(2) To estimate Rome’s attitude (as far as it concerns the ultimate

truth and completeness of these doctrines, taken in their most

characteristic and explicit forms) fairly, we shall have to put aside

all questions as to the motives that impelled, and the methods that

were employed, by either side against the other. Molinos may have been

even worse than the condemned propositions represent, and yet Petrucci

would remain a saintly soul; and we certainly are driven to ask with

Leibniz: “Si Molinos a caché du venin sous ce miel, est-il juste que

Petrucci et autres personnes de mérite en soient responsables?”[134]

But neither the wickedness of the one nor the sanctity of the other

would make the doctrines propounded by them, objectively, any less

solid or more spiritual than they are in themselves. The acutely

anti-Roman Anglican Bishop Burnet may not have invented or exaggerated

when he wrote from Rome, during those critical years, that one of the

chief motives which actuated the opponents of the Quietists was the

fact that, though the latter “were observed to become more strict in

their lives, more retired and serious in their mental devotions, yet …

they were not so assiduous at Mass, nor so earnest to procure Masses to

be said for their friends: nor … so frequently either at Confession or

in processions”: and so “the trade of those that live by these things

was sensibly sunk.”[135] And the cruel injustice of many details and

processes of the movement against the Quietists,--a movement which soon

had much of the character of a popular scare and panic, in reaction

against a previous, in part, heedless enthusiasm,--are beyond dispute

or justification. Yet mercenary and ruthless as part of the motives and

much of the action of the anti-quietists doubtlessly were, the question

as to the worth and wisdom of Quietism, (taken objectively, and not as

an excusable counter-excess but as a true synthesis of the spiritual

life), remains precisely where it was before.

(3) Now I think that two peculiarities, most difficult to notice at

the time, seriously differentiate the Molinist movement from the great

current of fully Catholic Mysticism, even in those points and elements

where the two are materially alike or even identical; and yet that

these peculiarities are but the caricature (through further emphasis

and systematization) of certain elements present, in a more latent

and sporadic manner, in the formulae and philosophic assumptions

or explanations of the older Mysticism,--elements which had been

borrowed too largely from a, at bottom, profoundly anti-incarnational

philosophy, not to be of far less value and of much greater danger than

the profoundly true experiences, nobly spiritual maxims, and exquisite

psychological descriptions which that predominantly Neo-Platonist

framework handed on.

The first peculiarity is that the older Mystics, especially those of

the type of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. John of the Cross, but

even also those of the more “mixed” type of Mysticism, such as St.

Teresa, had indeed quite freely used terms which are vividly true

as descriptions of the prima facie aspect and emotional impression

of certain states and experiences of the soul: “empty,” “fixed,”

“motionless,” “the reason and the will have ceased to act,” “doing

nothing,” “incapable of doing anything,” “moved by irresistible grace,”

“but one act,” “one single desire”: these and equivalent expressions

occur again and again. But these sayings do not here lead up to such a

deliberate and exclusive rule as is that given by Falconi, and repeated

by Molinos in his _Guida_, Nos. 103-106.[136]

This doctrine of the One Act, in this its negative form,--for it

is not to be repeated,--and in its application to the whole waking

and sleeping life, is first an exclusive concentration upon, and

then a wholesale extension of, one out of the several trends of the

older teaching, a doctrine which, compared with that teaching in its

completeness, is thin and doctrinaire, and as untrue to the full

psychological explanation and working requirements of the soul as it

is readily abusable in practice and contrary to the Incarnational type

of religion. It is impossible not to feel that the manifold great

ocean-waters of life, that the diversely blowing winds of God’s Spirit

are here, somehow, expected to flow and breathe in a little shortcut,

single channel, through a tiny pipe; one more infallible recipe or

prescription is here offered to us, hardly more adequate than the many

similar “sure” roads to salvation, declared by this or that body of

devout religionists to attach to the practice or possession of this or

that particular prayer or particular religious object.

And the second difference is that the older Catholic Mystics leave

less the impression that the external side of religion, its _body_,

is of little or no importance, and indeed very readily an obstacle to

its interior side, its _soul_. And this, again, for the simple reason

that their teaching is, in general, less systematic and pointed, more

incidental, and careless of much self-consistency.

(4) Yet these two differences have largely sprung from the simple

pressing and further extension of precisely the least satisfactory, the

explanatory and systematic side,--the form as against the content,--of

the older Mystics. For once the more specifically Neo-Platonist

constituent, in those Mystics’ explanation and systematization, was

isolated from the elements of other provenance which there had kept it

in check, and now became, as it were, hypostasized and self-sufficient,

this constituent could not but reveal, more clearly than before, its

inadequacy as a form for the intensely organic and “incarnational”

spiritual realities and processes which it attempted to show forth.

That Neo-Platonist constituent, always present in those ancient

Mystics, had ever tended to conceive the soul’s unity, at any one

moment, as a something outside of all multiplicity whatsoever. Hence

this character of the simultaneous unity had only to be extended to

the successive unity,--and the literally One Act, as in the present so

throughout the future, became a necessary postulate.

And that same constituent had, even in those great teachers of

profound maxims, exquisite religious psychology, and noblest living,

tended, (however efficaciously checked by all this their Christian

experience and by certain specifically Platonist and Aristotelian

elements of their philosophy), towards depreciating the necessity,

importance, indeed even the preponderant utility, of the External,

Contingent, Historical and Institutional, and of the interchange, the

inter-stimulation between these sides and expressions of religion and

its internal centre and spirit.

Perhaps, amongst all the great ecclesiastically authorized Mystics of

that past, the then most recent of them all, St. John of the Cross,

comes, by his (theoretically continuous though in his practice by no

means exclusive) insistence upon the abstractive and universal, the

obscure and invisible, the self-despoiling and simplifying element and

movement, nearest to an exclusion of the other element and movement.

Indeed the Quietists’ generally strong insistence upon the necessity

of a Director and upon Frequent Communion gives their teaching, when

taken in its completeness, a prima facie greater Institutionalism than

is offered by the spiritual theory of the great Spaniard. Yet if, even

in him, one misses, in his theoretical system, a sufficiently organic

necessity for the outgoing movement, a movement begun by God Himself,

and which cannot but be of fundamental importance and influence for

believers in the Incarnation, there is as complete an absence of the

doctrinaire One-Act recipe for perfection as in the most Historical and

Institutional of Christian teachers. But more about this hereafter.

6. _Four needs recognised by Quietism._

Quietism, then, has undoubtedly isolated and further exaggerated

certain explanatory elements of the older Mysticism which, even there,

were largely a weakness and not a strength; has thus underrated and

starved the Particular, Visible, Historical, Institutional constituents

of Religion; and has, indeed, misunderstood the nature of true Unity

everywhere. Yet the very eagerness with which it was welcomed at

the time,--in France and Italy especially,--and this, not only as a

fashion by the _Quidnuncs_, but as so much spiritual food and life by

many a deeply religious soul; and the difficulty, and not infrequent

ruthlessness of its suppression, indicate plainly enough that, with

all its faults and dangers, it was divining and attempting to supply

certain profound and abiding needs of the soul. I take these needs to

be the following four.

