftly as
possible from hence thither. And to fly thither is to become like God”;
but he adds, “as far as this is possible.”[6]
And there is, lastly, an unfailing faith in an unexhausted,
inexhaustible, transcendent world of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness,
which gives of itself, but never gives itself wholly, to that
phenomenal world which exists only by participation in it; and in
a Supreme Goodness, felt and half conceived to be personal and
self-communicative, as the cause of all that is anywhere beautiful and
one and good.
These four characteristics of Universality, Conversion, Unification,
Transcendence, we find them together in Greek philosophy once, and once
only, namely in Plato. Twice again we have indeed a world-embracing,
world-moving scheme placed before us, and in each case two of these
four characteristics reappear in a deepened and developed form. For
Aristotle works out, more fully and satisfactorily than Plato, the
characters of Universality and of Unification; especially does the
latter find a great improvement. And Plotinus insists, even more
constantly and movingly than Plato, upon Conversion as a necessary
means, and upon Transcendence as a necessary characteristic of all
true philosophy. But Aristotle has lost the Conversion from out of
his scheme, and also the Transcendence conceived as at the same time
immanent in the world; and Plotinus has lost the Universality, and the
Unification conceived as a Unity in Multiplicity.
4. _In Aristotle._
As to Aristotle, the improvements upon Plato are marked and many.
There is the doctrine of the non-existence of the General apart from
the Particular; the doctrine of Matter as not simple Non-Being, but
as Not-yet-Being, the Possible, the Not-yet-Actual, which is waiting
the presence of the Form to give it the Actuality for which it is
destined, since Matter requires Form, and Form requires Matter; and
the doctrine, here first fully developed, of Motion, the Moved and the
Moving.
Since all Motion, Change, Natural Life spring from Form (and a
particular Form), working in and with Matter (a particular and
appropriate Matter), the ultimate First Moving Cause must Itself be
all-moving and all-unmoved, that is, it must be Pure Form. We thus get
the first at all adequate philosophical presentation of Theism: for
this Pure Form is then shown to be eternal, unchanging, all thought,
self-thinking, and absolutely distinct from the world which it moves.
In all other real Beings the Form has, in various degrees, to contend
with the manifold impediments of Matter; and in proportion to the
Form’s success, does the resultant Being stand high in the scale of
Creation. The plant, with its vegetative and plastic soul, stands
lowest in the scale of organic life; next comes the animal, with its
sensitive and motive soul; and highest stands man, with his rational
and volitional soul. And each higher Being takes over, as the lower
part of his own nature, the functions and powers of the lower Being;
and hence, since all Beings constitute so many several parts of the
world’s systematic whole, they are all deserving of the closest study.
And Man, destined to be the highest constituent of this whole, can
become so only by moving as much as may be out of his entanglement in
the lower, the passive functions of his soul, and identifying himself
with his true self, with that active power, that pure reason which,
itself pure Form, finds its proper objects in the Forms of all things
that are.
Thus we get a system of a certain grand consistency and an impressively
constant re-application of certain fundamental ideas to every kind of
subject-matter. But the Platonic Dualism, though everywhere vigorously
attacked, is yet nowhere fully overcome.
For in Metaphysics, Plato’s “One alongside of the Many” becomes with
Aristotle the “One throughout the Many”: to the mind of the latter,
the Separate General, Pure Form as existing without Matter, is a mere
abstraction; Matter without Form is a simple potentiality; Matter and
Form together, and they only, constitute the Particular, and (in and
by it) all actual and full Reality. And only Reality, in the highest
and primary sense, can, according to him, form the highest and primary
object of Knowledge. Yet knowledge never refers to the Particular, but
always to the General; and, in the Particular, only to the General
manifested in it. And this is the case, not because, though the
Particular is the fuller Reality, we can more easily reach the General
within it; but, on the contrary, because, though we can more easily
reach the Particular, the General alone is abiding and fully true and
really knowable.
Again, for Aristotle the Particular, which alone really exists, is
constituted a particular and really existent Being, in virtue of its
participation in Matter; but it is constituted as abiding, true,
and knowable, in virtue of its Form. The cause of its Reality is
thus different from that of its Truth; the addition of the simple
Potentiality of Matter has alone given Reality to the pure Actuality of
Form.
Finally, for Aristotle all Movement, as comprehensive of every kind of
change, being defined as the transition from Potentiality to Reality,
as the determination of Matter by Form, can be called forth, in the
last resort, only by a pure Form which, though the cause of all Motion,
is itself unmoved, is pure Thought and Speculation, a thinking of
thinking,--God eternally thinking God and Himself alone. Yet this
God is, if thus safely distinguished from the world, yet hardly more
Personal than Spirit was in Anaxagoras, or the Idea of Good was in
Plato. For not only does Aristotle refuse Him a body and all psychic
life, but with them he eliminates all Doing and all Producing, all
Emotion and all Willing, indeed all Thinking except that of His own
lonely Self-Contemplation. And yet the activity of the will is as
essential to Personality as that of thinking; and thinking again we can
conceive as personal only if conditioned by a diversity of objects and
a variety of mental states. And this God’s relations with the world are
strangely few and still curiously materialistic. For He but sets the
world in motion, and has no special care for it or detailed rule over
it; and since, of the three or four kinds of motion, spacial motion is
declared to be the primary one, and its most perfect form to be the
circular, and since a circle moves quickest at its circumference, He is
conceived as imparting to the world a spacial and a circular movement,
and this, apparently, from a point in space, since He does so from
outside. His transcendence is, so far, but a spacial one.
In Physics, Aristotle still constantly describes Nature as an
harmonious, reasonable Being, an all-effecting force. There is here a
mythical strain at work, and yet nowhere is a subject clearly defined
to which these various qualities could be attributed.
In Anthropology again, the active soul, the rational and free-willing,
the immortal principle, is that which specially distinguishes and
constitutes Humanity, and which indeed is the Form of the lower
soul-powers and of the body as well. Yet it is these lower soul-powers,
it is the passive, the vegetative and sensitive, the mortal soul-powers
which, in and with the body, constitute this particular man, and only
particular men are really existent. Where and how then is this living
man’s Personality, his indelible consciousness of the unity of his
nature, to arise and to be found in all this medley?
And finally, in Ethics, Aristotle maintains and develops, it is true,
the great Socratic tradition of conceiving all virtue as active,
and demands with Plato that the whole man should, as much as may
be, put himself into all his moral acts. Indeed Aristotle makes
here the great advance of definitely denying the Socratic doctrine
that virtue consists in knowledge, and of abolishing the Platonic
distinction between ordinary and philosophic virtue. All moral
qualities are, according to him, matters of the will; and arise, in
the first instance, not through instruction, but through exercise and
education. But in place of Plato’s grandly organic, though still too
abstract scheme of the Cardinal Virtues, each of the three partial
ones pressing upwards and requiring and completing the others, and all
three bound together by the general fourth, we get a more detailed and
experimental, but only loosely co-ordinated enumeration and description
of the virtuous habits, all of them so many means between two vicious
extremes. The purificatory, recollective, self-fleeing, grandly
organic, deeply religious tone and drift of Plato’s philosophy, that
priceless conviction that we must give all if we would gain all, has
disappeared.
Everywhere then we get in Aristotle that noble Greek insistence, upon
Action and Energy, upon Reason and Clearness, upon the General and
Unification. But at all the chief turning-points we get a conflict
between the General, which is alone supposed to be fully true, and the
Particular, which is alone supposed to be fully real. And hence we are
left with an insufficient apprehension of the inexhaustibleness of
all Reality, of its indefinite apprehensibleness but ever inadequate
apprehendedness. And above all, as both cause and effect of all this,
we find here only a slight and intermittent hold upon the great
fact and force of Personality in both God and man. In a word, if in
Plato the abstracting process went in general still further than
in Aristotle: in Aristotle the supply of experimental material of
a spiritual kind which in Plato was ever enriching, supplementing
and correcting the abstract reasoning and its results in matters of
spirituality, is almost entirely in abeyance.
5. _In Plotinus and Proclus._
In the third and last period of Greek Philosophy, we can pass by the
Stoic and Epicurean, and also the Sceptical schools. For, great as
was their practical importance and influence, these schools never
aimed at embracing the totality of life; no one of them ever, as a
matter of fact, cultivated more than one side of a purely individual
self-education and peace-seeking. They reproduced and continued, on
a larger scale, those interesting three minor Socratic schools which
themselves had, even during the full times and universal systems of
Plato and Aristotle, constituted as it were the backwaters away from
the main stream of Greek speculation. The Stoic system carries on the
Cynic school; the Epicurean, the Cyrenaic; and the Sceptical, the
Megaric. Unity and Rest is monopolized by the Stoic, and Multiplicity
and Movement by the Epicurean; whilst the Sceptic attempts to stand
apart from and above both. What Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, living
in still many-sided and public-spirited times, had, in their lives and
teaching, seen and practised together; now, in a period of spiritual
poverty and self-seeking, is seen and practised by separate schools
separately, each in external conflict with the other.
Only the system of that great mystical soul, Plotinus, has, for our
present purposes, a claim on our close attention. Indeed this, the
last great attempt at synthesis of the ancient Greek mind, will have
to occupy us in such detail throughout a great part of this book, that
here we can but briefly indicate its chief characteristics as regards
the One and the Many.
It is then clear that Plotinus is an even more intensely and
exclusively religious spirit than is Plato himself. Some of his
descriptions of the soul’s flight from the world of sense and of the
soul’s substantial touch of God in ecstasy, and again his penetrating
apprehension of the timeless and spaceless characteristics of Spirit,
have never ceased, at least indirectly, to leaven, and to lend much of
their form to, the deepest recollective aspirations of religious souls
in Europe and Western Asia, for some fourteen centuries at least.
Yet this religious sense is here so exclusive, and it thirsts so
vehemently for perfect unity and for an infinite Superiority and
utter Self-sufficingness of God, that it readily allies itself
with, and reinforces by a massive enthusiasm and asceticism, the
abstractive trend which, so strong at all times in Greek philosophy,
was at this period already, for other reasons, growing more intensely
abstractive than ever. Under this double influence Plotinus reduces
the two great, deliberate, alternating movements of the soul,--its
Outgoing to the Particular and Contingent, and its Incoming to the
General and Infinite, as they are taught by Plato,--to one only, that
of Recollection and Abstraction, a movement ever up and away, from
all Multiplicity, to the One alone. And he denies to this One all
Multiplicity whatsoever,--hence all such conscious, volitional action
upon the world as is involved in Plato’s magnificent, though never
worked out, intuition that it is love, (some energizing analogous to
our thinking, loving and willing the existence, the self-realization
and the happiness of other self-conscious beings,) which moves the
Good, as it were, to go out from Itself, and to communicate Itself
to others. Here, in Plotinus’s scheme, Man begins indeed with
sense-impressions and imaginative picturings, with discursive reasoning
and intuitive reason, with feelings, volitions, and energizings
of every kind. But the more he moves up, the more of all this he
leaves utterly behind; till, in ecstasy, all will, love, thought,
consciousness, cease altogether. For man has thus been getting nearer
and nearer, and more and more like, the One; and this One is just
nothing besides sheer, pure Oneness,--it is neither Will, nor Love, nor
Thought, nor Self-consciousness, in any degree or sense of these words.
Plotinus’s scheme is thus indeed prompted by some of the deepest
Mystical aspirations. But whilst in its one deliberate movement--that
of man up to God--it starts from convictions and requirements that are
deeply ethical, libertarian, spiritual, theistic: it will be shown, in
its conception of the nature of the One and of this One’s relations
down into the world, to be curiously naturalistic and determinist, and
subtly materialistic. Thus does Greek Philosophy end in an impressively
all-devouring Abstraction, in an intense Realism destructive, step by
step, of precisely all that concrete, individual, personal Beauty,
Truth, and Goodness, of all the spiritual, hence organic, interior,
self-conscious reality, which had given occasion to this system.
We have now but so many hypostatized abstractions, each more pale
and empty than the other, each ever more simply a mere category of
the human mind, indeed, but a category appropriate to Things and
to Mathematico-Physical Laws, not to Spirit and to Ethico-Personal
Organisms. The system, in its ultimate upshot and trend, is thus
profoundly anti-Immanental, anti-Incarnational: a succession of
increasingly exalted and increasingly empty Transcendences, each of
which is, as it were, open upwards but closed downwards, takes the
place of all deliberate operations and self-expressions of the Higher
in and through the Lower, hence of all preveniences and condescensions
of God.
And in Proclus, practically the last non-Christian Greek Philosopher,
all these intensely abstractive, naturalistic features get finally and
fully systematized, whilst but intermittent traces remain of Plato’s
richly manifold, organized activities and his at times strikingly
incarnational conceptions; and only skeleton-schemes persist of those
rapt recollective experiences of Plotinus which, derived in his case
from direct experience, constitute him, among all Philosophers, as Dr.
Edward Caird most aptly calls him, the “Mystic par excellence.”
II. THE SECOND OF THE THREE FORCES: CHRISTIANITY, THE REVELATION OF
PERSONALITY AND DEPTH.
Now the whole of this clear, conceptual, abstractive Greek method, in
as far as it identified abstractions with realities, and names with
things, and reasoning with doing, suffering, and experience; and sought
for Unity outside of Multiplicity, for Rest outside of Energizing, for
the Highest outside of Personality and Character as these are developed
and manifested in the permeation and elevation of the lower; has in
so far been succeeded and superseded by two other great world-moving
experiences of the human race, experiences apparently even more
antagonistic to each other than either appears to be to the Greek view:
Christianity and Scientific Method.
1. _The unique fulness and closeness of unity in multiplicity of our
Lord’s life._
As to Christianity, it is really impossible to compare it directly
with Hellenism, without at once under-stating its originality. For
its originality consists not so much in its single doctrines, or even
in its teaching as a whole, and in the particular place each doctrine
occupies in this teaching, as in its revelation, through the person
and example of its Founder, of the altogether unsuspected depth and
inexhaustibleness of human Personality, and of this Personality’s
source and analogue in God, of the simplicity and yet difficulty and
never-endingness of the access of man to God, and of the ever-preceding
condescension of God to man. Hence if Christianity is thus throughout
the Revelation of Personality; and if Personality is ever a One in
Many, (and more deeply One and more richly Many, in proportion to the
greatness of that spiritual reality): then we need not wonder at the
difficulty we find in pointing out any one particular doctrine as
constitutive of the unique originality of Christianity.
For a Person came, and lived and loved, and did and taught, and died
and rose again, and lives on by His Power and His Spirit for ever
within us and amongst us, so unspeakably rich and yet so simple, so
sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above us precisely in being
so divinely near,--that His character and teaching require, for an
ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the varying study, and
different experiments and applications, embodiments and unrollings
of all the races and civilizations, of all the individual and
corporate, the simultaneous and successive experiences of the human
race to the end of time. If there is nothing shifting or fitful or
simply changing about Him, there is everywhere energy and expansion,
thought and emotion, effort and experience, joy and sorrow, loneliness
and conflict, interior trial and triumph, exterior defeat and
supplantation: particular affections, particular humiliations, homely
labour, a homely heroism, greatness throughout in littleness. And in
Him, for the first and last time, we find an insight so unique, a
Personality so strong and supreme, as to teach us, once for all, the
true attitude towards suffering.
