SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS
[Sidenote: To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.]
In honouring the sources of life, piety is retrospective. It collects,
as it were, food for morality, and fortifies it with natural and
historic nutriment. But a digestive and formative principle must exist
to assimilate this nutriment; a direction and an ideal have to be
imposed on these gathered forces. So that religion has a second and a
higher side, which looks to the end toward which we move as piety looks
to the conditions of progress and to the sources from which we draw our
energies. This aspiring side of religion may be called Spirituality.
Spirituality is nobler than piety, because what would fulfil our being
and make it worth having is what alone lends value to that being’s
source. Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the
substance and cause of all things. The gift of existence would be
worthless unless existence was good and supported at least a possible
happiness. A man is spiritual when he lives in the presence of the
ideal, and whether he eat or drink does so for the sake of a true and
ultimate good. He is spiritual when he envisages his goal so frankly
that his whole material life becomes a transparent and transitive
vehicle, an instrument which scarcely arrests attention but allows the
spirit to use it economically and with perfect detachment and freedom.
There is no need that this ideal should be pompously or mystically
described. A simple life is its own reward, and continually realises its
function. Though a spiritual man may perfectly well go through intricate
processes of thought and attend to very complex affairs, his single eye,
fixed on a rational purpose, will simplify morally the natural chaos it
looks upon and will remain free. This spiritual mastery is, of course,
no slashing and forced synthesis of things into a system of philosophy
which, even if it were thinkable, would leave the conceived logical
machine without ideality and without responsiveness to actual interests;
it is rather an inward aim and fixity in affection that knows what to
take and what to leave in a world over which it diffuses something of
its own peace. It threads its way through the landscape with so little
temptation to distraction that it can salute every irrelevant thing, as
Saint Francis did the sun and moon, with courtesy and a certain
affectionate detachment.
[Sidenote: Spirituality natural.]
Spirituality likes to say, Behold the lilies of the field! For its
secret has the same simplicity as their vegetative art; only
spirituality has succeeded in adding consciousness without confusing
instinct. This success, unfortunately so rare in man’s life as to seem
paradoxical, is its whole achievement. Spirituality ought to have been a
matter of course, since conscious existence has inherent value and there
is no intrinsic ground why it should smother that value in alien
ambitions and servitudes. But spirituality, though so natural and
obvious a thing, is subject, like the lilies’ beauty, to corruption. I
know not what army of microbes evidently invaded from the beginning the
soul’s physical basis and devoured its tissues, so that sophistication
and bad dreams entirely obscured her limpidity.
None the less, spirituality, or life in the ideal, must be regarded as
the fundamental and native type of all life; what deviates from it is
disease and incipient dissolution, and is itself what might plausibly
demand explanation and evoke surprise. The spiritual man should be quite
at home in a world made to be used; the firmament is spread over him
like a tent for habitation, and sublunary furniture is even more
obviously to be taken as a convenience. He cannot, indeed, remove
mountains, but neither does he wish to do so. He comes to endow the
mountains with a function, and takes them at that, as a painter might
take his brushes and canvas. Their beauty, their metals, their
pasturage, their defence—this is what he observes in them and
celebrates in his addresses to them. The spiritual man, though not
ashamed to be a beggar, is cognisant of what wealth can do and of what
it cannot. His unworldliness is true knowledge of the world, not so
much a gaping and busy acquaintance as a quiet comprehension and
estimation which, while it cannot come without intercourse, can very
well lay intercourse aside.
[Sidenote: Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.]