(1) Man has an ineradicable, and, when rightly assuaged, profoundly

fruitful thirst for Unity,--for Unification, Synthesis, Harmonization;

for a living System, an Organization both within and without himself,

in which each constituent gains its full expansion and significance

through being, and more and more becoming, just _that_ part and

function of a great, dynamic whole; a sense of the essential and

ultimate organic connection of all things, in so far as, in any degree

or form, they are fair and true and good. And this sense and inevitable

requirement alone explain the surprise and pain caused, at first, to

us all, by the actual condition of mutual aloofness and hostility,

characteristic of most of the constituents of the world within us, as

of the world around us, towards their fellow-constituents. A truly

atomistic world,--even an atomistic conception of the world,--of life,

as a collection of things one alongside of another, on and on, is

utterly repulsive to any deeply religious spirit whose self-knowledge

is at all equal to its aspirations.--No wonder, then, if the Quietists,

haunted by the false alternative of one such impenetrable atom-act or

of an indefinite number of them, chose the One Act, and not a multitude

of them.

(2) Man has a deep-seated necessity to purify himself by detachment,

not only from things that are illicit but even from those that are

essential and towards which he is bound to practise a deep and warm

attachment. There is no shadow of theoretical or ultimate contradiction

here: to love one’s country deeply, yet not to be a _Chauvinist_; to

love one’s wife tenderly, yet not to be uxorious; to care profoundly

for one’s children, yet to train, rebuke, and ever brace them, when

necessary, up to suffering and even death itself: these things so

little exclude each the other, that each attachment can only rightly

grow in and through the corresponding detachment. The imperfection

in all these cases, and in all the analogous, specifically religious

ones, lies not in the objects to be loved, nor in these objects being

many and of various degrees and kinds of lovableness, nor in the right

(both effective and affective, appropriately varied) love of them:

but simply in our actual manner of loving them.--No wonder then that

Quietism, face to face with the false alternative of either Attachment

or Detachment, chose Detachment, (the salt and the leaven of life) and

not attachment (life’s meat and meal).

(3) Man has a profound, though ever largely latent, capacity and need

for admiration, trust, faith; and does not by any means improve solely

by direct efforts at self-improvement, and by explicit examinations

of his efforts and failures; but, (a little from the first, and very

soon as much, and later on far more), he progresses by means of a

happy absorption in anything clean and fruitful that can and does

lift him out of and above his smaller self altogether.--And such an

absorption will necessarily be unaccompanied, at the time, by any

direct consciousness on the part of the mind as to this its absorption.

And, religiously, such quiet concentrations will, in so far as they are

at all analyzable after the event, consist in a quite inarticulate,

and yet profound and spiritually renovating, sense of God; and they

will have to be tested, not by their describable content, but by their

ethical and religious effects. “Psychology and religion,” says that

great psychological authority, Prof. William James, “both admit that

there are forces, seemingly outside of the conscious individual, that

bring redemption to his life.” “A man’s conscious wit and will, so far

as they strain after the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and

inaccurately imagined, whilst the deeper forces of organic ripening

within him tend towards a rearrangement that is pretty surely definite,

and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and

determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with by efforts

of too direct and energetic a kind on our part.”[137]--No wonder

then that Quietism, finding this element of quiet incubation much

ignored and starved in the lives of most religious souls, flew to the

other extreme, of making this inarticulateness and wise indirectness

of striving into the one test and measure of the perfection of all

the constituents of the religious life, instead of insisting upon

various degrees and combination of full and direct consciousness and

articulation, and of much dimness and indirect alertness, as each

requiring the other, and as both required by the complete and normal

life of the soul.

(4) And Man has a deep-seated sense of shame, in precise proportion

as he becomes spiritually awake, about appropriating to himself his

virtues and spiritual insight, even in so much as he perceives and

admits his possession of them. Not all his consciousness and conviction

of the reality of his own efforts and initiative, can or does prevent

a growing sense that this very giving of his is (in a true sense)

God’s gift,--that his very seeking of God ever implies that he had, in

some degree, already found God,--that God had already sought him out,

in order that he might seek and find God.--No wonder then that, once

more shrinking from a Unity constituted in a Multiplicity, Quietism

should, (with the apparently sole choice before it, of God Himself

operating literally all, or of man subtracting something from that

exclusive action and honour of God), have chosen God alone and entire,

rather than, as it were, a fragmentary, limited, baffled influence

and efficiency of the Almighty within His Own creature. Yet here

again the greater does not supplant, but informs, the lesser; and the

Incarnational action of God is, in this supreme question also, the

central truth and secret of Christianity.

7. _Multiplicity and unity, in different proportions, needful for all

spiritual life._

We find, then, that it is essential for even the most advanced souls,

that they should keep and increase the sense and the practice of a

right multiplicity, as ever a constituent and essential condition

of every concrete, living unity; of a right attachment, as ever the

necessary material and content for a fruitful and enriching detachment;

of a right consciousness and articulation of images, thoughts,

feelings, volitions, and external acts, as ever stimulations, restful

alternations, and food for a wise and strengthening prayer or states

of Quiet and inarticulation; and of a right personal initiative

and responsibility, as the most precious means and element for the

operations of God.

We find, too, that it is equally important, for even the most imperfect

souls, to be helped towards some, (though but ever semi-conscious and

intermittent), sense of the unity which alone can give much worth

or meaning to their multiplicity; of the detachment which alone can

purify and spiritualize their attachments; of the self-oblivion, in

rapt and peaceful admiration, which alone can save even their right

self-watchings and self-improvements from still further centring them

in themselves; and of the true self-abandonment to pure grace and the

breathing of God’s Spirit, which alone can give a touch of winning

freedom and of joyful spaciousness to all the prudence and right fear

and conscious responsibility which, left alone, will hip, darken and

weigh down the religious soul.

And thus we shall find that there is no degree of perfection for any

one set of souls which is not, in some form and amount, prefigured and

required by all other souls of good-will; and again, that there is

no one constituent, to which any one soul is specially drawn, which

does not require the supplementation and corrective of some other

constituents, more fully represented in other souls of possibly lower

sanctity.

Thus each soul and grade requires all the others; and thus the measure

of a soul’s greatness is not its possessing things which cannot, in

any degree or way, be found in, or expected of, all human souls, in

proportion as they are fully and characteristically human, but, on the

contrary, its being full of a spirit and a force which, in different

degrees and forms, are the very salt and yeast, the very light and

life, of all men in every place and time.