Not one of the philosophers or systems before Him had effectually
escaped falling either into Pessimism, seeing the end of life as
trouble and weariness, and seeking to escape from it into some
aloofness or some Nirvana; or into Optimism, ignoring or explaining
away that suffering and trial which, as our first experience and as our
last, surround us on every side. But with Him, and alone with Him and
those who still learn and live from and by Him, there is the union of
the clearest, keenest sense of all the mysterious depth and breadth and
length and height of human sadness, suffering, and sin, _and_, in spite
of this and through this and at the end of this, a note of conquest and
of triumphant joy.
And here, as elsewhere in Christianity, this is achieved not by some
artificial, facile juxtaposition: but the soul is allowed to sob
itself out; and all this its pain gets fully faced and willed, gets
taken up into the conscious life. Suffering thus becomes the highest
form of action, a divinely potent means of satisfaction, recovery,
and enlargement for the soul,--the soul with its mysteriously great
consciousness of pettiness and sin, and its immense capacity for joy in
self-donation.
And again, His moral and spiritual idealism, whilst indefinitely higher
than that of any of the philosophers or prophets before Him, has
nothing strained or restless, nothing rootless or quietistic, nothing
querulous or disdainful, or of caste or sect about it: the humblest
manual labour, the simplest of the human relations, the universal
elemental faculties of man as man, are all entered into and developed,
are all hallowed in smallest detail, and step by step.
And finally His teaching, His life, are all positive, all constructive,
and come into conflict only with worldly indifference and bad faith.
No teacher before Him or since, but requires, if we would not be led
astray by him, that we should make some allowances, in his character
and doctrine, for certain inevitable reactions, and consequent
narrownesses and contrarinesses. Especially is this true of religious
teachers and reformers, and generally in exact proportion to the
intensity of their fervour. But in Him there is no reaction, no
negation, no fierceness, of a kind to deflect His teaching from its
immanent, self-consistent trend. His very Apostles can ask Him to call
down fire from heaven upon the unbelieving Samaritans; they can use
the sword against one of those come out to apprehend Him; and they
can attempt to keep the little ones from Him. But He rebukes them; He
orders Peter to put back the sword in its scabbard; and He bids the
little ones to come unto Him, since of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Indeed St. Mark’s Gospel tells us how the disciples begged Him to
forbid a man who did not follow them from casting out devils in His
name; and how He refused to do so, and laid down the great universal
rule of all-embracing generosity: “He that is not against us, is with
us.”[7]
2. _This rich unity of life occasions three special presentations of
it, the “Petrine,” “Pauline,” “Joannine.”_
Now it is this very reality and depth, and hence the rich Unity, the
growth, variety, and manifold fruitfulness of His life and teaching,
which explain, as a necessity and an advantage, that we should have
those successive pictures and conceptions of Him which already the New
Testament presents. _Because_ Socrates was so great and impressive, we
have the two successive, remarkably divergent, portraits of him: the
external, historical, by Xenophon; the internal, typical one, by Plato;
and _that_ is all. _Because_ our Lord is so unspeakably greater, and
continues, with inexhaustible freshness, to be the very life of the
lives of Christians, we have three or four classical portraits of Him
in the New Testament; and, in a certain true manner and degree, each
successive age, in a measure each single soul, forms, and has to form,
its own picture of Him.
We can roughly classify these pictures under the three successive types
of the “Petrine,” the “Pauline,” and the “Joannine,” provided we do
not forget that the precise limits of the first of these divisions are
difficult to draw, and that there are growths and diversities of aspect
to be found within the Pauline type. For the Petrine type will here be
sought in the Synoptic Gospels, and in particular in those accounts
and sayings there which appear to give us the closest reproduction
of our Lord’s very acts and words and of the impressions produced by
these upon the original witnesses. The Pauline type will embrace four
main stages or developments: that of the four or five of the earlier
Epistles--the two to the Thessalonians and those to the Galatians,
Corinthians, and Romans; that of the Epistles of the Captivity,
Colossians, Philippians, Ephesians; that of the Pastoral Epistles; and
that of the Epistle to the Hebrews. And even in the least diversified,
the Joannine type, there is the variation between the Gospel and
Epistles on the one hand, and the Apocalypse on the other.
But taking these three types as each a unity, we shall hardly be guilty
of an empty schematization, if the Petrine or Primitive-Apostolic
group represents to us mainly the simplest statement of the external
facts, and specially of the traditional, the Jewish side of our Lord’s
teaching; and if the Pauline and Joannine groups each mainly represent
to us, in various degrees and combinations, the two manners in which
the hidden significance of these facts, as intended for all men and for
all time, can be penetrated, viz. by thought and speculation, and by
feeling and operative experience.
Of course none of the three groups is without a large element common to
it and to the other two: it is the same facts that are looked at and
loved, by means of the same powers of the soul, and within the same
great common principles and convictions. Only the precise antecedents,
point of view, temper of mind; the selection, presentation, and
degree of elaboration of the facts and of their spiritual meaning;
the preponderance of this or that mental activity; the reasons and
connections sought and seen, are often widely different in each,
and produce a distinctiveness of impression which can be taken to
correspond roughly to the three main powers of the soul: to the range
of sense-perception and of memory; to that of reasoning; and to that
of intuition, feeling, and will. If each group had _only_ that element
which can be taken as being its predominant one, then any single group
would be of little value, and each group would imperatively require
ever to be taken in conjunction with the other two. But, as a matter of
fact, neither are the “Petrine” writings free from all reasoning and
mystical affinities; nor are the “Pauline,” free from the historic,
positive spirit, or, still less, from the mystical habit; nor the
“Joannine” free from the deepest teaching as to the necessity of
external facts, or from some argument and appeals to reason. Hence each
group, indeed each writing even singly, and still more all three groups
if taken together, profoundly embody and proclaim, by the rich variety
of their contents and spirit, the great principle and measure of all
life and truth: unity in and through variety, and steadfastness in and
through growth.
Specially easy is it to find in all three types the two chief among
the three modalities of all advanced religion: the careful reverence
for the external facts of nature (so far as these are known), and
for social religious tradition and institutions; and the vivid
consciousness of the necessity and reality of internal experience and
actuation, as the single spirit’s search, response, and assimilation
of the former.[8]
3. _The “Petrine” attestations: their special message._
Thus the “Petrine” group gives us, as evidence for the observation and
love of the external world: “Behold the birds of the air, how they sow
not, neither harvest nor gather into barns”; “Study the lilies of the
field how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say
unto you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of
these”; “The seed sprouts and shoots up, whilst the man knows not; the
earth beareth fruit of itself, first the stalk, then the ear, then the
full grain in the ear”; “When now the fig-tree’s shoot grows tender and
putteth forth leaves, you know that summer is nigh”; and, “When it is
evening, you say: ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in
the morning: ‘It will be foul weather to-day, for the heaven is red and
lowering.’”[9]
And as to reverence for tradition we get: “Think not that I have come
to destroy the law or the prophets; I have come not to destroy but to
fulfil.” And this respect extends to existing religious practices:
“Beware,” He says, “lest you do your justice before men, to be seen
by them,” but then describes the spirit in which they are to practice
their “_sedaka_,” this “justice” which they are to do, with its three
quite traditional divisions of alms-deeds, prayer, fasting, the three
Eminent Good Works of Judaism. And again: “If thou offer thy gift upon
the altar,” the doing so is in nowise criticised.[10]
Indeed there is no shrinking from the manifestation, on the part of the
crowd, of new and even rude forms of trust in the visible and external:
“A woman who had been suffering from an issue of blood during twelve
years, … coming in the crowd behind Him, touched His garment, for she
said: ‘If I but touch His garments I shall be saved.’ And straightway
the issue of blood was dried up”; and the crowds generally “put the
sick in the open places, and begged Him that they might but touch the
hem of His garment; and such as touched it were healed”; and this “hem”
consisted doubtless in the blue tassels, the Zizith, worn by every
religious Jew at the four corners of his cloak.[11]
And the twelve Apostles, whom He sends out with special instructions,
“going forth preached that men should repent, and went casting out many
devils, and anointing many sick with oil and healing them.” Indeed
there is, as the act preliminary to His public ministry, His baptism in
the Jordan; and there is, as introductory to His Passion, the supremely
solemn, visible, and audible act which crowns the Last Supper.[12]
But this same group of documents testifies also to a mystical, interior
element in Our Lord’s temper and teaching. “Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” “Blessed are the clean
of heart, for they shall see God,” are Beatitudes which cannot be far
from the _ipsissima verba_ of Our Lord. “In that hour Jesus answering
said: ‘I confess to Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, that Thou
hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed
them unto babes: yea, Father, for this hath been well-pleasing before
Thee.’ … ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I
will refresh you. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek
and humble of heart, and you shall find refreshment for your souls: for
My yoke is sweet and My burden is light.’” is deeply mystical passage
doubtless expresses with a vivid exactitude the unique spiritual
impression and renovation produced by Him within the souls of the first
generations of His disciples. And the three Synoptists give us five
times over the great fundamental mystical paradox: “If a man would
come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow
Me. For whosoever shall be determined to save his soul, shall lose it;
but whosoever shall lose his soul for My sake, shall find it.” And the
great law of interiority is recorded in St. Mark: “Listen unto Me, ye
all, and understand: nothing that entereth from without into a man can
defile him, but only the things that proceed from a man are the things
that defile a man.”[13]
And we get in Mark the fundamental interior virtue of childlikeness,
and the immanence of Christ in the childlike soul: “If anyone wish
to be first, let him be the last of all men and all men’s servant.”
“And taking a little child He placed it in the midst of them; and
having embraced it, He said unto them: ‘Whosoever shall not receive
the kingdom of God as a little child, shall not enter therein.’”
“Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the kingdom of
heaven.”[14]
And the spirituality of the soul’s life in heaven, and the eternal
_Now_ of God, as the Living and Vivifying Present, are given in all
three Synoptists: “In the Resurrection they neither marry nor are
given in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven. But concerning the
resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken by
God, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”[15]
4. _The “Pauline” group of writings: its special teaching._
The Pauline group furnishes by far the greater amount of the explicit
reasoning to be found in the New Testament; where, _e.g._, does the
New Testament furnish a parallel to the long and intricate argument
of chapters Third to Eleventh of the Epistle to the Romans, with
its constant “therefores” and “buts” and “nows”? Yet this same
group of writings also emphasizes strongly, though more rarely, the
external-fact side of religion, and is deeply penetrated by the
intuitive-emotional, the mystical spirit of Christianity.
The external, historical side is represented by the careful description
and chronological arrangement observable in the account of six
successive apparitions of the Risen Christ; and by the reference
back to the acts and words used in the Eucharistic act at the Last
Supper.[16]
Yet throughout the writings of St. Paul and of his school, it is
the mystical, interior, experimental element that permeates the
argumentative-speculative and the historical constituents. The chief
manifestations of this mystical spirit and conviction, which really
penetrates and knits together the whole of the Pauline teaching, can
perhaps best be taken in a logical order.
First then it is St. Paul who, himself or through writers more or
less dependent on him, gives us by far the most definite and detailed
presentation of by far the most extraordinary experiences and events
to be found in the New Testament outside of the Gospels themselves.
For the author of the Acts of the Apostles gives us the lengthy
description of the Pentecostal Visitation, and, three times over,
that most vivid account of Our Lord’s apparition to Saul on the way
to Damascus. And St. Paul himself describes for us, at the closest
first hand, the ecstatic states of the Christian communities in their
earliest charismatic stage; he treats the apparition on the way to
Damascus as truly objective and as on a complete par with the earlier
apparitions accorded to the chosen Apostles in the first days after
the Resurrection; and he gives us the solemn reference to his own
experience of rapture to the third Heaven.[17] We should, however,
note, in the next place, as the vital complement, indeed as the
necessary pre-requisite, to this conviction and to the effectiveness
of these facts,--facts conceived and recorded as external, as temporal
and local,--St. Paul’s profound belief that all external evidences,
whether of human reasoning and philosophy or of visible miracle, fail
to carry conviction without the presence of certain corresponding
moral and spiritual dispositions in those to whom they are addressed.
“The word of the Cross,” the very same preaching, “is to those that
are perishing foolishness, but to us that are being saved the power
of God.” And the external, taken alone, can so little convince, that
even the seeking after the external, without requisite dispositions,
will but get us further away from its hidden function and meaning. “The
Jews ask for signs (miracles), and the Greeks seek wisdom (philosophy);
but we preach Christ crucified, who is to the Jews a stumbling-block,
and to the Gentiles foolishness; but to those who are called, both
Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For
the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is
stronger than men.” And the cause of this difference of interpretation
is shown to lie in the various interior dispositions of the hearers:
“The animal man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for
they are foolishness to him, and he is incapable of understanding
them, because they are spiritually discerned; but the spiritual man
discerneth all things.”[18]
And yet this mystery of religion has to be externally offered, to be
preached to us, and is preached to all men; it is intended by God to
be known by all, and hence it is He who stimulates men to external
preaching and external hearing, as to one of the pre-requisites of its
acceptance: “The mystery which was hidden from the ages has now been
made manifest”; he desires the Colossians to be strengthened in “the
knowledge of the mystery of God and Christ”; and has to “speak the
mystery of the Christ,” to “make it manifest.”[19]
And since this preaching, to be effective, absolutely requires, as
we have seen, interior dispositions and interior illumination of the
hearers, and since these things are different in different men, the
degrees of initiation into this identical mystery are to be carefully
adapted to the interior state of those addressed. “We preach wisdom
amongst the perfect τέλειοι,” the technical term in the heathen Greek
Mysteries for those who had received the higher grades of initiation.
“I was not able to speak unto you as unto spiritual men, but (only) as
unto fleshly ones, as unto infants in Christ. I have fed you with milk,
not strong food, for you were not yet able.”[20]
And since all good, hence also the external preaching, comes from God,
still more must this all-important interior apprehension of it come
from Him. In a certain real sense the Spirit is thus organ as well as
object of this interior light. “God has revealed unto us the wisdom of
God through the Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, even the
deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, unless
the spirit of man that is in him? even so no man knoweth the things of
God, except the Spirit of God.”[21]
But further, the mystery revealed in a unique degree and form in
Christ’s life, is really a universal spiritual-human law; the law of
suffering and sacrifice, as the one way to joy and possession, which
has existed, though veiled till now, since the foundation of the world.
“The mystery of Christ, which in former generations was not made
manifest unto the sons of men, but has now been revealed to His holy
apostles and prophets in the spirit.” And this law, which is Christ’s
life, must reappear in the life of each one of us. “We have been
buried together with Him through Baptism unto death, in order that, as
Christ rose again from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we
also may walk in the newness of life”; “We know that our old man has
been crucified together with Him. But if we have died with Christ, we
believe that we shall live with Him”; “If the Spirit who raised Jesus
from the dead dwelleth in you, He who raised Jesus from the dead will
quicken your mortal bodies through His Spirit dwelling within you.”[22]
Christ’s life can be thus the very law of all life, because “He is
the first-born of all creation, for in Him all things were created
in heaven and on earth,” “all things were created through Him”; “and
He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together”; “all
things are summed up in Christ”; “Christ is all in all.” So that in
the past, before His visible coming, the Jews in the desert “drank
from the spiritual rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ.”