If the essence of life be spiritual, early examples of life would seem
to be rather the opposite. But man’s view of primitive consciousness is
humanly biassed and relies too much on partial analogies. We conceive an
animal’s physical life in the gross, and must then regard the momentary
feelings that accompany it as very poor expressions either of its extent
or conditions. These feelings are, indeed, so many ephemeral lives,
containing no comprehensive view of the animal’s fortunes. They
accordingly fail to realise our notion of a spiritual human life which
would have to be rational and to form some representation of man’s total
environment and interests. But it hardly follows that animal feelings
are not spiritual in their nature and, on their narrow basis, perfectly
ideal. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most
absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral. Very likely, if we
could revert to an innocent and absorbed view of our early sensations,
we should find that each was a little spiritual universe like Dante’s,
with its internal hell, purgatory, and heaven. Cut off, as those
experiences were, from all vistas and from sympathy with things remote,
they would contain a closed circle of interests, a flying glimpse of
eternity. So an infant living in his mystical limbo, without trailing
in a literal sense any clouds of glory from elsewhere, might well repeat
on a diminutive scale the beatific vision, insomuch as the only function
of which he was conscious at all might be perfectly fulfilled by him and
felt in its ideal import. Sucking and blinking are ridiculous processes,
perhaps, but they may bring a thrill and satisfaction no less ideal than
do the lark’s inexhaustible palpitations. Narrow scope and low
representative value are not defects in a consciousness having a narrow
physical basis and comparatively simple conditions.
[Sidenote: Spirit crossed by instrumentalities.]
The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. His
instincts, in becoming many, became confused, and in growing permanent,
grew feeble and subject to arrest and deviation. Nature, we may say,
threw the brute form back into her cauldron, to smelt its substance
again before pouring it into a rational mould. The docility which
instinct, in its feebleness, acquired in the new creature was to be
reason’s opportunity, but before the larger harmony could be established
a sorry chaos was bound to reign in the mind. Every peeping impulse
would drop its dark hint and hide its head in confusion, while some
pedantic and unjust law would be passed in its absence and without its
vote. Secondary activities, which should always be representative, would
establish themselves without being really such. Means would be pursued
as if they were ends, and ends, under the illusion that they were
forces, would be expected to further some activity, itself without
justification. So pedantry might be substituted for wisdom, tyranny for
government, superstition for morals, rhetoric for art.
This sophistication is what renders the pursuit of reason so perplexing
and prolonged a problem. Half-formed adjustments in the brain and in the
body politic are represented in consciousness by what are called
passions, prejudices, motives, animosities. None of these felt
ebullitions in the least understands its own causes, effects, or
relations, but is hatched, so to speak, on the wing and flutters along
in the direction of its momentary preference until it lapses, it knows
not why, or is crossed and overwhelmed by some contrary power. Thus the
vital elements, which in their comparative isolation in the lower
animals might have yielded simple little dramas, each with its obvious
ideal, its achievement, and its quietus, when mixed in the barbarous
human will make a boisterous medley. For they are linked enough together
to feel a strain, but not knit enough to form a harmony. In this way the
unity of apperception seems to light up at first nothing but disunion.
The first dawn of that rational principle which involves immortality
breaks upon a discovery of death. The consequence is that ideality seems
to man something supernatural and almost impossible. He finds himself at
his awakening so confused that he puts chaos at the origin of the world.
But only order can beget a world or evoke a sensation. Chaos is
something secondary, composed of conflicting organisations interfering
with one another. It is compounded like a common noise out of jumbled
vibrations, each of which has its period and would in itself be musical.
The problem is to arrange these sounds, naturally so tuneful, into
concerted music. So long as total discord endures human life remains
spasmodic and irresolute; it can find no ideal and admit no total
representation of nature. Only when the disordered impulses and
perceptions settle down into a trained instinct, a steady, vital
response and adequate preparation for the world, do clear ideas and
successful purposes arise in the mind. The Life of Reason, with all the
arts, then begins its career.
The forces at play in this drama are, first, the primary impulses and
functions represented by elementary values; second, the thin network of
signals and responses by which those functions are woven into a total
organ, represented by discursive thought and all secondary mental
figments, and, third, the equilibrium and total power of that new
organism in action represented by the ideal. Spirituality, which might
have resided in the elementary values, sensuous or passionate, before
the relational process supervened, can now exist only in the ultimate
activity to which these processes are instrumental. Obstacles to
spirituality in human life may accordingly take the form of an arrest
either at the elementary values—an entanglement in sense and
passion—or at the instrumental processes—an entanglement in what in
religious parlance is called “the world.”
[Sidenote: One foe of the spirit is worldliness.]