The following weighty declaration, long ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas,

fully covers, I think, the doctrine and ideal aimed at throughout this

section: “Already in this life we ought continuously to enjoy God, as

a thing most fully our own, in all our works.… Great is the blindness

and exceeding the folly of many souls that are ever seeking God,

continuously sighing after God, and frequently desiring God: whilst,

all the time, they are themselves the tabernacles of the living God …

since their soul is the seat of God, in which He continuously reposes.

Now who but a fool deliberately seeks a tool which he possesses under

lock and key? or who can use and profit by an instrument which he is

seeking? or who can draw comfort from food for which he hungers, but

which he does not relish at leisure? Like unto all this is the life

of many a just soul, which ever seeks God and never tarries to enjoy

Him; and all the works of such an one are, on this account, less

perfect.”[138]

IV. PURE LOVE, OR DISINTERESTED RELIGION: ITS DISTINCTION FROM QUIETISM.

The problem of Pure Love, of Disinterested Religion, can hardly, in

practice, be distinguished from that of Quiet and Passivity, if only

because Quietists, (those who have considered perfection to diminish

more and more the number of the soul’s acts, or at least to eliminate

more and more the need of distinctness or difference between them),

have, quite inevitably, ever given a special prominence to the question

as to what should be the character of those few acts, of that one

unbroken act. For once allow this their main question we should all

have to answer in the Quietist’s way,--viz. that this single act must,

for a perfect soul, to be the most perfect of the acts possible to

man, and hence must be an act of Pure Love.--Yet it is well to realize

clearly that, if Quietism necessitates an even excessive and unreal

doctrine of Pure Love, a moderate and solid Pure-Love teaching has

no kind of necessary connection with Quietism. For even though my

interior life be necessarily one continuous stream and tissue of acts,

countless in their number, variety, and degrees of inter-penetration,

it in nowise follows that acts of Pure Love are not the best, or are

impossible; nor that, in proportion as Pure Love informs the soul’s

multiform acts, such acts must lose in depth and delicacy of variety

and articulation. Indeed here, with regard to the very culmination

of the interior life, we shall again find and must again test the two

conceptions: the finally abstractive and materially simplifying one,

which must ever have any one real thing outside of another; and the

incarnational and synthetic one, which finds spiritual realities and

forces working the one inside and through the other. And the latter

view will appear the true one.

1. _New Testament teaching as to Pure Love._

Now we must first try and get some clear ideas as to how this difficult

matter stands in the New Testament,--in the Synoptic tradition and in

the Pauline-Joannine teaching respectively. Here again it is the former

which, (though on its surface it appears as the more ordinary and the

more locally coloured teaching), is the richer, in its grandly elastic

and manifold simplicity; and it is the latter which has most profoundly

penetrated and articulated the ultimate meaning and genius of a part

of Our Lord’s doctrine, yet at the cost of a certain narrowing of the

variety and breadth of that outlook. In both cases I shall move, from

the easier and more popular teaching, to the deepest and most original

enunciations and explanations.[139]

(1) The Synoptic teaching starts throughout from the ordinary

post-exilic Jewish feeling and teaching, which indeed recognizes the

ceremonial obligations and the more tangible amongst the ethical

demands as standing under the categorical imperative of the Legal

“Thou Shalt,” but places the large territory of the finer moral

precepts outside of the Law. So with the “Zedakah,” the “Justice” of

almsdeeds, and with the “Gemiluth Chasadim,” the “works of mercy,”

such as visiting the sick, burying the dead, and rejoicing with the

joyful and sorrowing with the sorrowful. Thus Rabbi Simon the Just

tells us: “The world rests on three things: on the Law (_Thorah_),

on Worship (_Abodah_), and on Works of Mercy (_Gemiluth Chasadim_)”;

and Rabbi Eleazar declared the “Gemiluth Chasadim” to be above the

“Zedakah.”[140] And it is especially in view of these works of

supererogation that rewards, and indeed a strict scale of rewards,

are conceived. Thus already in the Book of Tobit, (written somewhere

between 175 and 25 B.C.), we have Tobit instructing his son Tobias that

“Prayer is good with Fasting and Alms, more than to buy up treasures

of gold. For Alms delivereth from death … they that practise Mercy and

Justice shall live long.”[141] And one of the sayings of the Jewish

Fathers declares: “So much trouble, so much reward.”[142]

Now this whole scheme and its spirit seems, at first to be taken over

quite unchanged by Our Lord. The very Beatitudes end with: “Rejoice

… because your reward is great in heaven.” And, in the following

Sermon, his hearers are bidden to beware of doing their “Zedakah,”--the

“Justice” of Prayer, Fasting, Almsdeeds in order to be seen by men;

since, in that case, “ye shall not have reward from your Father Who is

in heaven.” And this is driven home in detail: these three kinds of

Justice are to be done “in secret,” and “thy Father will repay thee.”

Even Prayer itself thus appears as a meritorious good work, one of the

means to “treasure up treasures in heaven.” Similarly, the rich man

is bid “Go sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor; and thou

shalt have a treasure in heaven.” Even “he that shall give you a cup of

cold water in My name, shall not lose his reward.” Indeed we have the

general principle, “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”[143]

And yet we can follow the delicate indications of the presence, and the

transitions to the expression, of the deeper apprehension and truth.

For, on the part of God, the reward appears, in the first instance, as

in intrinsic relation to the deed. The reward is the deed’s congenital

equivalent: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”;

“if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Father … will likewise

forgive you your trespasses”; and “everyone who shall confess Me before

men, him will I also confess before My Father Who is in heaven.”[144]

Or the reward appears as a just inversion of the ordinary results of

the action thus rewarded: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit

the land”; take the highest seat at a banquet, and you will be forced

down to the lowest, take the lowest, and you will be moved up to the

highest; and, generally, “he who findeth his soul, shall lose it;

and that loseth his soul, for My sake, shall find it.”[145] Or the

reward appears as an effect organically connected with the deed, as its

cause or condition: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see

God.”[146] And then the reward comes to vary, although the deed remains

quantitatively identical, solely because of that deed’s qualitative

difference,--_i.e._ according to the variation in its motive: “He that

receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive the reward

of a prophet; and he who receiveth a just man in the name of a just

man, shall receive the reward of a just man.”[147] And then the reward

moves up and up and becomes a grace, through being so far in excess

of the work done: “Every one who hath forsaken house … or father or

children or fields for My name, shall receive manifold,” indeed “an

hundredfold”--“a full … and overflowing measure shall they pour into

your lap”; and “whosoever shall humble himself, shall be exalted,”--not

simply back to his original level, but into the Kingdom of Heaven. So,

too, “Thou wast faithful over a few things, I shall place thee over

many things”; indeed this faithful servant’s master “shall place him

over all his possessions;” or rather, “blessed are those servants whom

the Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching. Amen, I say unto you,

that he shall approach … and shall minister unto them.”[148]