And as He Himself is the perfect image of God, so all things are, in
varying degrees, created in the image of Christ: “(Christ) who is the
image of the living God”; “all things were created unto Him.” And
since man is, in his original and potential essence, in a very special
sense “the image and glory of God,” his perfecting will consist in a
painful reconquest and development of this obscured and but potential
essence, by becoming, as far as may be, another Christ, and living
through the successive stages of Christ’s earthly life. We are bidden
“all attain unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of
the fulness of Christ,” so that, in the end, we may be able to say
with the Apostle himself: “I live no more in myself, but Christ lives
in me”; a consummation which appears so possible to St. Paul’s mind,
that he eagerly, painfully longs for it: “My children, with whom I am
again in travail, until Christ be formed in you.” And indeed “we all,
with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are
transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the
Lord, the Spirit.”[23]
We have then in St. Paul not only a deeply mystical element, but
mysticism of the noblest, indeed the most daringly speculative,
world-embracing type.
5. _The “Joannine” group: its characteristic truths._
And finally the Joannine group furnishes us with an instance, as
strong as is conceivable within the wide pale of a healthy Christian
spirit, of the predominance of an interior and intuitive, mystical,
universalistic, spiritual and symbolic apprehension and interpretation
both of external fact and of explicit reasoning.
The Visible and Historical is indeed emphasized, with a full
consciousness of the contrasting Gnostic error, in the culminating
sentence of the solemn Prologue of the Gospel, “And the Word was made
Flesh and tabernacled amongst us, and we saw His glory,” and in the
equally emphatic opening sentence of the First Epistle: “That which
was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our
eyes, what we have beholden, and our hands have handled, … we announce
unto you.” Hence too the Historical, Temporal Last Judgment, with its
corporal resurrection, remains as certainly retained in this Gospel as
in St. Matthew: “The hour cometh in which all those that are in the
monuments shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and those that have
done good shall come forth unto the resurrection of life, but those
that have worked evil, unto the resurrection of judgment.”[24]
And Reasoning of a peculiarly continuous, rhythmically recurrent
pattern, is as present and influential everywhere, as it is difficult
to describe or even to trace. For it is here but the instrument and
reflex of certain Mystical conceptions and doctrines, of a tendency
to see, in everything particular and temporal, the Universal and
Eternal; to apprehend Unity, a changeless Here and Now, in all
multiplicity and succession, and hence to suppress explicit reasoning
and clear distinctions, movement, growth, and change, as much as may
be, both in the method of presentation and in the facts presented. If
the Synoptists give us the successive, and write, unconsciously but
specially, under the category of Time: the Fourth Gospel consciously
presents us with simultaneity, and works specially under the category
of Space.
The Successive is here conceived as but the appearance of the
Simultaneous, of the Eternal and Abiding. Hence the historical
development in the earthly experiences, teachings, and successes of
Christ is ignored: His Godhead, that which _is_, stands revealed
from the first in the appearances of His earthly life. Hence too the
various souls of other men are presented to us as far as possible under
one eternal and changeless aspect; they are types of various abiding
virtues and iniquities, rather than concrete, composite mortals.
God appears here specially as Light, as Love, and as Spirit. Yet these
largely thing-like attributions co-exist with personal qualities, and
with real, ethical relations between God and the world: “God so loved
the world, as that He gave His only begotten Son, in order that anyone
who believeth in Him may not perish, but may have everlasting life.”
The Father “draws” men, and “sends” His Son into the world.[25]
And this Son has eternally pre-existed with the Father; is the very
instrument and principle of the world’s creation; and “is the true
Light that enlightened every man that cometh into the world.” And this
Word which, from the first, was already the Light of all men, became
Flesh specially to manifest fully this its Life and Light. Indeed He is
the only Light, and Way, and Truth, and Life; the only Door; the Living
Bread; the true Vine.[26]
This Revelation and Salvation is indeed assimilated by individual souls
and is received by them at a given moment, by a birth both new and from
above, and is followed by a new knowledge. But this knowledge is not
absolute nor unprogressive. Everywhere the Evangelist has indeed the
verb γιγνώσκω, but nowhere the noun Gnosis; and the full meaning of the
Revelation of the Father by the Son is to be only gradually revealed
by the Holy Spirit. And this special new knowledge is not the cause
but the effect of an ethical act on the part of the human soul,--an
act of full trust in the persons of God and of His Christ, and in the
intimations of the moral conscience as reflections of the divine will
and nature. “If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the
doctrine, whether it be from God, or whether I speak from myself”; “He
who doeth the truth, cometh to the light.”[27]
And this trust, and the experimental knowledge which flows from it,
lead to an interior conviction so strong as to make us practically
independent of external evidences. Hence in the First Epistle, this
“we _know_” is repeatedly emphasized: “We _know_, that, if He shall
be manifested, we shall be like Him”; “You _know_, that He was made
manifest, that He might take away sins.” And this knowledge is
communicated by the Spirit of God to man’s soul; the spirit bearing
witness, there within, to the truth of Christ’s words, communicated
from without. “The Spirit it is that beareth witness, for the Spirit
is the Truth.”[28]
External signs (miracles), and a certain un-ethical assent given to
them and their implications, these things are, even at their best,
but preliminary, and, of themselves, insufficient. Hence Our Lord can
find “many who believed in His name, seeing His signs (miracles) which
He did”; and yet could “not trust Himself to them.” Nicodemus indeed
can come to Our Lord, moved by the argument that “thou hast come a
teacher from God, for no man can do the signs (miracles) that thou
doest, unless God be with him.” But then Our Lord’s whole conversation
with him renders clear how imperfect and ignorant Nicodemus is so
far,--he had come by night, his soul was still in darkness. So also
“many Samaritans believed in Him, because of His sign,”--His miraculous
knowledge of her past history, shown to the Woman at the Well; but more
of them believed because of His own words to them: “We ourselves have
(now) heard, and we _know_ that this man is of a truth the Saviour of
the world.” Hence He can Himself bid the Apostles, in intimation of
their full and final privilege and duty, “believe in Me” (that is, My
words and the Spirit testifying within you to their Truth), “that I
am in the Father, and the Father is in Me”; and, only secondarily and
failing that fulness, “but if not, then believe, because of the very
works.” And the whole Joannine doctrine as to the object and method of
Faith is dramatically presented and summed up in the great culminating
scene and saying of the Fourth Gospel: “Thomas” (the Apostle who
would see a visible sign first, and would then build his Faith upon
that sight) “saith to Him: ‘My Lord and my God.’ Jesus saith to him:
‘Because thou hast seen Me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are
they that have not seen, and have believed.’”[29]
And this Faith and Knowledge arising thus, in its fulness, at most only
on occasion, and never because, of spacial and temporal signs, are
conceived as a timeless, Eternal Life, and as one which is already,
here and now, an actual present possession. “He who believeth in the
Son, hath eternal life”; “He who heareth and believeth My word, hath
eternal life”; “We know that we have passed from death unto life”;
“We know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, in His Son
Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.”[30] There is then
a profound immanence of Christ in the believing soul, and of such a
soul in Christ; and this mutual immanence bears some likeness to the
Immanence of the Father in Christ, and of Christ in the Father. “In
that day” (when “the Father shall give you the Spirit of Truth”) “ye
shall know that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I in you.”[31]
III. SCIENCE: THE APPREHENSION AND CONCEPTION OF BRUTE FACT AND IRON
LAW.
But now, athwart both the Hellenic and the Christian factors of our
lives, the first apparently so clear and complete and beautiful,
the latter, if largely dark and fragmentary, so deep and operative,
comes and cuts a third and last factor, that of Science, apparently
more peremptory and irresistible than either of its predecessors.[32]
For both the former factors would appear to melt into mid-air before
this last one. _They_ evidently cannot ignore _it_; _it_ apparently
can ignore _them_. If Metaphysics and Religion seem involved in a
perpetual round of interminable questions, solved, at most and at
best, for but this man and for that, and with an evidence for their
truth which can be and is gainsaid by many, but cannot be demonstrated
with a peremptory clearness to any one: Science, on the other hand,
would appear to give us just this _terra firma_ of an easy, immediate,
undeniable, continually growing, patently fruitful body of evidence and
of fact.
And not only can Metaphysics and Religion not ignore Science, in
the sense of denying or even overlooking its existence; they cannot
apparently, either of them, even begin or proceed or end without
constant reference, here frank and open, there tacit but none the
less potent, to the enterprises, the methods, the conclusions of the
Sciences one and all, and this even in view of establishing their own
contentions. And more and more of the territory formerly assigned to
Metaphysics or Religion seems in process of being conquered by Science:
in Metaphysics, by experimental psychology, and by the simple history
of the various philosophical systems, ideas, and technical terms,
and of the local and temporal, racial and cultural antecedents and
environments which gave rise to them; in Religion, by an analogous
observation and study of man in the past and present, of man studied
from within and from without.
1. _Three characteristics of this scientific spirit._
Now this scientific spirit has hitherto, since its birth at the
Renaissance, ever tended to the ever-increasing development of three
main characteristics, which are indeed but several aspects of one
single aim and end. There was and is, for one thing, the passion
for Clearness, which finds its expression in the application of
Mathematics and of the Quantitative view and standard to all and every
subject-matter, in so far as the latter is conceived as being truly
knowable at all. There was and is, for another, the great concept
of Law, of an iron Necessity running through and expressing itself
in all things, one great Determinism, before which all emotion and
volition, all concepts of Spontaneity and Liberty, of Personality
and Spirit, either Human or Divine, melt away, as so many petty
subjective wilfulnesses of selfish, childish, “provincial” man, bent
on fantastically humanizing this great, cold thing, the Universe, into
something responsive to his own profoundly unimportant and objectively
uninteresting sensations and demands. There was and is, for a third
thing, a vigorous Monism, both in the means and in the end of this
view. Our sources of information are _but one_,--the reasoning,
reckoning Intellect, backed up by readily repeatable, directly
verifiable Experiment. The resultant information is _but one_,--the
Universe within and without, a strict unbroken Mechanism.
If we look at the most characteristically modern elements of Descartes,
and, above all, of Spinoza, we cannot fail to find throughout, as
the reaction of this Scientific spirit upon Philosophy, the passion
for those three things: for Clearness and ready Transferableness of
ideas; for one universal, undeniable Common Element and Measure for
all knowledge of every degree and kind; and for Law, omnipresent and
inexorable. That is, we have here a passion for Thing as over against,
as above, Person; for the elimination of all wilfulness, even at the
cost of will itself, of all indetermination, obscurity and chance, even
at the cost of starving and drying up whole regions of our complex
nature, whole sources of information, and of violently simplifying and
impoverishing the outlook on to reality both within us and without.
2. _Fundamental motive of entire quest, deeply legitimate, indeed
religious: Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant._
And yet how unjust would he be who failed to recognize, in the case of
Spinoza especially, the noble, and at bottom deeply religious, motives
and aspirations underlying such excesses; or the new problems and
necessities, the permanent growth and gain, which this long process of
human thought has brought to Religion itself, especially in indirect
and unintentional ways!
For as to the motives, it ought not to be difficult to any one who
knows human history and human nature, to see how the all but complete
estrangement from Nature and Physical Fact which, from Socrates
onwards, with the but very partial exception of Aristotle, had, for
well-nigh two thousand years, preceded this reaction; how the treatment
of Matter and the Visible as more or less synonymous with Non-Being and
Irrationality, as a veil or even a wall, as a mere accident or even
a positive snare, lying everywhere between us and Reality, could not
fail to require and produce a swing of the pendulum in the opposite
direction. And the feeling and the perception of how superficial and
unreal, how oppressively confined, how intolerably fixed and ultimate,
how arrogant and cold and fruitless, such persistent neglect of the
Data of Sense had somehow, at last, rendered philosophy, gave now
polemical edge to men’s zealous study and discovery of _this_ world.
This study was perceived, even by the shallower thinkers, to be fair
and rational and fruitful in itself; and it was found, by some few
deep spirits, to be a strangely potent means of purifying, enlarging,
“deprovincializing” man himself. The severe discipline of a rigorous
study of man’s lowly, physical conditions and environment, things
hitherto so despised by him, was now at last to purify him of his own
childish immediacy of claim. The pettily selfish, shouting Individual
was to pass through the broad, still, purgatorial waters of a temporary
submergence under the conceptions, as vivid as though they were direct
experiences, of ruthless Law, of Mechanism, of the Thing; so as to pass
out, purified and enlarged, a Person, expressive of the Universal and
Objective, of Order and of Law.
It is especially in Spinoza that this deeper, universally human and
ethical, indeed we can say religious, implication and ideal of the
rigorously scientific spirit is present in all its noble intuition
and aspiration, and that at the same time, alas, this deep truth is
forced into a ruinously inappropriate method and formulation. For the
original end of the entire quest, an end which is still emotionally
dominant and which furnishes the hidden dialectic of the whole,--Man,
his nobility and interior purification and beatitude,--has here,
intellectually, become but a means; Man, in the real logic of this
system, is, hopelessly and finally, but a wheel in the huge mechanism
of that _natura naturata_ which Spinoza’s own richness and nobility of
character transcends with potent inconsistency. And this very system,
which is so nobly human and Christian in its ethical tone and in its
demand of a Conversion of the whole man, in its requiring man to
lose and sacrifice his petty self that he may gain his true self and
become a genuine constituent of the Universe and Thought of God, is
also the very one which, by its ruthless Naturalism and Determinism of
Doctrine and its universally Mathematical and Quantitative form and
method, logically eliminates all such qualitative differentiation and
conversion as impossible and futile.
The prima facie view of life as it presents itself to the clarifying,
Scientific Intellect, namely the omnipresence of the determinist
mechanism, has never been more impressively felt and pictured than by
Spinoza; the dispositions and happiness of the purified, disinterested
soul have rarely been experienced and described with more touching
elevation and power. But there is no real transition, indeed no
possibility of such, in his system, from that first aspect to this
latter state; for that first aspect, that apparent determinism, is for
his logic _not_ merely apparent or secondary, but the very truth of
truths, the very core and end of things.
And this bondage of mind to matter, this enslavement of the master to
the servant, this narrow, doctrinaire intellectualism and determinism,
is more hidden than cured in Leibniz, who, if he brings the immense
improvement because enrichment of a keen sense and love of the
Historical, loses, on the other hand, Spinoza’s grandly Conversional
tone and temper. A cheerful, easy, eminently sane but quite inadequate
bustle of manifold interests; a ready, pleasant optimism; an endless
laboriousness of the reasoning faculty; all this, even though carried
out on a scale unique since the days of Aristotle, is necessarily
unequal to face and bear “the burthen of all this unintelligible
world.”