Worldly minds bristle with conventional morality (though in private they
may nurse a vice or two to appease wayward nature), and they are
rational in everything except first principles. They consider the
voluptuary a weak fool, disgraced and disreputable; and if they notice
the spiritual man at all—for he is easily ignored—they regard him as a
useless and visionary fellow. Civilisation has to work algebraically
with symbols for known and unknown quantities which only in the end
resume their concrete values, so that the journeymen and vulgar
middlemen of the world know only conventional goods. They are lost in
instrumentalities and are themselves only instruments in the Life of
Reason. Wealth, station, fame, success of some notorious and outward
sort, make their standard of happiness. Their chosen virtues are
industry, good sense, probity, conventional piety, and whatever else has
acknowledged utility and seemliness.
[Sidenote: The case for and against pleasure.]
In its strictures on pleasure and reverie this Philistia is perfectly
right. Sensuous living (and I do not mean debauchery alone, but the
palpitations of any poet without art or any mystic without discipline)
is not only inconsequential and shallow, but dangerous to honour and to
sincere happiness. When life remains lost in sense or reverts to it
entirely, humanity itself is atrophied. And humanity is tormented and
spoilt when, as more often happens, a man disbelieving in reason and out
of humour with his world, abandons his soul to loose whimseys and
passions that play a quarrelsome game there, like so many ill-bred
children. Nevertheless, compared with the worldling’s mental mechanism
and rhetoric, the sensualist’s soul is a well of wisdom. He lives
naturally on an animal level and attains a kind of good. He has free and
concrete pursuits, though they be momentary, and he has sincere
satisfactions. He is less often corrupt than primitive, and even when
corrupt he finds some justification for his captious existence. He
harvests pleasures as he goes which intrinsically, as we have seen, may
have the depth and ideality which nature breathes in all her oracles.
His experience, for that reason, though disastrous is interesting and
has some human pathos; it is easier to make a saint out of a libertine
than out of a prig. True, the libertine is pursued, like the animals, by
unforeseen tortures, decay, and abandonment, and he is vowed to a total
death; but in these respects the worldly man has hardly an advantage.
The Babels he piles up may indeed survive his person, but they are
themselves vain and without issue, while his brief life has been
meantime spent in slavery and his mind cramped with cant and foolish
ambitions. The voluptuary is like some roving creature, browsing on
nettles and living by chance; the worldling is like a beast of burden,
now ill-used and over-worked, now fatted, stalled, and richly
caparisoned. Æsop might well have described their relative happiness in
a fable about the wild ass and the mule.
[Sidenote: Upshot of worldly wisdom.]
Thus, even if the voluptuary is sometimes a poet and the worldling often
an honest man, they both lack reason so entirely that reflection revolts
equally against the life of both. Vanity, vanity, is their common
epitaph. Now, at the soul’s christening and initiation into the Life of
Reason, the first vow must always be to “renounce the pomps and vanities
of this wicked world.” A person to whom this means nothing is one to
whom, in the end, nothing has meaning. He has not conceived a highest
good, no ultimate goal is within his horizon, and it has never occurred
to him to ask what he is living for. With all his pompous soberness, the
worldly man is fundamentally frivolous; with all his maxims and cant
estimations he is radically inane. He conforms to religion without
suspecting what religion means, not being in the least open to such an
inquiry. He judges art like a parrot, without having ever stopped to
evoke an image. He preaches about service and duty without any
recognition of natural demands or any standard of betterment. His moral
life is one vast anacoluthon in which the final term is left out that
might have given sense to the whole, one vast ellipsis in which custom
seems to bridge the chasm left between ideas. He denies the values of
sense because they tempt to truancies from mechanical activity; the
values of reason he necessarily ignores because they lie beyond his
scope. He adheres to conventional maxims and material quantitative
standards; his production is therefore, as far as he himself is
concerned, an essential waste and his activity an essential tedium. If
at least, like the sensualist, he enjoyed the process and expressed his
fancy in his life, there would be something gained; and this sort of
gain, though over-looked in the worldling’s maxims, all of which have a
categorical tone, is really what often lends his life some propriety and
spirit. Business and war and any customary task may come to form, so to
speak, an organ whose natural function will be just that operation, and
the most abstract and secondary activity, like that of adding figures or
reading advertisements, may in this way become the one function proper
to some soul. There are Nibelungen dwelling by choice underground and
happy pedants in the upper air.