This immense disproportion between the work and its reward, and the

consequent grace-character of the latter, is driven home with a

purposely paradoxical, provocative pointedness, in the two Parables of

the Wedding Garment and of the Equal Payment of the Unequal Labourers,

both of which are in St. Matthew alone. The former concerns the soul’s

call to the kingdom, and that soul’s response. The King here, after

having formally invited a certain select number of previously warned

relatives and nobles, who all, as such, had a _claim_ upon him, Matt,

xxii, 3, sends out invitations with absolute indiscrimination,--to men

with no claims or with less than none; to “bad” as well as “good.” And

it is the King, again, who gratuitously supplies them each with the

appropriate white wedding-feast garment. He has thus a double right to

expect all his guests to be thus clothed, and to punish instantly,

not the mere negligence, but the active rejection implied on the part

of the man clothed in his ordinary clothing (vv. 11, 12). Both call

and investiture have been here throughout pure graces, which rendered

possible, and which invited but did not force, an acceptance.[149]

The second Parable describes the “Householder” who hired labourers

for his vineyard at the first, third, sixth, ninth, and even eleventh

hour,--each and all of them for a penny a day; who actually pays out

to them, at the end of the day, this one identical pay; and who,

to the labourer of the first shift who complains, “These last have

wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us who have

borne the burden and heat of the day,” declares, “Friend, I do thee

no wrong: didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take thine own

and go thy way: I will give to this last even as unto thee. Is it not

lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil (art

thou envious) because I am good” (because I choose to be bountiful)?

Matt. xx, 1-15. Here again the overflowing generosity of God’s grace

is brought home to us, as operating according to other standards

than those of ordinary daily life: nor is this operation unjust, for

the Householder paid their due to the first set of workers, whilst

rewarding, far above their worth, those poor labourers of the last

hour. But, as Jülicher well points out, “we should not pedantically

insist upon finding here a doctrine of the strict equality of souls in

the Beyond--a doctrine contradicted by other declarations of Jesus.

Only the _claim_ of single groups of souls to preferential treatment is

combated here …: a certain fundamental religious disposition is to be

awakened.” And, as Bugge rightly notes, “the great supreme conception

which lies at the bottom of the parable has, parablewise, remained here

unnamed: Paul has found the expressive term for it,--‘Grace.’”[150]

And we get corresponding, increasingly spiritual interpretations with

regard to man’s action and man’s merit. First, all ostentation in the

doing of the deed cancels all reward in the Beyond; so, in the case

of each of the three branches of “Justice.”[151] And then the worker

is to be satisfied, day by day, with that day’s pay and sustenance:

“Give us this day our daily bread,” every soul is to pray; the divine

Householder will say, “Didst thou not agree with me for a penny a day?

Take thine own and go thy way.” And even “when ye have done all that

has been commanded you, say ‘we are unprofitable servants, we have but

done what we were bound to do.’” They are invited to look away from

self, to “seek first the Kingdom and His Justice,” and then “all these

things,” their very necessaries for earthly life, “shall be added unto

you.” Indeed it is the boundlessly generous self-communicativeness of

God Himself which is to be His disciples’ deliberate ideal, “be ye

perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; and the production of

this likeness within themselves is to be the ultimate end and crown

of their most heroic, most costly acts: “love your enemies, and pray

for those that persecute you: that you may become the sons of your

Father who is in Heaven, who maketh His sun to rise upon the evil and

the good, and who raineth upon the just and the unjust.” And the more

there is of such self-oblivious love, the more will even the gravest

sins be entirely blotted out, and the more rapid will be the full

sanctification of the soul, as Our Lord solemnly declares concerning

the sinful woman in St. Luke, “her many sins are forgiven her, because

she hath loved much.”[152]

In all this matter it is St. Luke’s Gospel which is specially

interesting as showing, so to speak, side by side, an increased

Rabbinical-like preciseness of balance between work and reward, and

yet the adoption, doubtlessly under Pauline influence, of St. Paul’s

central term in lieu of the old Jewish terminology. For, in one of its

curious so-called “Ebjonite” passages, this Gospel works up the Parable

of the Talents, with its only approximate relation between the deeds

and their rewards (Matt. xxv, 14-30), into the Parable of the Pounds

(Luke xix, 12-27), with its mathematically symmetrical interdependence

between the quantities of the merit and those of this merit’s reward:

the man who makes ten pounds is placed over ten cities, and he who

makes five, over five. And, on the other hand, in a Lukan equivalent

for part of the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew’s “reward” is replaced

by “grace”: “If ye love them that love you, what grace (χάρις) have

you? and if ye do good to those that do you good, what grace have

you?”[153]

(2) St. Paul indeed it is who, in the specially characteristic portions

of his teaching, unfolds, by means of a partly original terminology,

the deepest motives and implications of Our Lord’s own divinely

deep sayings and doings, and never wearies of insisting upon the

Grace-character of the soul’s call and salvation,--the Free Mercy, the

Pure Love which God shows to us, and the sheer dependence and complete

self-donation, the pure love which we owe to Him, and which, at the

soul’s best, it can and does give Him.

It is true that in the contrasting, the traditional layer of his

teaching, we find the old Jewish terminology still intact: “God will

render unto every man according to his works”; “it behoves us to

appear before the Judgment-seat of Christ, that everyone … may receive

according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad.”[154]

Indeed it is precisely in St. Paul’s pages that we find the two most

difficult and, at first sight, least spiritual sayings concerning this

matter to be discovered in the whole New Testament: “If in this life

only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most miserable.”

And: “If the dead do not rise … let us eat and drink, for to-morrow

we die.”[155] But these two passages must doubtless be taken partly

as arguments adapted to the dispositions of his hearers,--the “Let us

eat and drink” conclusion is given in the words of a current Heathen

Greek proverb,--and, still more, as expressions not so much of a

formal doctrine as of a mood, of one out of the many intense, mutually

supplementary and corrective moods of that rich nature.