And yet here, in him who may not unfitly be called the last of the
Dogmatic Rationalists and Optimists, we have already those great
perceptions which were destined more and more to burst the bonds of
this cold, clear, complete, confining outlook. For one thing, as
already stated, there is, alongside the love of the Material and
Mathematical, an almost equal love of the Historical and Human. There
is, for another thing, the deep consciousness of the Individuality
and Interiority of all real existences,--all that _is_ at all, has
an inside to it. And, finally, in further enforcement of this latter
doctrine, there is the fruitful conception of Subconscious States of
feeling and of mind in all living things.
Yet it is only in Kant that,--with all his obscurities and numberless
demonstrable inconsistencies, with all his saddening impoverishment
of the outlook in many ways,--we get, little conscious as he himself
is of such a service, the deep modern explanation of the ancient
pre-scientific neglect and suspicion of natural research. Here we are
led to see that the strictly Scientific view of Nature is necessarily
quantitative, but that the strictly Ethical, Spiritual view of man is
as necessarily qualitative; that the analysis of all natural phenomena
but leads to judgments as to what _is_, whereas the requirements of
human action lead to judgments of what _ought to be_. Here the weak
point lies in the contrast, established by him and pushed to the degree
of mutual exclusion, between Reason and Will. For the contrast which we
find in actual life is really between the deeper reason, ever closely
accompanied by deep emotion, this reason and emotion occasioning, and
strengthened by, the action of the whole man,--and all this is not
directly transferable; and the more superficial reasoning, having with
it little or no emotion,--the action of but one human faculty,--and
this action is readily transferable.
3. _Place and function of such science in the totality of man’s life._
The mistake in the past would thus lie, not in the doctrine that the
Visible cannot suffice for man and is not his mind’s true home; nor in
the implication that the Visible cannot directly and of itself reveal
to him the Spiritual world. The error would lie entirely in the double
implication or doctrine, that there is really nothing to be known about
Nature, or that what can be known of it can be attained by Metaphysical
or Mystical methods; and again that strictly quantitative, severe
scientific method and investigation can, even in the long run, be
safely neglected by the human soul, as far as its own spiritual health
is concerned.
We take it then that mankind has, after endless testings and
experiences, reached the following conclusions. We encounter
everywhere, both within us and without, both in the physical and
mental world, in the first instance, a whole network of phenomena;
and these phenomena are everywhere found to fall under certain laws,
and to be penetrable by certain methods of research, these laws and
methods varying indeed in character and definiteness according to the
subject-matter to which they apply, but in each case affording to man
simply indefinite scope for discovery without, and for self-discipline
within.
And all this preliminary work and knowledge does not directly require
religion nor does it directly lead to it; indeed we shall spoil both
the knowledge itself, and its effect upon our souls and upon religion,
if religion is here directly introduced. The phenomena of Astronomy and
Geology, of Botany and Zoology, of human Physiology and Psychology, of
Philology and History are and ought to be, in the first instance, the
same for all men, whether the said men do or do not eventually give
them a _raison d’être_ and formal rational interest by discovering the
metaphysical and religious convictions and conclusions which underlie
and alone give true unity to them and furnish a living link between the
mind observing and the things observed. Various as are these phenomena,
according to the department of human knowledge to which they severally
belong, yet they each and all have to be, in the first instance,
discovered and treated according to principles and methods immanent and
special to that department.
And the more rigorously this is accomplished, both by carrying
out these principles and methods to their fullest extent, and by
conscientiously respecting their limits of applicability and their
precise degree of truth and of range in the larger scheme of human
activity and conviction, the more will such science achieve three
deeply ethical, spiritually helpful results.
Such science will help to discipline, humble, purify the natural
eagerness and wilfulness, the cruder forms of anthropomorphism, of the
human mind and heart. This turning to the visible will thus largely
take the place of that former turning away from it; for only since the
Visible has been taken to represent laws, and, provisionally at least,
rigorously mechanical laws characteristic of itself, can it be thus
looked upon as a means of spiritual purification.
Such science again will help to stimulate those other, deeper
activities of human nature, which have made possible, and have all
along preceded and accompanied, these more superficial ones; and this,
although such science will doubtless tend to do the very opposite, if
the whole nature be allowed to become exclusively engrossed in this
one phenomenal direction. Still it remains true that perhaps never has
man turned to the living God more happily and humbly, than when coming
straight away from such rigorous, disinterested phenomenal analysis, as
long as such analysis is felt to be both other than, and preliminary
and secondary to, the deepest depths of the soul’s life and of all
ultimate Reality.
And finally, such science will correspondingly help to give depth and
mystery, drama and pathos, a rich spirituality, to the whole experience
and conception of the soul and of life, of the world and of God.
Instead of a more or less abstract picture, where all is much on the
same plane, where all is either fixed and frozen, or all is in a state
of feverish flux, we get an outlook, with foreground, middle distances,
and background, each contrasting with, each partially obscuring,
partially revealing, the other; but each doing so, with any freshness
and fulness, only in and through the strongly willing, the fully active
and gladly suffering, the praying, aspiring, and energizing spiritual
Personality, which thus both gives and gets its own true self ever more
entirely and more deeply.
4. _Science to be taken, throughout our life, in a double sense and
way._
In such a conception of the place of Science, we have permanently
to take Science, throughout life, in a double sense and way. In the
first instance, Science is self-sufficing, its own end and its own
law. In the second instance, which alone is ever final, Science is
but a part of a whole, but a function, a necessary yet preliminary
function, of the whole of man; and it is but part, a necessary yet
preliminary part, of his outlook. Crush out, or in any way mutilate or
deautonomize, this part, and all the rest will suffer. Sacrifice the
rest to this part, either by starvation or attempted suppression, or by
an impatient assimilation of this immense remainder to that smaller and
more superficial part, and the whole man suffers again, and much more
seriously.
And the danger, in both directions,--let us have the frankness to admit
the fact,--is constant and profound: even to see it continuously is
difficult; to guard against it with effect, most difficult indeed.
For to starve or to suspect, to cramp or to crush this phenomenal
apprehension and investigation, in the supposed interest of the
ulterior truths, must ever be a besetting temptation and weakness for
the religious instinct, wherever this instinct is strong and fixed, and
has not yet itself been put in the way of purification.
For Religion is ever, _qua_ religion, authoritative and absolute. What
constitutes religion is not simply to hold a view and to try and live
a life, with respect to the Unseen and the Deity, as possibly or even
certainly beautiful or true or good: but precisely that which is over
and above this,--the holding this view and this life to proceed somehow
from God Himself, so as to bind my innermost mind and conscience to
unhesitating assent. Not simply that I think it, but that, in addition,
I feel bound to think it, transforms a thought about God into a
religious act.
Now this at once brings with it a double and most difficult problem.
For Religion thus becomes, by its very genius and in exact proportion
to its reality, something so entirely _sui generis_, so claimful
and supreme, that it at once exacts a two-fold submission, the one
simultaneous, the other successive; the first as it were in space, the
second in time. The first regards the relations of religion to things
non-religious. It might be parodied by saying: “Since religion is
true and supreme, religion is all we require: all things else must be
bent or broken to her sway.” She has at the very least the right to a
primacy not of honour only, but of direct jurisdiction, over and within
all activities and things. The second regards the form and concept of
religion itself. Since religion always appears both in a particular
form at a particular time and place, _and_ as divine and hence
authoritative and eternal; and since the very strength and passion of
religion depend upon the vigorous presence and close union of these two
elements: religion will ever tend either really to oppose all change
within itself, or else to explain away its existence. Religion would
thus appear doomed to be either vague and inoperative, or obscurantist
and insincere.
And it is equally clear that the other parts of man’s nature and of his
outlook cannot simply accept such a claim, nor could religion itself
flourish at all if they could and did accept it. They cannot accept
the claim of religion to be immediately and simply all, for they are
fully aware of being themselves something also. They cannot accept her
claim to dictate to them their own domestic laws, for they are fully
aware that they each, to live truly at all, require their own laws
and their own, at least relative, autonomy. However much man may be
supremely and finally a religious animal, he is not _only_ that; but
he is a physical and sexual, a fighting and artistic, a domestic and
social, a political and philosophical animal as well.
Nor can man, even simply _qua_ religious man, consent to a simple
finality in the experience and explication, in the apprehension and
application of religion, either in looking back into the past; or
in believing and loving, suffering and acting in the present; or in
forecasting the future, either of the race or of himself alone. For the
_here and now_, the concrete “immediacy,” the unique individuality of
the religious experience for _me_, in this room, on this very day, its
freshness, is as true and necessary a quality of living religion as any
other whatsoever. And if all life sustains itself only by constant,
costing renovation and adaptation of itself to its environment, the
religious life, as the most intense and extensive of all lives, must
somehow be richest in such newness in oldness, such renovative,
adaptive, assimilative power.
5. _All this seen at work in man’s actual history._
Now it is deeply instructive to observe all this at work historically.
For here we find every variety of attitude towards this very point.
There are men of Religion who attempt to do without Science, and
men of Science who attempt to do without Religion. Or again, men of
Religion attempt to _level up_,--to assimilate the principles and
results of the various sciences directly to religion, or at least to
rule those scientific principles and results directly by religion.
Or men of Science attempt to _level down_, to make religion into a
mere philosophy or even a natural history. Yet we find also,--with
so persistent a recurrence in all manner of places and times, as
itself to suggest the inherent, essential, indestructible truth of the
view,--another, a far more costing attitude. This attitude refuses
all mutilation either of normal human nature or of its outlook, all
oppression of one part by the other; for it discovers that these
various levels of life have been actually practised in conjunction by
many an individual in the past and in the present; and that, where they
have been practised within a large organization of faith and love,
they have ever led to a fuller reality and helpfulness both of the
science and of the religion concerned. Hence the mind thus informed
cannot doubt the truth of this solution, however difficult at all times
may be its practice, and however little final at any time can be its
detailed intellectual analysis.
IV. SUMMING UP: HELLENISM OR HARMONIZATION, CHRISTIANITY OR SPIRITUAL
EXPERIENCE, AND SCIENCE OR ACCEPTANCE OF A PRELIMINARY MECHANISM, ALL
THREE NECESSARY TO MAN.
To sum up all this first chapter, we have got so far as this. We have
seen that humanity has, so far, found and worked out three forces and
conceptions of life, forces which are still variously operative in each
of us, but which find their harmonious interaction in but few men,
their full theoretical systematization in none.[33]
There is the ancient, Greek contribution, chiefly intellectual and
aesthetic, mostly cold and clear, quick and conclusive, with, upon
the whole, but a slight apprehension of personality and freedom, of
conscience and of sin, and little or no sense of the difference and
antagonism between these realities and simply Mathematical, Mechanical
laws and concepts. It is a view profoundly abstract, and, at bottom,
determinist: the will follows the intellect necessarily, in exact
proportion to the clearness of information of the former. And the
strength of this view, which was possible even to that gifted race
just because of the restrictedness of its knowledge concerning the
length and breadth of nature and of history, and still more with regard
to the depths of the human character and conscience, consists in its
freshness, completeness, and unity. And this ideal of an ultimate
harmonization of our entire life and of its theory we must never lose,
more and more difficult though its even approximate realization has of
necessity become.
There is next the middle, Christian contribution, directly moral and
religious, deep and dim and tender, slow and far-reaching, immensely
costly, infinitely strong; with its discovery and exemplification of
the mysterious depth and range and complexity of human personality
and freedom, of conscience and of sin; a view profoundly concrete
and at bottom libertarian. The goodwill here first precedes, and then
outstrips, and determines the information supplied by the intellect:
“Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” And the
strength of this position consists in its being primarily not a view,
but a life, a spiritual, religious life, requiring, implying, indeed
proclaiming, definite doctrines concerning God and man, and their
relations to each other, but never exhausted by these doctrines even
in their collectivity, inexhaustible though these in their turn are by
their union with the life of the spirit, their origin and end.
There is finally the modern, Scientific contribution, intensely
impersonal and determinist, directly neither metaphysical nor
religious, but more abstract even than the Greek view, in the
mathematical constituent of its method, and more concrete in a sense
than Christianity itself, in the other, the sensible-experiment
constituent of its method. The most undeniable of abstractions, those
of mathematics, (undeniable just because of their enunciation of
nothing but certain simplest relations between objects, supposing
those objects to exist,) are here applied to the most undeniable of
concretions, the direct experiences of the senses. And this mysterious
union which, on the surface, is so utterly heterogeneous, is itself
at all explicable only on mental, metaphysical assumptions and on the
admission of the reality and priority of Mind. It is a union that has
turned out as unassailable in its own province, as it is incapable
of suppressing or replacing the wider and deeper truths and lives
discovered for us respectively by Hellenism and Christianity.
Only in the case that man could but reckon mathematically and observe
with his senses, or in the case that man were indeed provided with
other faculties, but that he found Reality outside him and within him
to be properly apprehensible by the mathematico-experimental process
alone, could there be any serious question of such a final suppression
of by far the greater and deeper portion of himself. Instead of any
such deadlock the facts of these last four centuries bear out the
contention that neither can the religious life suppress or do without
the philosophical and the scientific, nor can either of these other two
lives suppress or permanently do without its fellow or without religion.
But all this and its detailed practical application will, I trust,
become much clearer as we proceed.
CHAPTER II
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF RELIGION
INTRODUCTORY.
We have found then that all life and all truth are, for all their
unity, deeply complex, for us men at all events; indeed that they
are both in exact proportion to their reality. In this, our second
chapter, I should like to show the complexity special to the deepest
kind of life, to Religion; and to attempt some description of the
working harmonization of this complexity. If Religion turned out to
be simple, in the sense of being a monotone, a mere oneness, a whole
without parts, it could not be true; and yet if Religion be left too
much a mere multiplicity, a mere congeries of parts without a whole, it
cannot be persuasive and fully operative. And the several constituents
are there, whether we harbour, recognize, and discipline them or not;
but these constituents will but hinder or supplant each other, in
proportion as they are not somehow each recognized in their proper
place and rank, and are not each allowed and required to supplement
and to stimulate the other. And though no amount of talk or theory
can, otherwise than harmfully, take the place of life, yet observation
and reflection can help us to see where and how life acts: what are
the causes, or at least the concomitants, of its inhibition and of
its stimulation and propagation, and can thus supply us with aids to
action, which action will then, in its turn, help to give experimental
fulness and precision to what otherwise remains a more or less vague
and empty scheme.
I. THE THREE ELEMENTS, AS THEY SUCCESSIVELY APPEAR IN THE CHILD, THE
YOUTH, AND THE ADULT MAN.
Now if we will but look back upon our own religious life, we shall
find that, in degrees and in part in an order of succession varying
indefinitely with each individual, three modalities, three modes of
apprehension and forms of appeal and of outlook, have been and are at
work within us and around.[34]
1. _Sense and Memory, the Child’s means of apprehending Religion._
In the doubtless overwhelming majority of cases, there came first,
as far as we can reconstruct the history of our consciousness, the
appeal to our infant senses of some external religious symbol or place,
some picture or statue, some cross or book, some movement of some
attendant’s hands and eyes. And this appeal would generally have been
externally interpreted to us by some particular men or women, a Mother,
Nurse, Father, Teacher, Cleric, who themselves would generally have
belonged to some more or less well-defined traditional, institutional
religion. And their appeal would be through my senses to my imaginative
faculty first, and then to my memory of that first appeal, and would
represent the principle of authority in its simplest form.