Facts are not wanting for these pillars of society to take solace in, if
they wish to defend their philosophy. The time will come, astronomers
say, when life will be extinct upon this weary planet. All the delights
of sense and imagination will be over. It is these that will have turned
out to be vain. But the masses of matter which the worldlings have
transformed with their machinery, and carried from one place to another,
will remain to bear witness of them. The collocation of atoms will
never be what it would have been if their feet had less continually
beaten the earth. They may have the proud happiness of knowing that,
when nothing that the spirit values endures, the earth may still
sometimes, because of them, cast a slightly different shadow across the
moon’s craters.
[Sidenote: Two supposed escapes from vanity:]
There is no more critical moment in the life of a man and a nation than
that in which they are first conscience-stricken and convicted of
vanity. Failure, exhaustion, confusion of aims, or whatever else it be
that causes a revulsion, brings them before a serious dilemma. Has the
vanity of life hitherto been essential or incidental? Are we to look for
a new ambition, free from all the illusions of natural impulse, or are
we rather to renounce all will indiscriminately and fall back upon
conformity and consummate indifference? As this question is answered in
one way or the other, two different types of unworldly religion arise.
[Sidenote: fanaticism.]
The first, which heralds a new and unimpeachable special hope, a highest
duty finally recognised and driving out all lesser motives and
satisfactions from the soul, refers vanity to perversity, to error, to a
sort of original misunderstanding of our own nature which has led us, in
pursuing our worldly interests, to pursue in truth our own destruction.
The vanity of life, according to this belief, has been accidental. The
taint of existence is not innate vanity but casual sin; what has misled
us is not the will in general but only the false and ignorant direction
of a will not recognising its only possible satisfaction. What religion
in this case opposes to the world is a special law, a special hope, a
life intense, ambitious, and aggressive, but excluding much which to an
ingenuous will might seem excellent and tempting. Worldliness, in a
word, is here met by fanaticism.
[Sidenote: and mysticism.]
The second type of unworldly religion does not propose to overwhelm the
old Adam by singleminded devotion to one selected interest, nor does it
refer vanity to an accidental error. On the contrary, it conceives that
any special interest, any claim made by a finite and mortal creature
upon an infinite world, is bound to be defeated. It is not special acts,
it conceives, which are sinful, but action and will themselves that are
intrinsically foolish. The cure lies in rescinding the passionate
interests that torment us, not in substituting for them another
artificial passion more imperious and merciless than the natural
passions it comes to devour. This form of religion accordingly meets
worldliness with mysticism. Holiness is not placed in conformity to a
prescriptive law, in pursuit of a slightly regenerated bliss, nor in
advancing a special institution and doctrine. Holiness for the mystic
consists rather in universal mildness and insight; in freedom from all
passion, bias, and illusion; in a disembodied wisdom which accepts the
world, dominates its labyrinths, and is able to guide others through
it, without pursuing, for its own part, any hope or desire.
[Sidenote: Both are irrational.]
If these two expedients of the conscience convicted of vanity were to be
subjected to a critical judgment, they would both be convicted of vanity
themselves. The case of fanaticism is not doubtful, for the choice it
makes of a special law or institution or posthumous hope is purely
arbitrary, and only to be justified by the satisfaction it affords to
those very desires which it boasts to supplant. An oracular morality or
revealed religion can hope to support its singular claims only by
showing its general conformity to natural reason and its perfect
beneficence in the world. Where such justification is wanting the system
fanatically embraced is simply an epidemic mania, a social disease for
the philosopher to study and, if possible, to cure. Every strong passion
tends to dislodge the others, so that fanaticism may often involve a
certain austerity, impetuosity, and intensity of life. This vigour,
however, is seldom lasting; fanaticism dries its own roots and becomes,
when traditionally established, a convention as arbitrary as any fashion
and the nest for a new brood of mean and sinister habits. The Pharisee
is a new worldling, only his little world is narrowed to a temple, a
tribe, and a clerical tradition.