According to his own deepest, most deliberate, and most systematic

teaching, it is the life of Christ, the living Christ, energizing even

now within the faithful soul, that constitutes both the primary source

and the ultimate motive of Christian sanctity. “I am crucified with

Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” And

through this divine-human life within us “we faint not; but though our

outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” Indeed

the Lord Himself said to him: “My grace is sufficient for thee; for

power is made perfect in infirmity”; and hence he, Paul, could declare:

“Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of

Christ may dwell in me.” And thus, with Christ living within him, he

can exclaim: “If God be for us, who shall be against us?… Who shall

separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or peril, or

the sword?… In all these things we are more than conquerors, through

him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life,

nor things present nor things to come … shall be able to separate us

from the love of God.” “Whether we live, or whether we die, we are

the Lord’s.”[156] We thus get here a reinsistence upon, and a further

deepening of, perhaps the profoundest utterance of the whole Old

Testament: “What have I in Heaven besides Thee? and besides Thee I seek

nothing upon earth. Even though my flesh and my heart faint, Thou art

my rock and my portion for ever.”[157]

And then that deathless hymn to Pure Love, the thirteenth chapter of

the First Epistle to the Corinthians, not only culminates with the

proclamation that, of all man can hope and wish and will and do, of

all his doings and his graces, “there remain these three, Faith, Hope,

Love, (Charity): but the greatest of these is Love (Charity).” But

the Love that has this primacy is Pure Love, for “it seeketh not its

own.” And though of this Love alone it is said that “it never passeth

away,” ever persists in the Beyond: yet even here already it can and

does get exercised,--and this, not only without any suppression of

parallel acts of the other virtues, but with these other virtues and

their specific motives now taken over and deepened, each in its special

characteristic, by the supreme virtue and motive of Pure Love: “Love

believeth all things, hopeth all things, beareth all things.”[158] Thus

Faith, Hope, Patience, and all the other virtues, they all remain,

but it is Love that is now the ultimate motive of all their specific

motives. These, his culminating teachings, indicate clearly enough that

virtue’s rewards are regarded by him, ultimately and substantially, as

“the wages of going on and not to die”; or rather that they are, in

their essence, manifestations of that Eternal Life which is already

energizing, within souls that earnestly seek God, even here and now.

This Life, then, however great may be its further expansion and the

soul’s consciousness of possessing it, already holds within itself

sufficient, indeed abundant motives, (in the fulfilment of its own

deepest nature and of its now awakened requirements of harmony,

strength, and peace through self-donation), for giving itself ever more

and more to God.

(3) And with regard to the Joannine teaching, it will be enough for

us to refer back to the texts discussed in the preceding chapter, and

to note how large and specially characteristic is here the current

which insists upon the reward being already, at least inchoatively,

enclosed in the deed itself, and upon this deed being the result and

expression of Eternal Life operating within the faithful soul, even

already, Here and Now. Only the declaration that “perfect love casteth

out fear,” that it does not tolerate fear alongside of itself, 1 John

iv, 18, appears to be contrary to the Pauline doctrine that Perfect

Love, “Love” itself “beareth all things, believeth, hopeth, endureth

all things,” 1 Cor. xiii, 7. Love then can animate other virtues: why

not then a holy fear? But this Joannine saying seems in fact modelled

upon St. Paul’s quotation and use of a passage from the Septuagint:

“Cast out the bondwoman (the slave-servant) and her son, for the son

of the bondwoman shall not be heir together with the son of the free,”

Gal. iv, 30; and hence this saying will not exclude “children of the

free-woman,”--a holy fear as well as faith, hope, patience,--but

only “children of the slave-woman,” superstition, presumption,

weakmindedness, and slavish fear.

2. _The “Pure Love” controversy._

In turning now to the controversy as to, Pure Love (1694-1699) and its

assured results, we shall have again to distinguish carefully between

the lives and intentions of the writers who were censured, and the

doctrines, analytic or systematic, taught or implied by them, which

were condemned. This distinction is easier in this case than in that of

Quietism, for the chief writer concerned here is Fénelon, as to whose

pure and spiritual character and deeply Catholic intentions there never

has been any serious doubt.

But in this instance we have to make a further distinction--viz.

between the objective drift of at least part of his _Explication des

Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure_, published in 1697, and

especially the twenty-three propositions extracted from it which

were condemned by Pope Innocent XII in 1699; and the teaching which

he increasingly clarified and improved in his numerous apologetic

writings against Bossuet and other opponents in this memorable

controversy--especially in his Latin writings, intended for

transmission to the Pope, and written as late as 1710 and 1712.[159]

It is certain that Bishops and theologians who opposed his _Maximes_

were found warmly endorsing such pieces as his wonderfully clear and

sober _Première Réponse aux Difficultés de M. l’Evêque de Chartres_.

It is these pieces, comprising also his remarkably rich _Instruction

Pastorale_, his admirably penetrating _Lettre sur l’Oraison Passive_

and _Lettre sur la Charité_, and his extraordinarily compact and

balanced Second Epistle to Pope Clement XI, 1712 (where all the

censured ambiguities and expressions are carefully avoided), and which

alone among Fénelon’s writings shall be accepted in what follows.[160]

Indeed even the earlier of these writings fail in but one thing--in

justifying the actual text of the condemned book, as distinguished

from the intentions of its writer. Bishop Hedley sums up the real

position with the treble authority of a spiritually trained Monk,

of a practised theological writer, and of a Catholic Bishop of long

experience: “The doctrine intended by Fénelon, in his _Maximes des

Saints_, and as explained by him during his controversy with Bossuet,

has never been censured, although the opposite party laboured hard for

its condemnation. Fifteen years after the condemnation of his book, we

find him re-stating to Pope Clement XI (who, as Cardinal, had drawn up

the Brief of his condemnations), in careful scholastic language the

doctrine intended by himself, but which he himself had misstated in his

popular treatise. As there were errors, the other side, whatever the

crudity or novelty of some of its contentions, whatever its motives or

methods--and some of them were far from creditable--was sure in the end

to succeed. And it is well that it should have succeeded as far as it

did succeed.”[161]

In any case, we shall have to beware of considering Bossuet’s

contentions as to the specific character of Charity, Love, and as to

the possibility, for man here below, of single acts of pure love, to

be representative of the ordinary Catholic teaching either before or

since the condemnation. On both these fundamental points Fénelon’s

positions are demonstrably, and indeed have been generally admitted to

be, a mere restatement of that teaching, as is shown, for instance, in

the Jesuit Father Deharbe’s solid and sober, thoroughly traditional and

highly authorized essay: _Die vollkommene Liebe Gottes … dargestellt

nach der Lehre des h. Thomas von Aquin_, Regensburg, 1856. It is

this most useful treatise and the admirable _Analyse Raisonnée de la

Controverse du Quiétisme_ of the Abbé Gosselin,[162] (which has already

much helped me in the preceding section), that have been my chief aids

in my careful study, back through Bossuet and Fénelon, to St. Thomas

and his chief commentators, Sylvius, who died in 1649, and Cardinal

Cajetan, who died in 1534, and to the other chief authorities beyond

them.--I group the main points, which alone need concern us here, under

three heads: the specific Nature of Pure Love; single Acts of Pure

Love; a State of Pure Love.

(1) Now as to the specific Nature of Charity, or Pure, Perfect Love,

St. Thomas tells us: “One Kind of Love is perfect, the other kind is

imperfect. Perfect Love is that wherewith a man is loved for his own

sake: as, for instance, when some one wishes well to another person,

for that other person’s sake, in the manner in which a man loves his

friend. Imperfect love is the love wherewith a man loves something,

not for its own sake, but in order that this good thing may accrue to

himself,--in the manner in which a man loves a thing that he covets.