All here as yet works quasi-automatically. The little child gets
these impressions long before itself can choose between, or even is
distinctly conscious of them; it believes whatever it sees and is told,
equally, as so much fact, as something to build on. If you will, it
believes these things to be true, but not in the sense of contrasting
them with error; the very possibility of the latter has not yet come
into sight. And at this stage the External, Authoritative, Historical,
Traditional, Institutional side and function of Religion are everywhere
evident. Cases like that of John Stuart Mill, of being left outside of
all religious tradition, we may safely say, will ever remain exceptions
to help prove the rule. The five senses then, perhaps that of touch
first, and certainly that of sight most; the picturing and associative
powers of the imagination; and the retentiveness of the memory, are
the side of human nature specially called forth. And the external,
sensible, readily picturable facts and the picturing functions of
religion correspond to and feed this side, as readily as does the
mother’s milk correspond to and feed that same mother’s infant.
Religion is here, above all, a Fact and Thing.
2. _Question and Argument, the Youth’s mode of approaching Religion._
But soon there wakes up another activity and requirement of human
nature, and another side of religion comes forth to meet it. Direct
experience, for one thing, brings home to the child that these
sense-informations are not always trustworthy, or identical in its own
case and in that of others. And, again, the very impressiveness of this
external religion stimulates indeed the sense of awe and of wonder, but
it awakens curiosity as well. The time of trustful questioning, but
still of questioning, first others, then oneself, has come. The old
impressions get now more and more consciously sought out, and selected
from among other conflicting ones; the facts seem to clamour for
reasons to back them, against the other hostile facts and appearances,
or at least against those men in books, if not in life, who dare to
question or reject them. Affirmation is beginning to be consciously
exclusive of its contrary: I begin to feel that _I_ hold _this_, and
that _you_ hold _that_; and that I cannot do both; and that I do the
former, and exclude and refuse the latter.
Here it is the reasoning, argumentative, abstractive side of human
nature that begins to come into play. Facts have now in my mind to
be related, to be bound to other facts, and men to men; the facts
themselves begin to stand for ideas or to have the latter in them
or behind them. The measuring-rod seems to be over all things. And
religion answers this demand by clear and systematic arguments and
concatenations: this and this is now connected with that and that; this
is true or this need not be false, because of that and that. Religion
here becomes Thought, System, a Philosophy.
3. _Intuition, Feeling, and Volitional requirements and evidences, the
Mature Man’s special approaches to Faith._
But yet a final activity of human nature has to come to its fullest,
and to meet its response in a third side of Religion. For if in
Physiology and Psychology all action whatsoever is found to begin with
a sense-impression, to move through the central process of reflection,
and to end in the final discharge of will and of action, the same final
stage can be found in the religious life. Certain interior experiences,
certain deep-seated spiritual pleasures and pains, weaknesses and
powers, helps and hindrances, are increasingly known and felt in and
through interior and exterior action, and interior suffering, effort,
and growth. For man is necessarily a creature of action, even more
than of sensation and of reflection; and in this action of part of
himself against other parts, of himself with or against other men,
with or against this or that external fact or condition, he grows and
gradually comes to his real self, and gains certain experiences as to
the existence and nature and growth of this his own deeper personality.
Man’s emotional and volitional, his ethical and spiritual powers, are
now in ever fuller motion, and they are met and fed by the third side
of religion, the Experimental and Mystical. Here religion is rather
felt than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather than
analyzed, is action and power, rather than either external fact or
intellectual verification.
II. EACH ELEMENT EVER ACCOMPANIED BY SOME AMOUNT OF THE OTHER TWO.
DIFFICULTY OF THE TRANSITIONS FROM ONE STAGE TO THE OTHER.
Now these three sides of the human character, and corresponding three
elements of Religion, are never, any one of them, without a trace
or rudiment of the other two; and this joint presence of three such
disparate elements ever involves tension, of a fruitful or dangerous
kind.[35]
1. _Utility of this joint presence._
In the living human being indeed there never exists a mere apprehension
of something external and sensible, without any interior elaboration,
any interpretation by the head and heart. We can hardly allow, we
can certainly in nowise picture to ourselves, even an infant of a
few hours old, as working, and being worked upon, by nothing beyond
these sense-perceptions alone. Already some mental, abstractive,
emotional-volitional reaction and interpretation is presumably at
work; and not many weeks or months pass before this is quite obviously
the case. And although, on the other hand, the impressions of the
senses, of the imagination and the memory are, normally, more numerous,
fresh, and lasting in early than in later years, yet up to the end
they continue to take in some new impressions, and keep up their most
necessary functions of supplying materials, stimulants, and tests to
the other powers of the soul.
Thus, too, Religion is at all times more or less both traditional
and individual; both external and internal; both institutional,
rational, and volitional. It always answers more or less to the needs
of authority and society; of reason and proof; of interior sustenance
and purification. I believe because I am told, because it is true,
because it answers to my deepest interior experiences and needs. And,
everything else being equal, my faith will be at its richest and
deepest and strongest, in so far as all these three motives are most
fully and characteristically operative within me, at one and the same
time, and towards one and the same ultimate result and end.
2. _The two crises of the soul, when it adds Speculation to
Institutionalism, and Mysticism to both._
Now all this is no fancy scheme, no petty or pretty artificial
arrangement: the danger and yet necessity of the presence of these
three forces, the conflicts and crises within and between them all,
in each human soul, and between various men and races that typify or
espouse one or the other force to the more or less complete exclusion
of the other, help to form the deepest history, the truest tragedy or
triumph of the secret life of every one of us.
The transition from the child’s religion, so simply naïve and
unselfconscious, so tied to time and place and particular persons and
things, so predominantly traditional and historical, institutional and
external, to the right and normal type of a young man’s religion, is
as necessary as it is perilous. The transition is necessary. For all
the rest of him is growing,--body and soul are growing in clamorous
complexity in every direction: how then can the deepest part of his
nature, his religion, not require to grow and develop also? And how can
it permeate and purify all the rest, how can it remain and increasingly
become “the secret source of all his seeing,” of his productiveness and
courage and unification, unless it continually equals and exceeds all
other interests within the living man, by its own persistent vitality,
its rich and infinite variety, its subtle, ever-fresh attraction and
inexhaustible resourcefulness and power? But the crisis is perilous.
For he will be greatly tempted either to cling exclusively to his
existing, all but simply institutional, external position, and to fight
or elude all approaches to its reasoned, intellectual apprehension
and systematization; and in this case his religion will tend to
contract and shrivel up, and to become a something simply alongside
of other things in his life. Or he will feel strongly pressed to let
the individually intellectual simply supplant the institutional, in
which case his religion will grow hard and shallow, and will tend to
disappear altogether. In the former case he will, at best, assimilate
his religion to external law and order, to Economics and Politics;
in the latter case he will, at best, assimilate it to Science and
Philosophy. In the first case, he will tend to superstition; in the
second, to rationalism and indifference.
But even if he passes well through this first crisis, and has thus
achieved the collaboration of these two religious forces, the external
and the intellectual, his religion will still be incomplete and
semi-operative, because still not reaching to what is deepest and
nearest to his will. A final transition, the addition of the third
force, that of the emotional-experimental life, must yet be safely
achieved. And this again is perilous: for the two other forces will,
even if single, still more if combined, tend to resist this third
force’s full share of influence to the uttermost. To the external
force this emotional power will tend to appear as akin to revolution;
to the intellectual side it will readily seem mere subjectivity and
sentimentality ever verging on delusion. And the emotional-experimental
force will, in its turn, be tempted to sweep aside both the external,
as so much oppressive ballast; and the intellectual, as so much
hair-splitting or rationalism. And if it succeeds, a shifting
subjectivity, and all but incurable tyranny of mood and fancy, will
result,--fanaticism is in full sight.
III. PARALLELS TO THIS TRIAD OF RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS.
If we would find, applied to other matters, the actual operation and
co-operation, at the earliest stage of man’s life, of the identical
powers under discussion, we can find them, by a careful analysis of our
means and processes of knowledge, or of the stages of all reflex action.
1. _The three constituents of Knowledge._
Even the most elementary acquisition, indeed the very possibility,
of any and all certitude and knowledge, is dependent for us upon the
due collaboration of the three elements or forces of our nature, the
sensational, the rational, the ethico-mystical.[36]
There is, first, in the order of our consciousness and in the degree of
its undeniableness, the element of our actual impressions, the flux of
our consciousness as it apprehends particular sights and sounds, smells
and tastes and touches; particular sensations of rest and movement,
pleasure and pain, memory, judgment, and volition, a flux, “changeless
in its ceaseless change.” We have so far found neither a true object
for thought, nor a subject which can think. And yet this element,
and this alone, is the simply, passively received, the absolutely
undeniable part of our experience,--we cannot deny it if we would. And
again, it is the absolutely necessary pre-requisite for our exercise or
acquisition, indeed for our very consciousness, of the other two means
or elements, without which there can be no real knowledge.
For there is, next in the logical order of the analysis of our
consciousness and in the degree of its undeniableness, the element
of the various forms of necessary thought, in as much as these are
experienced by us as necessary. We can, with Aristotle, simply call
them the ten categories; or we can, with greater precision and
extension, group them, so far with Kant, under the two main heads
of the two pure “aesthetic” Perceptions of time and space, on the
one hand; and of the various “analytic” Forms of judgment and of the
Categories of Unity, Reality, Substance, Possibility, etc., on the
other hand. Now it can be shown that it is only by means of this whole
second element, only through the co-operation of these “perceptions”
and forms of thought, that any kind even of dim feeling of ordered
succession or of system, of unity or meaning, is found by our mind in
that first element. Only these two elements, found and taken together,
present us, in their interaction, with even the impression and
possibility of something to reason _about_, and something _wherewith_
to reason.
The second element then differs from the first in this, that whereas
the first presents its contents simply as actual and undeniable, yet
without so far any necessity or significance: the second presents its
contents as both actual and necessary. By means of the first element
I see a red rose, but without any feeling of more than the fact that a
rose, or at least this one, _is_ red; it might quite as well be yellow
or blue. By means of the second element, I think of a body of any kind,
not only as actually occupying some particular space and time, but as
_necessarily_ doing so; I feel that I _must_ so think of it.
And yet there is a third and last element necessary to give real
value to the two previous ones. For only on the condition that I
am willing to trust these intimations of necessity, to believe
that these necessities of my subjective thought are objective as
well, and correspond to the necessities of Being, can I reach the
trans-subjective, can I have any real knowledge and experience of
anything whatsoever, either within me or without. The most elementary
experience, the humblest something to be granted as really existing
and as to be reasoned from, is thus invariably and inevitably composed
for me of three elements, of which only the first two are directly
experienced by me at all. And the third element, the ethico-mystical,
has to be there, I have to trust and endorse the intimations of
necessity furnished by the second element, if anything is to come of
the whole movement.
Thus, here also, at the very source of all our certainty, of the worth
attributable to the least or greatest of our thoughts and feelings
and acts, we already find the three elements: indubitable sensation,
clear thought, warm faith in and through action. And thus life here
already consists of multiplicity in unity; and what in it is absolutely
indubitable, is of value only because it constitutes the indispensable
starting-point and stimulation for the apprehension and affirmation
of realities not directly experienced, not absolutely undeniable, but
which alone bear with them all the meaning, all the richness, all the
reality and worth of life.
2. _The three links in the chain of Reflex Action._
We can also find this same triad, perhaps more simply, if we look
to Psychology, and that most assured and most far-reaching of all
its results, the fact and analysis of Reflex Action. For we find
here that all the activities of specifically human life begin with a
sense-impression, as the first, the one simply _given_ element; that
they move into and through a central process of mental abstraction and
reflection, as the second element, contributed by the mind itself; and
that they end, as the third element, in the discharge of will and of
action, in an act of free affirmation, expansion, and love.
In this endless chain composed of these groups of three links each,
the first link and the last link are obscure and mysterious: the
first, as coming from without us, and as still below our own thought;
the third, as going out from us, and seen by us only in its external
results, never in its actual operation, nor in its effect upon our
own central selves. Only the middle link is clear to us. And yet the
most mysterious part of the whole process, the effect of it all upon
the central self, is also the most certain and the most important
result of the whole movement, a movement which ever culminates in a
modification of the personality and which prepares this personality for
the next round of sense-perception, intellectual abstraction, ethical
affirmation and volitional self-determination,--acts in which light and
love, fixed and free, hard and cold and warm, are so mysteriously, so
universally, and yet so variously linked.
IV. DISTRIBUTION OF THE THREE ELEMENTS AMONGST MANKIND AND THROUGHOUT
HUMAN HISTORY.
Let us now watch and see where and how the three elements of Religion
appear among the periods of man’s life, the human professions, and
the races of mankind; then how they succeed each other in history
generally; and finally how they exist among the chief types and phases
of the Oriental, Classical Graeco-Roman, and Judaeo-Christian religions.
1. _The Elements: their distribution among man’s various ages, sexes,
professions, and races._
We have already noticed how children incline to the memory-side, to
the external, social type; and it is well they should do so, and
they should be wisely helped therein. Those passing through the
storm-and-stress period insist more upon the reason, the internal,
intellectual type; and mature souls lay stress upon the feelings
and the will, the internal, ethical type. So again, women generally
tend either to an excess of the external, to superstition; or of the
emotional, to fanaticism. Men, on the contrary, appear generally
to incline to an excess of the intellectual, to rationalism and
indifference.
Professions, too, both by the temperaments which they presuppose, and
the habits of mind which they foster, have various affinities. The
fighting, administrative, legal and political sciences and services,
readily incline to the external and institutional; the medical,
mathematical, natural science studies, to the internal-intellectual;
the poetical, artistic, humanitarian activities, to the
internal-emotional.
And whole races have tended and will tend, upon the whole, to one or
other of these three excesses: _e.g._ the Latin races, to Externalism
and Superstition; the Teutonic races, to the two Interiorisms,
Rationalism and Fanaticism.
2. _Co-existence and succession of the Three Elements in history
generally._
The human race at large has evidently been passing, upon the whole,
from the exterior to the interior, but with a constant tendency to
drop one function for another, instead of supplementing, stimulating,
purifying each by means of the other two.
If we go back as far as any analyzable records will carry us, we
find that, in proportion as religion emerges from pure fetichism,
it has ever combined with the apprehension of a Power conceived, at
last and at best, as of a Father in heaven, that of a Bond with its
brethren upon earth. Never has the sacrifice, the so-to-speak vertical
relation between the individual man and God, between the worshipper
and the object of his worship, been without the sacrificial meal, the
communion, the so-to-speak lateral, horizontal relations between man
and his fellow-man, between the worshippers one and all. Never has
religion been purely and entirely individual; always has it been,
as truly and necessarily, social and institutional, traditional and
historical. And this traditional element, not all the religious genius
in the world can ever escape or replace: it was there, surrounding
and moulding the very pre-natal existence of each one of us; it will
be there, long after we have left the scene. We live and die its wise
servants and stewards, or its blind slaves, or in futile, impoverishing
revolt against it: we never, for good or for evil, really get beyond
its reach.