Mysticism, as its meditative nature comports, is never so pernicious,
nor can it be brought so easily round to worldliness again. That its
beneficent element is purely natural and inconsistent with a denial of
will, we shall have occasion elsewhere to observe. Suffice it here to
point out, that even if a moral nihilism could be carried through and
all definite interests abandoned, the vanity of life would not be
thereby corrected, but merely exposed. When our steps had been retraced
to the very threshold of being, nothing better worth doing would have
been discovered on the way. That to suffer illusion is a bad thing might
ordinarily be taken for an axiom, because ordinarily we assume that true
knowledge and rational volition are possible; but if this assumption is
denied, the value of retracting illusions is itself impeached. When
vanity is represented as universal and salvation as purely negative,
every one is left free to declare that it is vain to renounce vanity and
sinful to seek salvation.
This result, fantastic though it may at first sight appear, is one which
mysticism actually comes to under certain circumstances. Absolute
pessimism and absolute optimism are opposite sentiments attached to a
doctrine identically the same. In either case no improvement is
possible, and the authority of human ideals is denied. To escape, to
stanch natural wounds, to redeem society and the private soul, are then
mistaken and pitiable ambitions, adding to their vanity a certain touch
of impiety. One who really believes that the world’s work is all
providentially directed and that whatever happens, no matter how
calamitous or shocking, happens by divine right, has a quietistic
excuse for license; to check energy by reason, and seek to limit and
choose its path, seems to him a puny rebellion against omnipotence,
which works through madness and crime in man no less than through
cataclysms in outer nature. Every particular desire is vain and bound,
perhaps, to be defeated; but the mystic, when caught in the expansive
mood, accepts this defeat itself as needful. Thus a refusal to
discriminate rationally or to accept human interests as the standard of
right may culminate in a convulsive surrender to passion, just as, when
caught in the contractile phase, the same mysticism may lead to
universal abstention.
[Sidenote: Is there a third course?]
Must unworldliness be either fanatical or mystical? That is a question
of supreme importance to the moral philosopher. On the answer to it
hangs the rationality of a spiritual life; nay, the existence of
spirituality itself among the types of human activity. For the fanatic
and mystic are only spiritual in appearance because they separate
themselves from the prevalent interests of the world, the one by a
special persistent aggression, the other by a general passivity and
unearthly calm. The fanatic is, notwithstanding, nothing but a worldling
too narrow and violent to understand the world, while the mystic is a
sensualist too rapt and voluptuous to rationalise his sensations. Both
represent arrested forms of common-sense, partial developments of a
perfectly usual sensibility. There is no divine inspiration in having
only one passion left, nor in dreamfully accepting or renouncing all the
passions together. Spirituality, if identified with such types, might
justly be called childish. There is an innocent and incredulous
childishness, with its useless eyes wide open, just as there is a
malevolent and peevish childishness, eaten up with some mischievous
whim. The man of experience and affairs can very quickly form an opinion
on such phenomena. He has no reason to expect superior wisdom in those
quarters. On the contrary, his own customary political and humane
standpoint gives him the only authoritative measure of their merits and
possible uses. “These sectaries and dreamers,” he will say to himself,
“cannot understand one another nor the role they themselves play in
society. It is for us to make the best of them we can, taking such
prudent measures as are possible to enlist the forces they represent in
works of common utility.”
[Sidenote: Yes; for experience has intrinsic inalienable values.]