Now the former kind of love pertains to Charity, which clings to God

for His own sake, whereas it is Hope that pertains to the second

kind of love, since he who hopes aims at obtaining something for

himself.”[163] And Cardinal Cajetan explains that this wishing well to

God, “this good that we can will God to have, is double. The good that

is in Him, that (strictly speaking) is God Himself,--we can, by Love,

will Him to have it, when we find our delight in God being what He is.

And the good that is but referred to God,--His honour and Kingdom and

the Obedience we owe him,--this we can will, not only by finding our

pleasure in it, but by labouring at its maintenance and increase with

all our might.”[164]

And, says St. Thomas, such Perfect Love alone is Love in its strict

sense and “the most excellent of all the virtues”: for “ever that which

exists for its own sake is greater than that which exists in view of

something else. Now Faith and Hope attain indeed to God, yet as the

source from which there accrue to us the knowledge of the Truth and

the acquisition of the Good; whilst Love attains to God Himself, with

a view to abide in Him, and not that some advantage may accrue to us

from Him.” And perhaps still more clearly: “ When a man loves something

so as to covet it, he apprehends it as something pertaining to his

own well-being. The lover here stands towards the object beloved, as

towards something which is his property.”[165] And note how, although

he teaches that whereas “the beatitude of man, as regards its cause

and its object, is something increate,” _i.e._ God Himself, “the

essence of the beatitude itself is something created,” for “men are

rendered blessed by participation, and this participation in beatitude

is something created”: yet he is careful to explain some of his more

incidental passages, in which he speaks of this essence of beatitude

as itself man’s end, by the _ex professo_ declaration: “God” alone “is

man’s ultimate end, and beatitude is only as it were an end before the

very end, an end in immediate proximity to the ultimate end.”[166]

(2) And next, as to the possibility, actual occurrence and

desirableness of single Acts of such Pure Love, even here below:

all this is assumed as a matter of course throughout St. Thomas’s

_ex professo_ teaching on the matter. For throughout the passages

concerning the Nature of Pure Love he is not exclusively, indeed not

even primarily, busy with man’s acts in the future life, but with the

respective characteristics of man’s various acts as executed and as

analyzable, more or less perfectly, already here below. And nowhere

does he warn us against concluding, from his reiterated insistence upon

the essential characteristics of Pure Love, that such love cannot, as

a matter of fact, be practised, at least in single acts, here below at

all. Hence it is clear that, according to him, the soul as it advances

in perfection will--alongside of acts of supernatural Faith, Hope,

Fear, etc. (and the production of such acts will never cease), produce

more and more acts of Pure Love: not necessarily more, as compared

with the other kinds of contemporary acts, but certainly more as

compared with its former acts of the same character.

But there is a further, profoundly and delicately experienced

doctrine. Not only can Pure Love be exercised in single and simple

acts, alongside of single and simple acts of other kinds of virtues,

supernatural or otherwise: but Pure Love can itself come to command

or to inform acts which in themselves bear, and will now bear in

increased degree, the characteristics of the other kinds of acts. St.

Thomas tells us, with admirable clearness: “An act can be derived from

Charity in one of two ways. In the first way, the act is elicited

by Charity itself, and such a virtuous act requires no other virtue

beside Charity,--as in the case of loving the Good, rejoicing in it,

and mourning over its opposite. In the second way, an act proceeds

from Charity in the sense of being commanded by it: and in this

manner,--since Charity” has the full range of and “commands all the

virtues, as ordering them (each and all) to their (ultimate) end,--an

act can proceed from Charity whilst nevertheless belonging to any other

special virtue.” And he assures us that: “The merit of eternal life,”

“the fountain-head of meriting,” “pertains primarily to, consists in

Charity, and pertains to and consists in other kinds of supernatural

acts in only a secondary manner,--that is, only in so far as these acts

are commanded or informed by Charity” or Pure Love.[167]

Let us take some instances of such two-fold manifestations of identical

motives and virtues, according as these motives and virtues operate

in simple co-ordination, or within a compound and organic system. In

the scholar’s life, Greek and Latin and Hebrew may be acquired, each

simply for its own sake and each alongside of the other; or they can be

acquired, from the immediate motive indeed of knowing each in its own

specific nature as thoroughly as possible, yet with the ultimate, ever

more and more conscious and all-penetrating, motive of thus acquiring

means and materials for the science of language, or for the study of

philosophy, or for research into early phases of the Jewish-Christian

religion. In the family life, a man, woman, or child can live for

himself or herself, and then for his or her other immediate relatives,

each taken as separate alongside of the other, or he or she may get

more and more dominated by the conception and claims of the family as

an organic whole, and may end by working largely, even with respect

to himself, as but for so many constituents of that larger organism

in which alone each part can attain its fullest significance. And

especially a young mother can live for her own health and joys, and

then, alongside of these, for those of her child, or she can get to the

point of sustaining her own physical health and her mental hopes and

will to live as so many means and conditions for feeding and fostering

the claimful body and soul of her child.

So again, in the creatively artistic life, we can have a Dante writing

prose and poetry and painting a picture, and a Rafael painting

pictures and writing sonnets; or we can have Wagner bringing all his

activities of scholar, poet, painter, musician, stage-manager,--each

retaining, and indeed indefinitely increasing, its specific character

and capabilities,--to contribute, by endless mutual stimulation and

interaction, to something other and greater than any one of them

individually or even than the simple addition of them all,--to a great

Music-Drama and multiform yet intensely unified image of life itself.

And an organist can draw out, as he plays, the _Vox Humana_ stop, and

then another and another limitedly efficacious organ-stop, whilst each

new-comer takes the place of its predecessor or a place beside it; or

he can draw out the _Grand Jeu_ stop, which sets all the other stops

to work in endless interaction, with itself permeating and organizing

the whole. We thus, in these and countless other cases, and in every

variety of degree within each case, get two kinds of variety, what we

may call the simple and the compound diversification. And everywhere

we can find that the richest variety not only can co-exist with, but

that it requires and is required by, indeed that it is a necessary

constituent and occasion of, the deepest and most delicate unity.[168]

(3) And finally, as to a State of Pure Love. Only here do we reach the

class of questions to which the condemnations of Fénelon really apply.