And yet all this stream and environment of the traditional and social
could make no impression upon me whatsoever unless it were met by
certain secret sympathies, by certain imperious wants and energies
within myself. If the contribution of tradition is _quantitatively_
by far the most important, and might be compared to the contribution
furnished by the Vocabulary to the constitution of a definite,
particular language,--the contribution of the individual is,
_qualitatively_ and for that individual, more important still,
and might be compared to the contribution of the Grammar to the
constitution of that same language: for it is the Grammar which,
though incomparably less in amount than the Vocabulary, yet definitely
constitutes any and every language.
And there is here no necessary conflict with the claim of Tradition.
It is true that all real, actual Religion is ever an act of submission
to some fact or truth conceived as not only true but as obligatory, as
coming from God, and hence as beyond and above our purely subjective
fancies, opinings, and wishes. But it is also true that, if I could
not mentally hear or see, I should be incapable of hearing or
seeing anything of this kind or of any other; and that without some
already existing interior affinity with and mysterious capacity for
discriminating between such intimations--as either corresponding to
or as traversing my existing imperious needs and instincts--I could
not apprehend the former as coming from God. Without, then, such
non-fanciful, non-wilful, subjective capacities and dispositions,
there is for us not even the apprehension of the existence of such
objective realities: such capacities and dispositions are as necessary
pre-requisites to every act of faith, as sight is the absolute
pre-requisite for my discrimination between black and white. Hence as
far back as we can go, the traditional and social, the institutional
side of religion was accompanied, in varying, and at first small or
less perceptible degrees and forms, by intellectual and experimental
interpretation and response.
3. _The Three Elements in the great Religions._
Even the Greek religion, so largely naturalistic up to the very end,
appears, in the centuries of its relative interiorization, as a
triad composed of a most ancient traditional cultus, a philosophy of
religion, and an experimental-ethical life; the latter element being
readily exemplified by the Demon of Socrates, and by the Eleusinian and
Orphic Mysteries.
In India and Tibet, again, Brahmanism and Buddhism may be said to have
divided these three elements between them, the former representing as
great an excess of the external as Buddhism does of abstruse reasoning
and pessimistic emotion. Mahometanism, while combining, in very
imperfect proportions, all three elements within itself, lays special
stress upon the first, the external element; and though harbouring, for
centuries now and more or less everywhere, the third, the mystical
element, looks, in its strictly orthodox representatives, with
suspicion upon this mysticism.
Judaism was slow in developing the second, the intellectual element;
and the third, the mystical, is all but wholly absent till the Exilic
period, and does not become a marked feature till still later on, and
in writers under Hellenistic influence. It is in the Book of Wisdom,
still more in Philo, that we find all three sides almost equally
developed. And from the Hasmonean period onwards till the destruction
of Jerusalem by Titus, we find a severe and ardent external,
traditional, authoritative school in the Pharisees; an accommodating
and rationalizing school in the Sadducees; and, apart from both, more a
sect than a school, the experimental, ascetical, and mystical body of
the Essenes.
But it is in Christianity, and throughout its various vicissitudes and
schools, that we can most fully observe the presence, characteristics,
and interaction of these three modalities. We have already seen how
the New Testament writings can be grouped, with little or no violence,
according to the predominance of one of these three moods, under the
heads of the traditional, historic, external, the “Petrine” school; the
reasoning, speculative-internal, the Pauline; and the experimental,
mystical-internal, the Joannine school. And in the East, up to Clement
of Alexandria, in the West up to St. Augustine, we find the prevalence
of the first type. And next, in the East, in Clement and Origen, in
St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the Alexandrian and the Antiochene school
generally, and in the West, in St. Augustine, we find predominantly a
combination of the second and third types. The Areopagitic writings of
the end of the fifth century still further emphasize and systematize
this Neo-Platonic form of mystical speculation, and become indeed
the great treasure-house from which above all the Mystics, but also
largely the Scholastics, throughout the Middle Ages, drew much of their
literary material.
And those six or seven centuries of the Middle Ages are full of the
contrasts and conflicts between varying forms of Institutionalism,
Intellectualism, and Mysticism. Especially clearly marked is the
parallelism, interaction, and apparent indestructibleness of the
Scholastic and Mystical currents. Abelard and St. Bernard, St. Thomas
of Aquin and the great Franciscan Doctors, above all the often
largely latent, yet really ceaseless conflict between Realism and
Nominalism, all can be rightly taken as caused by various combinations
and degrees, insufficiencies or abnormalities in the action of the
three great powers of the human soul, and of the three corresponding
root-forms and functions of religion. And whereas, during the
prevalence of Realism, affective, mystical religion is the concomitant
and double of intellectual religion; during the later prevalence of
Nominalism, Mysticism becomes the ever-increasing supplement, and at
last, ever more largely, the substitute, for the methods of reasoning.
“Do penance and believe in the Gospel” becomes now the favourite text,
even in the mouth of Gerson (who died in 1429), the great Nominalist
Doctor, the Chancellor of the then greatest intellectual centre
upon earth, the University of Paris. A constant depreciation of all
dialectics, indeed largely of human knowledge generally, appears even
more markedly in the pages of the gentle and otherwise moderate Thomas
of Kempen (who died in 1471).
Although the Humanist Renaissance was not long in carrying away many
minds and hearts from all deeper consciousness and effort of a moral
and religious sort, yet in so far as men retained and but further
deepened and enriched their religious outlook and life, the three
old forms and modalities reappear, during the earlier stages of the
movement, in fresh forms and combinations. Perhaps the most truly
comprehensive and Christian representative of the new at its best, is
Cardinal Nicolas of Coes, the precursor of modern philosophy. For he
combines the fullest adhesion to, and life-long labour for, External
Institutional authority, with the keenest Intellectual, Speculative
life, and with the constant temper and practice of experimental and
Mystical piety. And a similar combination we find in Blessed Sir Thomas
More in England, who lays down his life in defence of Institutional
Religion and of the authority of the visible Church and its earthly
head; who is a devoted lover of the New Learning, both Critical and
Philosophical; and who continuously cultivates the Interior Life. A
little later on, we find the same combination in Cardinal Ximenes in
Spain.
But it is under the stress and strain of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation movements that the depth and vitality of the three
currents gets specially revealed. For in Germany, and in Continental
Protestantism generally, we see (immediately after the very short
first “fluid” stage of Luther’s and Zwingli’s attitude consequent upon
their breach with Rome) the three currents in a largely separate
condition, and hence with startling distinctness. Luther, Calvin,
Zwingli, different as are their temperaments and both their earlier
and their later Protestant attitudes and doctrines, all three soon
fall back upon some form and fragmentary continuation, or even in
its way intensification, of Institutional Religion,--driven to such
conservatism by the iron necessity of real life and the irrepressible
requirements of human nature. They thus formed that heavy untransparent
thing, orthodox Continental Protestantism. Laelius and Faustus Socinus
attempt the construction of a purely Rationalistic Religion, and
capture and intensify the current of a clear, cold Deism, in which the
critical mind is to be supreme. And the Anabaptist and other scattered
sects and individuals (the latter represented at their best by
Sebastian Frank) attempt, in their turn, to hold and develop a purely
interior, experimental, emotional-intuitive, ecstatic Religion, which
is warm, indeed feverish and impulsive, and distrusts both the visible
and institutional, and the rational and critical.
In England the same phenomenon recurs in a modified form. For in
Anglicanism, the most characteristic of its parties, the High Church
school, represents predominantly the Historical, Institutional
principle. The Latitudinarian school fights for the Rational, Critical,
and Speculative element. The Evangelical school stands in close
spiritual affinity to all but the Unitarian Nonconformists in England,
and represents the Experimental, Mystical element. We readily think
of Laud and Andrewes, Pusey and Keble as representatives of the first
class; of Arnold, Stanley, and Jowett as figures of the second class;
of Thomas Scott, John Newton, and Charles Simeon as types of the third
class. _The Tracts for the Times_, _Essays and Reviews_, and (further
back) Bunyan’s Works, would roughly correspond to them in literature.
And this trinity of tendency can also be traced in Catholicism. Whole
Religious Orders and Congregations can be seen or felt to tend,
upon the whole, to one or the other type. The Jesuits can be taken
as predominantly making for the first type, for fact, authority,
submission, obedience; the Dominicans for the second type, for thought,
a philosophico-speculative, intellectual religion; the Benedictines,
in their noble Congregation of St. Maur, for a historico-critical
intellectual type; the French Oratory, for a combination of both the
speculative (Malebranche) and the critical (Simon, Thomassin); and
the Franciscans, for the third, for action and experimental, affective
spirituality.
And yet none of these Orders but has had its individuals, and even
whole secondary periods, schools, and traditions, markedly typical of
some current other than that specially characteristic of the Order
as a whole. There are the great Critics and Historians of the Jesuit
Order: the Spanish Maldonatus, the New Testament Scholar, admirable for
his time, and helpful and unexhausted still; the French Denys Petau,
the great historian of Christian Doctrine and of its development;
the Flemish Bollandists, with their unbroken tradition of thorough
critical method and incorruptible accuracy and impartiality. There are
the great Jesuit Mystics: the Spanish Venerable Balthazar Alvarez,
declared by St. Teresa to be the holiest mystical soul she had ever
known; and the Frenchmen, Louis Lallemant and Jean Joseph Surin. There
are those most attractive figures, combining the Scholar and the
Mystic: Blessed Edmund Campion, the Oxford Scholar and Elizabethan
Martyr; and Jean Nicolas Grou, the French translator of Plato, who
died in exile in England in 1800. The Dominicans have, from the
first, been really representative of external authority as well of
the speculative rational bent; and the mystical side has never been
wanting to them, so amongst the early German Dominicans, Tauler and
Suso, and many a Dominican female Saint. The Benedictines from the
first produced great rulers; such striking types of external authority
as the Pope-Saints, Gregory the Great and Gregory VII (Hildebrand), and
the great Benedictine Abbots and Bishops throughout the Middle Ages
are rightly felt to represent one whole side of this great Order. And
again such great mystical figures as St. Hildegard of Bingen and the
two Saints Gertrude are fully at home in that hospitable Family. And
the Franciscans have, in the Conventuals, developed representatives of
the external authority type; and in such great philosopher-theologians
as Duns Scotus and Occam, a combination which has more of the
intellectual, both speculative and critical, than of the simply
ascetical or even mystical type.
And if we look for individual contrasts, we can often find them in
close temporal and local juxtaposition, as in France, in the time of
Louis XIV, in the persons of Bossuet, Richard Simon, and Fénelon, so
strikingly typical of the special strengths and limitations of the
institutional, rational, experimental types respectively. And yet the
most largely varied influence will necessarily proceed from characters
which combine not only two of the types, as in our times Frederick
Faber combined the external and experimental; but which hold them all
three, as with John Henry Newman in England or Antonio Rosmini in Italy.
V. CAUSES OPERATIVE IN ALL RELIGION TOWARDS MINIMIZING OR SUPPRESSING
ONE OR OTHER ELEMENT, OR TOWARDS DENYING THE NEED OF ANY MULTIPLICITY.
Let us end this chapter with some consideration of the causes and
reasons that are ever tending to produce and to excuse the quiet
elimination or forcible suppression of one or other of the elements
that constitute the full organism of religion, and even to minimize or
to deny altogether the necessity of any such multiplicity.
1. _The religious temper longs for simplification._
To take the last point first. How obvious and irresistible seems
always, to the specifically religious temper, the appeal to boundless
simplification. “Can there be anything more sublimely, utterly simple
than religion?” we all say and feel. In these regions, if anywhere, we
long and thirst to see and feel all things in one, to become ourselves
one, to find the One Thing necessary, the One God, and to be one
with Him for ever. Where is there room here, we feel even angrily,
for all these distinctions, all this balancing of divers faculties
and parts? Is not all this but so much Aestheticism, some kind of
subtle Naturalism, a presumptuous attempting to build up bit by bit
in practice, and to analyze part from part in theory, what can only
come straight from God Himself, and, coming from Him the One, cannot
but bear the impress of His own indistinguishable Unity? And can there
be anything more unforcedly, unanalyzably simple than all actual
religion,--and this in exact proportion to its greatness? Look at St.
Francis of Assisi, or St. John Baptist; look above all at the Christ,
supremely, uniquely great, just because of His sublime simplicity!
Look at, feel, the presence and character of those countless souls
that bear, unknown even to themselves, some portion of this His
impress within themselves, forming thus a kind of indefinitely rich
extension of His reign, of the kingdom of His childlikeness. Away then
with everything that at all threatens to break up a corresponding
simplicity in ourselves! Poverty of spirit, emptiness of heart, a
constant turning away from all distraction, from all multiplicity both
of thought and of feeling, of action and of being; this, surely, is
the one and only necessity for the soul, at least in proportion to the
height of her spiritual call.
2. _Yet every truly living Unity is constituted in Multiplicity._
Now in all this there is a most subtle mixture of truth and of error.
It is profoundly true that all that _is_ at all, still more all
personality, and hence above all God, the Spirit of spirits is, just
in that proportion, profoundly mysteriously One, with a Unity which
all our best thinking can only distantly and analogously represent.
And all religion will ever, in proportion as it is vigorous and pure,
thirst after an ever-increasing Unification, will long to be one and
to give itself to the One,--to follow naked the naked Jesus. Yet all
the history of human thought and all the actual experience of each
one of us prove that this Unity can be apprehended and developed, by
and within our poor human selves, only in proportion as we carefully
persist in stopping at the point where it can most thoroughly organize
and harmonize the largest possible multiplicity of various facts and
forces.
No doubt the living soul is not a whole made up of separate parts;
still less is God made up of parts. Yet we cannot apprehend this Unity
of God except in multiplicity of some sort; nor can we ourselves become
rightly one, except through being in a true sense many, and very many,
as well. Indeed the Christian Faith insists that there is something
most real actually corresponding to this our conception of multiplicity
even and especially in God Himself. For it as emphatically bids us
think of Him as in one sense a Trinity as in another a Unity. And it
is one of the oldest and most universal of Christian approaches to
this mystery, to conceive it under the analogy of the three powers of
the soul. God the Father and Creator is conceived as corresponding to
the sense-perception and Imagination, to Memory-power; God the Son and
Redeemer, as the Logos, to our reason; and God the Holy Spirit, as
corresponding to the effective-volitional force within us; and then we
are bidden to remember that, as in ourselves these three powers are
all united in One personality, so in God the three Persons are united
in One substance and nature. Even the supremely and ineffably simple
Godhead is not, then, a mere, undifferentiated One.
And if we take the case of Our Lord, even when He is apprehended in the
most abstract of orthodox ways: we get either the duality of natures,
God and Man; or a trinity of offices, the Kingly, the Prophetic,
and the Priestly,--these latter again corresponding roughly to the
External, the Intellectual, and the Mystical element of the human soul.