The philosopher’s task, in these premisses, is to discover an escape
from worldliness which shall offer a rational advance over it, such as
fanaticism and mysticism cannot afford. Does the Life of Reason differ
from that of convention? Is there a spirituality really wiser than
common-sense? That there is appears in many directions. Worldliness is
arrest and absorption in the instrumentalities of life; but
instrumentalities cannot exist without ultimate purposes, and it
suffices to lift the eyes to those purposes and to question the will
sincerely about its essential preferences, to institute a catalogue of
rational goods, by pursuing any of which we escape worldliness. Sense
itself is one of these goods. The sensualist at least is not worldly,
and though his nature be atrophied in all its higher part, there is not
lacking, as we have seen, a certain internal and abstract spirituality
in his experience. He is a sort of sprightly and incidental mystic,
treating his varied succession of little worlds as the mystic does his
monotonous universe. Sense, moreover, is capable of many refinements, by
which physical existence becomes its own reward. In the disciplined play
of fancy which the fine arts afford, the mind’s free action justifies
itself and becomes intrinsically delightful. Science not only exercises
in itself the intellectual powers, but assimilates nature to the mind,
so that all things may nourish it. In love and friendship the liberal
life extends also to the heart. All these interests, which justify
themselves by their intrinsic fruits, make so many rational episodes and
patches in conventional life; but it must be confessed in all candour
that these are but oases in the desert, and that as the springs of life
are irrational, so its most vehement and prevalent interests remain
irrational to the end. When the pleasures of sense and art, of knowledge
and sympathy, are stretched to the utmost, what part will they cover and
justify of our passions, our industry, our governments, our religion?
It was a signal error in those rationalists who attributed their ideal
retrospectively to nature that they grotesquely imagined that people
were hungry so that they might enjoy eating, or curious in order to
delight in discovering the truth, or in love the better to live in
conscious harmony. Such a view forgets that all the forces of life work
originally and fundamentally _a tergo_, that experience and reason are
not the ground of preference but its result. In order to live men will
work disproportionately and eat all manner of filth without pleasure;
curiosity as often as not leads to illusion, and argument serves to
foster hatred of the truth; finally, love is notoriously a great
fountain of bitterness and frequently a prelude to crime and death. When
we have skimmed from life its incidental successes, when we have
harvested the moments in which existence justifies itself, its profound
depths remain below in their obscure commotion, depths that breed indeed
a rational efflorescence, but which are far from exhausted in producing
it, and continually threaten, on the contrary, to engulf it.
[Sidenote: For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal
standard.]
The spiritual man needs, therefore, something more than a cultivated
sympathy with the brighter scintillation of things. He needs to refer
that scintillation to some essential light, so that in reviewing the
motley aspects of experience he may not be reduced to culling
superciliously the flowers that please him, but may view in them all
only images and varied symbols of some eternal good. Spirituality has
never flourished apart from religion, except momentarily, perhaps, in
some master-mind, whose original intuitions at once became a religion to
his followers. For it is religion that knows how to interpret the casual
rationalities in the world and isolate their principle, setting this
principle up in the face of nature as nature’s standard and model. This
ideal synthesis of all that is good, this consciousness that over earth
floats its congenial heaven, this vision of perfection which gilds
beauty and sanctifies grief, has taken form, for the most part, in such
grossly material images, in a mythology so opaque and pseudo-physical,
that its ideal and moral essence has been sadly obscured; nevertheless,
every religion worthy of the name has put into its gods some element of
real goodness, something by which they become representative of those
scattered excellences and self-justifying bits of experience in which
the Life of Reason consists.
That happy constitution which human life has at its best moments—that,
says Aristotle, the divine life has continually. The philosopher thus
expressed with absolute clearness the principle which the poets had been
clumsily trying to embody from the beginning. Burdened as traditional
faiths might be with cosmological and fanciful matter, they still
presented in a conspicuous and permanent image that which made all good
things good, the ideal and standard of all excellence. By the help of
such symbols the spiritual man could steer and steady his judgment; he
could say, according to the form religion had taken in his country, that
the truly good was what God commanded, or what made man akin to the
divine, or what led the soul to heaven. Such expressions, though taken
more or less literally by a metaphysical intellect, did not wholly
forfeit their practical and moral meaning. God, for a long time, was
understood to command what in fact was truly important, the divine was
long the truly noble and beautiful, heaven hardly ever ceased to respond
to impersonal and ideal aspirations. Under those figures, therefore, the
ideals of life could confront life with clearness and authority. The
spiritual man, fixing his eyes on them, could live in the presence of
ultimate purposes and ideal issues. Before each immediate task, each
incidental pleasure, each casual success, he could retain his sweetness
and constancy, accepting what good these moments brought and laying it
on the altar of what they ought to bring.