We shall do well to begin by bearing in mind the very ancient,

practically unbroken, very orthodox Christian discrimination of

faithful souls,--sometimes into the two classes of Mercenaries (or

Slaves) and Friends or Children, the latter of whom the great Clement

of Alexandria, who died about A.D. 215, called “Gnostics,” “Gnosis”

being his term for perfection (this scheme is the one to which

Catherine’s life and teaching conform); or into the three classes

of Servants (Slaves); Mercenaries; and Friends (or Children), as is

already worked out with full explicitness by Saints Basil, Gregory

of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa, who died in the years 379, 389,

and 395 (?) respectively. Now Clement places the Mercenary on the

left of the Sanctuary, but the “Gnostic” on the right; and, whilst

declaring that the former “are those who, by means of renouncing things

perishable, hope to receive the goods of incorruption in exchange,”

he demands of the “Gnostic” that “he approach the saving word neither

from the fear of punishment, nor from the motive of reward, but simply

because He is good.”[169] And St. Basil, echoed in this by his two

contemporaries, teaches that, “We obey God and avoid vices, from the

fear of punishment, and in that case we take on the resemblance of

Slaves. Or we keep the precepts, because of the utility that we derive

from the recompense, thus resembling Mercenaries. Or finally, from

love of Him who has given us the law, we obey with joy at having been

judged worthy of serving so great and good a God, and thus we imitate

the affection of Children towards their parents.”[170] And, in the case

of all these Fathers, it is clear that, not only single acts, but whole

states of soul and life are meant.

But the increased fineness in the analysis of interior experiences

and dispositions has since then required, and the Church formulations

have most wisely demanded, that these three classes be not so sharply

distinguished as to make any one soul seem exclusively and unchangeably

to pertain to any one of them; and, still more, that these three

divisions be taken to represent, even where and whilst they are most

completely realized, only the predominant character of the majority of

the acts constituting the respective state of soul. For it is clear

that not only is there, and can there be, no such thing, on earth at

least, as a state composed of one unrepeated act; but there is no such

thing as a condition of soul made up solely of acts of “simple” Pure

Love, or even of supernatural acts of all sorts commanded throughout

by Charity, or indeed solely of supernatural acts, both simple and

commanded. The “One-act” state is a chimera; the state of “simple”

acts of Pure Love alone would, if possible, involve the neglect of

numberless other virtues and duties; and the last two states indeed

highly desirable, but it would be fanaticism to think we could

completely attain to them here below.

Yet there is nothing in any Church-censure to prevent, and there is

much in the teaching and life of countless saints to invite, our

holding the possibility, hence the working ideal and standard, for even

here below, of a state in which two kinds of acts, which are still

good in their degree, would be in a considerable minority: acts of

merely natural, unspiritualized hope, fear, desire, etc.; and acts of

supernatural hope, fear, desire, etc., in so far as not commanded by

Charity. For even in this state not fully deliberate venial sins would

occasionally be committed, far more would a certain number of acts

of an unspiritualized, unsupernatural kind occur. And the necessary

variety among the supernatural acts would in nowise be impaired,--it

would indeed be greatly stimulated, by Pure Love being now, for the

most part, the ultimate motive of their exercise.

Sylvius, in his highly authoritative commentary on St. Thomas, puts the

matter admirably: “We may not love God in view of reward in suchwise

as to make eternal life the true and ultimate end of our love, or to

love God because of it, so that without the reward we would not love

Him … We must love God with reference to the eternal reward in suchwise

that we put forth indeed both love and good works in view of such

beatitude,--in so far as the latter is the end proposed to these works

by God Himself; yet that we subordinate this our beatitude to the love

of God as the true and ultimate end,” so that “if we had no beatitude

to expect at all, we should nevertheless still love Him and execute

good works for His own sake alone. In this manner we shall first love

God above all things and for His own sake; and we shall next keep the

eternal reward before us, for the sake of God and of His honour.”[171]

A man in these dispositions would still hope, and desire, and fear,

and regret, and strive for, and aspire to conditions, things, persons

both of earth and of the beyond, both for himself and for others,

both for time and for eternity: but all this, for the most part, from

the ultimate motive, penetrating, deepening, unifying all the other

motives,--of the love of Love, Christ, Spirit, God.

Any hesitation to accept the reality or possibility of such a state

cannot, then, be based upon such acceptance involving any kind of

Quietism, but simply on the admittedly great elevation of such a

condition. Yet this latter objection seems to be sufficiently met if

we continuously insist that even such a state neither exempts souls

from the commission of (more or less deliberate) venial sin; nor is

ever entirely equable; nor is incapable of being completely lost; nor,

as we have just contended, is ever without more or less numerous acts

of an unsupernaturalized kind, and still less without acts of the

supernatural virtues other than Love and unprompted by Love.

And all fear of fanaticism will be finally removed by a further most

necessary and grandly enlarging insistence upon the Mercenaries and

even the Servants having passing moments, and producing varyingly

numerous single acts of, Pure Love and of the other supernatural

virtues prompted by Pure Love. All souls in a state of Grace throughout

God’s wide wide world,--every constituent, however slight and recent,

of the great soul of the Church throughout every sex, age, race, clime,

and external organization, would thus have some touches, some at least

incidental beginnings of Pure Love, and of the other supernatural

virtues prompted by Pure Love. All souls would thus, in proportion to

their degree of grace and of fidelity, have some of those touches; and

the progress of all would consist in the degree to which that variety

of acts would become informed and commanded by the supreme motive of

all motives, Pure and Perfect Love.[172]

And with such an Ideal, required by fundamental Catholic positions,

ever increasingly actuating the soul and binding it to all souls

beneath, around, above it, what there is of truth in the savage

attacks of Spinoza and of Kant and of such recent writers as A.

E. Taylor,[173] upon the supposed hypocritical self-seeking in the

practice and temper of average Christians, would lose all its force.

3. _Cognate Problems._

Three much-discussed cognate matters require some elucidation here.

They answer to the questions: Does reference to the self, as for

instance in acts of gratitude and thanksgiving, prevent an act from

being one of Pure Love? Is the pleasurableness, normally ever attached

and subsequent to all virtuous acts, to be regarded as part of the

reward from which Pure Love abstracts? And finally are, I will not say

any technically ecstatic or other in part psycho-physical peculiarities

and manifestations, but even active Contemplation or the simple Prayer

of Quiet, necessary conditions or expressions of a state of Pure

Love,--understood in the sense explained above?

(1) As to reference to the self, it is highly important to distinguish

between acts of Pure Love, and attempts, by means of the maximum

possible degree of abstraction, to apprehend the absolute character

and being of God. For these two things have no necessary connection,

and yet they have been frequently confounded. St. Teresa’s noble

confession of past error, and consequent doubly valuable, amended

teaching is perhaps the most classical pronouncement extant upon this

profoundly important point.[174] The contingent, spacial and temporal,

manifestations and communications of God, above all as we have them in

the life of Our Lord and in those who have come nearest to Him, but

also, in their several degrees and forms, in the lives of each one of

us: all these, in their sacred, awakening and healing, particularity

and closeness of contact, can and should be occasions and materials for

the most perfect, for the purest Love.