And even if we restrict ourselves to His Humanity, and as pictured in
any one Gospel, nay in the earliest, simplest, and shortest, St. Mark,
we shall still come continually upon a rich multiplicity, variety, and
play of different exterior and interior apprehensions and activities,
emotions and sufferings, all profoundly permeated by one great end and
aim, yet each differing from the other, and contributing a different
share to the one great result. The astonishment at the disciples’
slowness of comprehension, the flash of anger at Peter, the sad
reproachfulness towards Judas, the love of the children, the sympathy
with women, the pity towards the fallen, the indignation against the
Pharisees, the rejoicing in the Father’s revelation, the agony in the
Garden, the desolation on the Cross, are all _different_ emotions. The
perception of the beauty of the flowers of the field, of the habits
of plants and of birds, of the varieties of the day’s early and late
cloud and sunshine, of the effects of storm and rain; and again of
the psychology of various classes of character, age, temperament,
and avocation; and indeed of so much more, are all _different_
observations. The lonely recollection in the desert, the nights spent
in prayer upon the mountains, the preaching from boats and on the
lake-side, the long foot-journeyings, the many flights, the reading and
expounding in the Synagogues, the curing the sick and restoring them to
their right mind, the driving the sellers from the Temple-court, and so
much else, are all _different_ activities.
And if we take what is or should be simplest in the spiritual life
of the Christian, his intention and motive; and if we conceive this
according to the evidence of the practice of such Saints as have
themselves revealed to us the actual working of their souls, and of
the long and most valuable series of controversies and ecclesiastical
decisions in this delicate matter, we shall again find the greatest
possible Multiplicity in the deepest possible Unity. For even in such
a Saint as St. John of the Cross, whose own analysis and theory of
the interior life would often seem all but directly and completely to
exclude the element of multiplicity, it is necessary ever to interpret
and supplement one part of his teaching by another, and to understand
the whole in the light of his actual, deliberate, habitual practice.
This latter will necessarily ever exceed his explicit teaching, both in
its completeness and in its authority. Now if in his formal teaching
he never wearies of insisting upon detachment from all things, and
upon the utmost simplification of the intentions of the soul, yet he
occasionally fully states what is ever completing this doctrine in his
own mind,--that this applies only to the means and not to the end, and
to false and not to true multiplicity. “The spiritual man,” he writes
in one place, “has greater joy and comfort in creatures, if he detaches
himself from them; and he can have no joy in them, if he considers them
as his own.” “He,” as distinct from the unspiritual man, “rejoices in
their truth,” “in their best conditions,” “in their substantial worth.”
He “has joy in all things.”[37] A real multiplicity then exists in
things, and in our most purified apprehension of them; varied, rich
joys related to this multiplicity are facts in the life of the Saints;
and these varied joys may legitimately be dwelt on as incentives to
holiness for oneself and others. “All that is wanting now,” he writes
to Donna Juana de Pedraça, his penitent, “is that I should forget
you. But consider how that is to be forgotten which is ever present
to the soul.”[38] An affection then, as pure as it was particular,
was ever in his heart, and fully accepted and willed and acknowledged
to its immediate object, as entirely conformable to his own teaching.
St. Teresa, on the other hand, is a character of much greater natural
variety, and yet it is she who has left us that most instructive record
of her temporary erroneous ideal of a false simplicity, in turning
away, for a number of years, from the consideration of the Humanity of
Christ. And a constant, keen interest in the actual larger happenings
of her time, in the vicissitudes of the Church in her day, was stamped
upon all her teaching, and remained with her up to the very end.
Perhaps the most classic expression of the true Unity is that implied
by St. Ignatius of Loyola, when he tells us that “Peace is the
simplicity of order.” For order as necessarily implies a multiplicity
of things ordered as the unity of the supreme ordering principle.
Fénelon, doubtless, at times, especially in parts of his condemned
_Explication des Maximes des Saints_, too much excludes, or seems to
exclude, the element of multiplicity in the soul’s intention. Yet,
both before and after this book, some of the clearest and completest
statements in existence, as to the true unity and diversity to be
found in the most perfect life, are to be found among his writings. In
his Latin Epistle to Pope Clement XI he insists upon the irreducible
element of multiplicity in the motives of the very highest sanctity.
For he maintains first that, though “in the specific act of Love, the
chief of the theological virtues, it is possible to love the absolute
perfection of God considered in Himself, without the addition of any
motive of the promised beatitude,” yet that “this specific act of love,
of its own nature, never excludes, and indeed most frequently includes,
this same motive of beatitude.” He asserts next that though, “in the
highest grade of perfection amongst souls here below, deliberate
acts of simply natural love of ourselves, and even supernatural acts
of hope which are not commanded by love mostly cease,” yet that in
this “habitual State of any and every most perfect soul upon earth,
the promised beatitude is desired, and there is no diminution of the
exercise of the virtue of hope, indeed day by day there is an increase
in this desire, from the specific motive of hope of this great good,
which God Himself bids us all, without exception, to hope for.” And he
declares finally that “there is no state of perfection in which souls
enjoy an uninterrupted contemplation, or in which the powers of the
soul are bound by an absolute incapacity for eliciting the discursive
acts of Christian piety; nor is there a state in which they are
exempted from following the laws of the Church, and executing all the
orders of superiors.”[39]
All the variety, then, of the interested and of the disinterested; of
hope and fear and sorrow; of gratitude and adoration and love; of the
Intuitive and Discursive; of Recollection and external Action, is to be
found, in a deeper, richer, more multiple and varied and at the same
time a more unified unity, in the most perfect life; and all this in
proportion to its approach to its own ideal and normality.
Indeed the same multiplicity in unity is finely traced by St. Bernard,
the great contemplative, in every human act that partakes of grace
at all. “That which was begun by Grace, gets accomplished alike by
both Grace and Free Will, so that they operate mixedly not separately,
simultaneously not successively, in each and all of their processes.
The acts are not in part Grace, in part Free Will; but the whole of
each act is effected by both in an undivided operation.”[40]
VI. THE SPECIAL MOTIVES OPERATING IN EACH ELEMENT TOWARDS THE
SUPPRESSION OF THE OTHER ELEMENTS.
Now the elements of Multiplicity and Friction and of Unity and
Harmonization, absolutely essential to all life, everywhere and always
cost us much to keep and gain. But there are also, very special reasons
why the three great constituents of religion should, each in its own
way, tend continually to tempt the soul to retain only _it_, and hence
to an impoverishing simplification. Let us try and see this tendency
at work in the two chief constituents, as against each other, and in
combination against the third.
1. _In the Historical and Institutional Element, as against all else._
We have seen how all religiousness is ever called into life by some
already existing religion. And this religion will consist in the
continuous commemoration of some great religious facts of the past.
It will teach and represent some divine revelation as having been
made, in and through such and such a particular person, in such and
such a particular place, at such and such a particular time; and
such a revelation will claim acceptance and submission as divine
and redemptive in and through the very form and manner in which it
was originally made. The very peculiarity, which will render the
teaching distinctively religious, will hence be a certain real, or
at least an at first apparent, externality to the mind and life of
the recipient, and a sense of even painful obligation answered by a
willing endorsement. All higher religion ever is thus personal and
revelational; and all such personal and revelational religion was
necessarily first manifested in unique conditions of space and time;
and yet it claims, in as much as divine, to embrace all the endless
conditions of other spaces and other times.
And this combination of a clearly contingent constituent and of an
imperiously absolute claim is not less, but more visible, as we rise
in the scale of religions. The figure of Our Lord is far more clear
and definite and richly individual than are the figures of the Buddha
or of Mahomet. And at the same time Christianity has ever claimed for
Him far more than Buddhism or Mahometanism have claimed for their
respective, somewhat shadowy founders. For the Buddha was conceived
as but one amongst a whole series of similar revealers that were to
come; and Mahomet was but the final prophet of the one God. But Christ
is offered to us as the unique Saviour, as the unique revelation of
God Himself. You are thus to take Him or leave Him. To distinguish and
interpret, analyze or theorize Him, to accept Him provisionally or
on conditions,--nothing of all this is distinctively religious. For,
here as everywhere else, the distinctive religious act is, as such, an
unconditional surrender. Nowhere in life can we both give and keep at
the same time; and least of all here, at life’s deepest sources.
With this acceptance then, in exact proportion as it is religious,
a double exclusiveness will apparently be set up. I have here found
my true life:--I will turn away then from all else, and will either
directly fight, or will at least starve and stunt, all other competing
interests and activities--I will have here a (so to speak) _spacial_,
a _simultaneous_ exclusiveness. Religion will thus be conceived
as a thing amongst other things, or as a force struggling amongst
other forces; we have given our undivided heart to _it_,--hence the
other things must go, as so many actual supernumeraries and possible
supplanters. Science and Literature, Art and Politics must all be
starved or cramped. Religion can safely reign, apparently, in a desert
alone.
But again, Religion will be conceived, at the same time, as a thing
fixed in itself, as given once for all, and to be defended against all
change and interpretation, against all novelty and discrimination.
We get thus a second, a (so to speak) _temporal_, _successive_
exclusiveness. Religion will here be conceived as a thing to be kept
literally and materially identical with itself and hence as requiring
to be defended against any kind of modification. Conceive it as a
paste, and all yeast must be kept out; or as wine, and fermentation
must be carefully excluded. And indeed Religion here would thus become
a stone, even though a stone fallen from heaven, like one of those
meteorites worshipped in Pagan antiquity. And the two exclusivenesses,
joined together, would give us a religion reduced to such a stone
worshipped in a desert.
Now the point to notice here is, that all this seems not to be an
abuse, but to spring from the very essence of religion,--from two of
its specific inalienable characteristics--those of externality and
authority. And although the extreme just described has never been
completely realized in history, yet we can see various approximations
to it in Mahometan Egypt, in Puritan Scotland, in Piagnone Florence, in
Spain of the Inquisition. Religion would thus appear fated, by its very
nature, to starve out all else, and its own self into the bargain.
What will be the answer to, the escape from, all this, provided
by religion itself? The answer and escape will be provided by the
intrinsic nature of the human soul, and of the religious appeal
made to it. For if this appeal must be conceived by the soul, in
exact proportion to the religiousness of both, as incomprehensible
by it, as exceeding its present, and even its potential, powers of
comprehension; if again this appeal must demand a sacrifice of various
inclinations felt at the time to be wrong or inferior; if it must come
home to the soul with a sense of constraining obligation, as an act
of submission and of sacrifice which it ought and must make: yet it
will as necessarily be conceived, at the same time, and again in exact
proportion to the religiousness both of the soul and of the appeal,
as the expression of Mind, of Spirit, and the impression of another
mind and spirit; as the manifestation of an infinite Personality,
responded and assented to by a personality, finite indeed yet capable
of indefinite growth. And hence the fixity of the revelation and of the
soul’s assent to it, will be as the fixity of a fountain-head, or as
the fixity of river-banks; or again as the fixity of a plant’s growth,
or of the gradual leavening of bread, or as that of the successive
evolution and identity of the human body. The fixity, in a word, will
be conceived and found to be a fixity of orientation, a definiteness of
affinities and of assimilative capacity.
Only full trust, only unconditional surrender suffice for religion. But
then religion excites and commands this in a person towards a Person;
a surrender to be achieved not in some thing, but in some one,--a some
one who _is_ at all, only in as much as he is living, loving, growing;
and to be performed, not towards some thing, but towards Some One,
Whose right, indeed Whose very power to claim me, consists precisely
in that He is Himself absolutely, infinitely and actually, what I am
but derivatively, finitely and potentially.
Thus the very same act and reasons which completely bind me, do so only
to true growth and to indefinite expansion. I shall, it is true, ever
go back and cling to the definite spacial and temporal manifestations
of this infinite Spirit’s personality, but I shall, by this same act,
proclaim His eternal presentness and inexhaustible self-interpreting
illumination. By the same act by which I believe in the revelation of
the workshop of Nazareth, of the Lake of Galilee, of Gethsemane and
Calvary, I believe that this revelation is inexhaustible, and that its
gradual analysis and theory, and above all its successive practical
application, experimentation, acceptance or rejection, and unfolding,
confer and call forth poignant dramatic freshness and inexhaustible
uniqueness upon and within every human life, unto the end of time.
All this takes place through the present, the _hic et nunc_,
co-operation of the living God and the living soul. And this
ever-to-be reconquered, ever-costing and chequered, ever-“deepenable”
interpretation, is as truly fresh as if it were a fresh revelation.
For all that comes from the living God, and is worked out by living
souls, is ever living and enlivening: there is no such thing as mere
repetition, or differentiation by mere number, place, and time, in this
Kingdom of Life, either as to God’s action or the soul’s. Infinite
Spirit Himself, He creates an indefinite number of, at first largely
but potential, persons, no one of which is identical with any other,
and provokes and supports an indefinite number of ever different
successive acts on the part of each and all of them, that so, through
the sum-total of such sources and streams of difference, the nearest
creaturely approach may be achieved to the ocean of His own infinite
richness.
2. _In the Emotional and Volitional Element, as against the Historical
and Institutional Element._
Now the tendency of a soul, when once awake to this necessary freshness
and interiority of feeling with regard to God’s and her own action,
will again be towards an impoverishing oneness. It will now tend to
shrink away from the External, Institutional altogether. For though it
cannot but have experienced the fact that it was by contact with this
External that, like unto Antaeus at his contact with Mother Earth, it
gained its experience of the Internal, yet each such experience tends
to obliterate the traces of its own occasion. Indeed the interior
feeling thus achieved tends, in the long run, to make the return to the
contact with the fact that occasioned, and to the act that produced
it, a matter of effort and repugnance. It seems a case of “a man’s
returning to his mother’s womb”; and is indeed a new birth to a fuller
life, and hence humiliating, obscure, concentrated, effortful, a matter
of trust and labour and pain and faith and love,--a true death of
and adieu to the self of this moment, however advanced this self may
seem,--a fully willed purifying pang. Only through such dark and narrow
Thermopylae passes can we issue on to the wide, sunlit plains. And both
plain and sunshine can never last long at a time; and they will cease
altogether, if they are not interrupted by this apparent shadow of the
valley of death, this concrete action, which invariably modifies not
only the soul’s environment, but above all the soul itself.
Thus does a simply mental prayer readily feel, to the soul that
possesses the habit of it, a complete substitute for all vocal prayer;
and a generally prayerful habit of mind readily appears an improvement
upon all conscious acts of prayer. Thus does a general, indeterminate
consciousness of Christ’s spirit and presence, easily feel larger and
wider, to him who has it, than the apparent contraction of mind and
heart involved in devotion to Him pictured in the definite Gospel
scenes or localized in His Eucharistic presence. Thus again does a
general disposition of regret for sin and of determination to do better
readily feel nobler, to him who has it, than the apparent materiality
and peddling casuistry, the attempting the impossible, of fixing for
oneself the kind and degree of one’s actual sins, and of determining
upon definite, detailed reforms.
Yet, in all these cases, this feeling will rapidly lead the soul on
to become unconsciously weak or feverish, unless the latter manfully
escapes from this feeling’s tyranny, and nobly bends under the yoke and
cramps itself within the narrow limits of the life-giving concrete act.
The Church’s insistence upon _some_ vocal prayer, upon _some_ definite,
differentiated, specific acts of the various moral and theological
virtues, upon Sacramental practice throughout all the states and stages
of the Christian life, is but a living commentary upon the difficulty
and importance of the point under discussion. And History, as we have
seen, confirms all this.
3. _In the Emotional and Volitional, singly or in combination with the
Historical and Institutional, as against the Analytic and Speculative
Element._
But just as the Institutional easily tends to a weakening both of
the Intellectual and of the Emotional, so does the Emotional readily
turn against not only the Institutional but against the Intellectual
as well. This latter hostility will take two forms. Inasmuch as the
feeling clings to historical facts and persons, it will instinctively
elude or attempt to suppress all critical examination and analysis
of these its supports. Inasmuch as it feeds upon its own emotion,
which (as so much pure emotion) is, at any one of its stages, ever
intensely one and intensely exclusive, it will instinctively fret under
and oppose all that slow discrimination and mere approximation, that
collection of a few certainties, many probabilities, and innumerable
possibilities, all that pother over a very little, which seem to make
up the sum of all human knowledge. Such Emotion will thus tend to be
hostile to Historical Criticism, and to all the Critical, Analytic
stages and forms of Philosophy. It turns away instinctively from the
cold manifold of thinking; and it shrinks spontaneously from the hard
opaque of action and of the external. All this will again be found to
be borne out by history.
A combination of Institutionalism and Experimentalism against
Intellectualism, is another not infrequent abuse, and one which is
not hard to explain. For if external, definite facts and acts are
found to lead to certain internal, deep, all-embracing emotions and
experiences, the soul can to a certain extent live and thrive in and
by a constant moving backwards and forwards between the Institution
and the Emotion alone, and can thus constitute an ever-tightening bond
and dialogue, increasingly exclusive of all else. For although the
Institution will, taken in itself, retain for the Emotion a certain
dryness and hardness, yet the Emotion can and often will associate
with this Institution whatever that contact with it has been found to
bring and to produce. And if the Institution feels hard and obscure,
it is not, like the Thinking, cold and transparent. Just because the
Institution appears to the emotional nature as though further from its
feeling, and yet is experienced as a mysterious cause or occasion of
this feeling, the emotional nature is fairly, often passionately, ready
to welcome what it can thus rest on and lean on, as something having a
comfortable fixity both of relation and of resistance. But with regard
to Thinking, all this is different. For thought is sufficiently near
to Feeling, necessarily to produce friction and competition of some
sort, and seems, with its keen edge and endless mobility, to be the
born implacable foe of the dull, dead givenness of the Institutional,
and of the equal givenness of any one Emotional mood. One of the
spontaneous activities of the human soul, the Analytic and Speculative
faculty, seems habitually, instinctively to labour at depersonalizing
all it touches, and thus continually both to undermine and discrown the
deeply personal work and world of the experimental forces of the soul.
Indeed the thinking seems to be doing this necessarily, since by its
very essence it begins and ends with laws, qualities, functions, and
parts,--with abstractions, which, at best, can be but skeletons and
empty forms of the real and actual, and which, of themselves, ever tend
to represent all Reality as something static, not dynamic, as a thing,
not as a person or Spirit.
Here again the true solution will be found in an ever fuller
conception of Personality, and of its primary place in the
religious life. For even the bare possibility of the truth of all
religion, especially of any one of the characteristic doctrines of
Christianity, involves a group of personalist convictions. Here the
human person begins more as a possibility than a reality. Here the
moral and spiritual character has to be built up slowly, painfully,
laboriously, throughout all the various stages and circumstances of
life, with their endless combinations of pleasure and pain, trouble
and temptation, inner and outer help and hindrance, success and
failure. Here the simply Individual is transformed into the truly
Personal only by the successive sacrifice of the lower, of the merely
animal and impoverishingly selfish self, with the help of God’s
constant prevenient, concomitant, and subsequent grace. And here this
constantly renewed dropping and opposing of the various lower selves,
in proportion as they appear and become lower, to the soul’s deepest
insight, in the growing light of its conscience and the increasing
elevation of the moral personality, involves that constant death to
self, that perpetual conversion, that unification and peace in and
through a continuous inner self-estrangement and conflict, which is the
very breath and joy of the religious life.
Only if all this be so, to a quite unpicturable extent, can even the
most elementary Christianity be more than an amiable intruder, or a
morbid surplusage in the world. And at same time, if all this be so,
then all within us is in need of successive, never-ending purification
and elaboration; and the God who has made man with a view to his
gradually achieving, and conquering his real self, must have stored
means and instruments, for the attainment of this man’s true end,
constant readiness, within himself. Now our whole Intellectual nature
is a great storehouse of one special class of such instruments. For it
is clear that the moral and spiritual side of our nature will, more
than any other, constantly require three things: Rest, Expression,
and Purification. And the intellectual activities will, if only they
be kept sufficiently vigorous and independent, alone be in a position
sufficiently to supply some forms of these three needs. For they can
rest the moral-spiritual activities, since they, the intellectual
ones, primarily neglect emotion, action, and persons, and are directly
occupied with abstractions and with things. They can and should express
the results of those moral, spiritual activities, because the religious
facts and experiences require, like all other facts, to be constantly
stated and re-stated by the intellect in terms fairly understandable by
the civilization and culture of the successive ages of the world. Above
all, they can help to purify those moral-spiritual activities, owing
to their interposing, by their very nature, a zone of abstraction,
of cool, clear thinking, of seemingly adequate and exhaustive, but
actually impoverishing and artificial concepts, and of apparently
ultimate, though really only phenomenal determinism, between the direct
informations of the senses, to which the Individual clings, and the
inspirations of the moral and spiritual nature, which constitute the
Person. Thus this intellectual abstractive element is, if neither
minimized in the life of the soul, nor allowed to be its sole element
or its last, a sobering, purifying, mortifying, vivifying bath and fire.
VII. THREE FINAL OBJECTIONS TO SUCH A CONCEPTION OF RELIGION, AND THEIR
ANSWERS.
Now there are three obvious objections to such a conception: with their
consideration, this Introduction shall conclude.
1. _This conception not excessively intellectual._
Does not, in the first place, such a view of life appear
preposterously intellectual? What of the uneducated, of the toiling
millions? What of most women and of all children? Are then all
these, the overwhelming majority of mankind, the objects of Christ’s
predilection, the very types chosen by Himself of His spirit and
of God’s ideal for man, precluded from an essential element of
religion? Or are we, at the least, to hold that an ethical and
spiritual advantage is necessarily attached, and this too for but
a small minority of mankind, to a simply intellectual function and
activity? If there was a thing specially antagonistic to Christ and
condemned by Him, it was the arrogance of the Schools of His day; if
there is a thing apparently absent from Christ’s own life it is all
philosophizing: even to suggest its presence seems at once to disfigure
and to lower Him. Is then Reasoning, the School, to be declared not
only necessary for some and for mankind at large, but necessary, in a
sense, for all men and for the religious life itself?
The answer to all this appears not far to seek. The element which we
have named the intellectual, is but one of the faculties of every
living soul; and hence, in some degree and form, it is present and
operative in every one of us. And there is probably no greater
difference between these degrees and forms, with regard to this
element, than there is between the degrees and forms found in the other
two elements of religion. For this intellectual, determinist element
would be truly represented by every however simple mental attention to
_things_ and their mechanism, their necessary laws and requirements.
Hence, the Venerable Anna Maria Taigi, the Roman working-man’s wife,
attending to the requirements and rules of good washing and of darning
of clothes; St. Jean Batiste de la Salle, the Breton gentleman,
studying the psychology of school-children’s minds, and adapting
his school system to it; St. Jerome labouring at his minute textual
criticism of manuscripts of all kinds; St. Anselm and St. Thomas
toiling at the construction of their dialectic systems,--all these,
amongst endless other cases, are but illustrations of the omnipresence
and endless variety of this element, which is busy with the rules and
processes that govern things.
And it is impossible to see why, simply because of their superior
intellectual gifts and development, men like Clement of Alexandria and
Origen, Cassian and Duns Scotus, Nicolas of Coes and Pascal, Rosmini
and Newman, should count as necessarily less near to God and Christ,
than others with fewer of such gifts and opportunities. For it is
not as though such gifts were considered as ever _of themselves_
constituting any moral or spiritual worth. Nothing can be more certain
than that great mental powers can be accompanied by emptiness or
depravity of heart. The identical standard is to be applied to these
as to all other gifts: they are not to be considered as substitutes,
but only as additional material and means for the moral and spiritual
life; and it is only inasmuch as they are actually so used, that they
can effectively help on sanctity itself. It is only contended here that
such gifts do furnish additional means and materials for the devoted
will- and grace-moved soul, towards the richest and deepest spiritual
life. For the intellectual virtues are no mere empty name: candour,
moral courage, intellectual honesty, scrupulous accuracy, chivalrous
fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested collaboration,
unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of
popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening
solitude: these and many other cognate qualities bear upon them the
impress of God and of His Christ. And yet they all as surely find but a
scanty field of development outside of the intellectual life, as they
are not the only virtues or class of virtues, and as the other two
elements each produce a quite unique group of virtues of their own and
require other means and materials for their exercise.
2. _Such a conception not Pelagian._
But, in the second place, is not such a view of life Pelagian at
bottom? Have we not argued throughout, as if the religious life were to
be begun, and carried on, and achieved simply by a constant succession
of efforts of our own; and as though it could be built up by us,
like to some work of art, by a careful, conscious balancing of part
against part? Is not all this pure Naturalism? Is not religion a life,
and hence an indivisible whole? And is not this life simply the gift
of God, capable of being received, but not produced by us; of being
dimly apprehended as present, but not of being clearly analyzed in its
process of formation?
Here again there is a true answer, I think. Simply all and every
one of our acts, our very physical existence and persistence, is
dependent, at every moment and in every direction, upon the prevenient,
accompanying and subsequent power and help of God; and still more is
every religious, every truly spiritual and supernatural act of the soul
impossible without the constant action of God’s grace. Yet not only
does all this not prevent the soul from consciously acting on her own
part, and according to the laws of her own being; but God’s grace acts
in and through the medium of her acts, inasmuch as these are good: so
that the very same action which, seen as it were from without, is the
effect of our own volition, is, seen as it were from within, the effect
of God’s grace. The more costly is our act of love or of sacrifice, the
more ethical and spiritual, and the more truly it is our own deepest
self-expression, so much the more, at the same time, is this action a
thing received as well as given, and that we have it to give, and that
we can and do give it, is itself a pure gift of God.
What then is wanted, if we would really cover the facts of the case, is
evidently not a conception which would minimize the human action, and
would represent the latter as shrinking, in proportion as God’s action
increases; but one which, on the contrary, fully faces, and keeps a
firm hold of, the mysterious paradox which pervades all true life, and
which shows us the human soul as self-active in proportion to God’s
action within it, according to St. Bernard’s doctrine already quoted.
Grace and the Will thus rise and fall, in their degree of action,
together; and man will never be so fully active, so truly and intensely
himself, as when he is most possessed by God.
And since man’s action is thus in actual fact mysteriously double, it
should ever be so considered by him; and he should, as St. Ignatius
of Loyola says, “pray as if all depended on his prayer, and act as if
all depended on his action.” Hence all man’s action, though really
incapable of existing for an instant without the aid of God, and though
never exclusively his own, can be studied throughout, preliminarily as
though it were his exclusive production on its analyzable, human side.
And man not only can, he ought to be as thoughtful and careful, as
reasonably analytic and systematic about this study of his action as he
was careful and consistent in its production,--in both cases, whilst
praying and believing as though it were all from God, he can and should
behave also as though this action were exclusively his own. As St.
Thomas admirably says: “We attribute one and the same effect both to
a natural cause and to a divine force, not in the sense of that effect
proceeding in part from God, and in part from the human agent. But the
effect proceeds entire from both, according to a different mode: just
as, in music, the whole effect is attributed to the instrument, and the
same entire effect is referred to man as the principal agent.”[41]
3. _Such a conception not Epicurean._
But, in the last place, is not such a view of life Epicurean? Where
is the Cross and Self-Renunciation? Is it not Christ Himself Who has
bidden us cut off our right hand and pluck out our right eye, if they
offend; Who has declared that he who hateth not his own father and
mother for His sake is not worthy of Him; Who has asked, “What doth
it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of
his own soul?” and Who has pronounced a special woe upon the rich,
and a special blessing upon the poor in spirit? Does not our view, on
the contrary, bid a man attend to his hands and eyes, rather than to
their possible or even actual offending, euphemistically described
here as “friction”; bid him love his father and mother, even though
this introduce a conflict into his affections; bid him take care to
gain, as far as may be, the whole of his own possible interior and
exterior world, as though this would of itself be equivalent to his
saving his soul; and thus bid him become rich and full and complex,
an aesthete rather than a man of God? In a word, is not our position
a masked Paganism, a new Renaissance rather than the nobly stern old
Christianity?
Now here again a true answer is found in a clear intelligence of the
actual implications of the position. For if the Intellectual action
were here taken as capable of alone, or in any degree directly, forming
the foundation of all our other life, so that on a mathematically
clear and complete system, appealing to and requiring the abstractive
powers alone, would, later on, be built, according to our own further
determination, the Institutional and Experimental, or both or neither;
then such a position, if possible and actualized, would indeed save us
the simultaneous energizing of our whole complex nature, and would, so
far, well deserve the accusation of unduly facilitating life; it might
be taken as, at least, not beginning with the Cross. But here this is
not so. For from the first the External and the Mystical elements are
held to be at least as necessary and operative as the Intellectual
element; and it is impossible to see how the elimination of this
latter, and of the ever-expensive keeping it and its rivals each at
their own work, could deepen the truly moral sufferings and sacrifices
of the soul’s life.
If again the Intellectual action were taken, as by Gnosticism of
all sorts, as the eventual goal of the whole, so that the External
and Mystical would end by being absorbed into the Intellectual, our
Knowledge becoming coextensive with Reality itself, then we might
again, and with still deeper truth, be accused of eliminating the
element of effort and of sacrifice,--the Cross. But here, on the
contrary, not only the Intellectual alone does not begin the soul’s
life or build up its conditions, but the Intellectual alone does not
conclude and crown it. Eternally will different soul-functions conjoin
in a common work, eternally will God and the souls of our fellows be
for us realities in diverse degrees outside and beyond of our own
apprehension of them, and eternally shall we apprehend them differently
and to a different degree by our intelligence, by our affection, and by
our volition. Hence, even in eternity itself we can, without exceeding
the limits of sober thinking and of psychological probability, find
a field for the exercise by our souls of something corresponding to
the joy and greatness of noble self-sacrifice here below. The loving
soul will there, in the very home of love, give itself wholly to and
be fulfilled by God, and yet the soul will possess an indefinitely
heightened apprehension of the immense excess of this its love and act
above its knowledge, and of God Himself above both. And here again it
is impossible to see how the elimination of the intellectual element,
which becomes thus the very measure of the soul’s own limitations, and
of the exceeding greatness of its love and of its Lover, would make the
conception more efficaciously humbling and Christian.
Both at the beginning, then, and throughout, and even at the end of
the soul’s life, the intellectual element is necessary, and this above
all for the planting fully and finally, in the very depths of the
personality, the Cross, the sole means to the soul’s true Incoronation.
PART II
BIOGRAPHICAL