Indeed it is well never to forget that nothing, and least of all God,

the deepest of all the realities, is known to us at all, except in and

by means of its relation to our own self or to our fellow-creatures.

Hence if Love were Pure only in proportion as it could be based upon

our apprehension of God as independent of all relation to ourselves,

Pure Love would be simply impossible for us.--But, in truth, such a

conception would, in addition, be false in itself: it would imply that

the whole great Incarnation-fact and -doctrine,--the whole of that

great root of all religion, the certainty that it is because God has

first loved us that we can love Him, that He is a self-revealing God,

and One whom we can know and reach because “in Him we live and move

and have our being”--was taking us, not towards, but away from, our

true goal. There are, surely, few sadder and, at bottom, more deeply

uncreaturely, unchristian attitudes, than that which would seek or

measure perfection in and by the greatest possible abstraction from all

those touching contingencies which God Himself has vouchsafed to our

nature,--a nature formed by Himself to require such plentiful contact

with the historical and visible.--And if God’s pure love for us can

and does manifest itself in such contingent acts, then our love can

and should become and manifest itself purer and purer by means, not

only of the prayer of formless abstraction and expectation, but also

by the contemplation of these contingencies and by the production of

analogously contingent acts. And if so, then certainly gratitude, in so

far as it truly deserves the name, can and does belong to Pure Love,

for the very characteristic of such gratitude consists in a desire to

give and not to receive.[175]

Not, then, the degree of disoccupation with the Contingent, even

of the contingent of our own life, but the degree of freedom from

self-seeking, and of the harmonization and subordination of all these

contingencies in and under the supreme motive of the Pure Love and

service of God in man and of man in God, is the standard and test of

Christian perfection.

(2) As to the pleasurableness which, in normal psychic conditions, more

or less immediately accompanies or follows the virtuous acts of the

soul, the realizations of its own deeper and deepest ideals, we should

note that, in its earthly degree and form, it is not included in what

theologians mean by the “rewards” of virtuous action. And in this they

are thoroughly self-consistent, for they adhere, I think with practical

unanimity, to Catherine’s doctrine that these immediate consequences

of virtuous acts are not to be considered a matter of positive and,

as it were, separate divine institution,--as something which, given

the fundamental character of man’s spiritual nature, might have been

otherwise; but as what,--given the immutable nature of God and of the

image at nature in His creature, man,--follows from an intrinsic,

quite spontaneous necessity.--Hence, at this point especially, would

it be foolish and fanatical, because contrary to the immanental nature

of things, and to the right interplay of the elemental forces of all

life, to attempt the suppression even of the several actual irruptions

of such pleasure, and still more of the source and recurrence of this

delectation. Fortunately success is here as impossible as it would be

undesirable,--as much so as, on a lower plane, would be the suppression

of the pleasure concomitant with the necessary kinds and degrees of

eating. Indeed, it is clear, upon reflection that unless a man (at

least implicitly) accepts and (indirectly) wills that spiritual or

physical pleasure, he cannot profitably eat his food or love his God.

But from this in nowise follows what Bossuet tried so hard to

prove,--that what is thus necessarily present in man, as a psychical or

physical prompting and satisfaction, must also of necessity be willed

by him, directly and as his determining reason and justification. In

turning to eat, man cannot help feeling a psychic pleasure of an all

but purely physical kind; and, if he is wise, he will make no attempt

to meddle with this feeling. But he can either deliberately will, as

his action’s object, that pleasure which is thus inevitably incident

to the act, and the more he does so, the more simply greedy and

sensual he will become; or he can directly will, as his determining

end, that sustenance of life and strength for his work and spiritual

growth, which is the justification and ultimate reason of eating (the

_rationale_ of that very pleasure so wisely attached by nature, as a

stimulus, to a process so necessary to the very highest objects), and

the more he does so, the more manly and spiritual he will grow.

And so with every one of man’s wondrously manifold and different

physical, psychical, spiritual requirements and actions, within

the wide range of his right nature and ideals. There is not one of

them,--not the most purely physical-seeming of these acts,--which he

cannot ennoble and spiritualize by, as it were, meeting it,--by willing

it, more and more, because of its rational end and justification.

And there is not one of them,--not an act which, judged simply by

its direct subject-matter and by the soul’s faculties immediately

engaged, would be the most purely mental and religious of acts,--which

man cannot degrade and de-spiritualize, by, as it were, following

it, by willing it more and more because of its psychical attraction

and pleasurable concomitance alone. For, in the former case, the

act, however gross may seem its material, is made the occasion and

instrument of spiritual character-building and of the constitution

of liberty; in the latter case, the act, however ethereal its body,

is but the occasion and means of the soul’s dispersion in the mere

phenomenal flux of the surface of existence, and of its subjection to

the determinism which obtains here.[176]

Catherine’s whole convert life is one long series of the most striking

examples of an heroic delicacy in self-knowledge and self-fighting in

this matter: a delicacy which, as to the degree of its possibility and

desirableness in any particular soul, is, however, peculiarly dependent

upon that soul’s special circumstances, temperament, _attrait_, and

degree of perfection reached and to be reached.

(3) And, finally, as to the relations between the Contemplative forms

of Prayer, and Acts and variously complete States of Pure Love; and,

again, of such Prayer and Love, and Abnormal or Miraculous conditions:

it is clear that, if there is no true Contemplation without much Pure

Love, there can be much Pure Love without Contemplation.

Abbé Gosselin well sums up the ordinary Catholic teaching. “Meditation

consists of discursive acts which are easily distinguished from each

other, both because of the kind of strain and shock with which they

are produced, and because of the diversity of their objects. It is

the ordinary foundation of the interior life and the ordinary prayer

of beginners, whose imperfect love requires to be thus excited and

sustained by distinct and reflective acts. Contemplation consists,

strictly speaking, in direct ‘non-reflex’ acts,--acts so simple and

peaceful as to have nothing salient by which the soul could distinguish

one from the other. It is called by the Mystical Saints ‘a simple and

loving look,’ as discriminating it from meditation and the latter’s

many methodic and discursive acts, and as limiting it to a simple and

loving consideration and view of God and of divine things, certified

and rendered present to the soul by faith. It is the ordinary prayer

of perfect souls, or at least of those that have already made much

progress in the divine love. For the more purely a soul loves

God, the less it requires to be sustained by distinct, reflective

acts; reasoning becomes a fatigue and an embarrassment to it in its

prayer--it longs but to love and to contemplate the object of its love.”

Or as Fénelon puts it: “‘Passivity,’ ‘Action,’ is not precisely itself

Pure Love, but is the mode in which Pure Love operates.… ‘Passivity,’

‘Action,’ is not precisely the purity of Love, but is the effect of

that purity.”[177] Yet, as M. Gosselin adds, “It must be admitted that

without Contemplation the soul can arrive at a very high perfection;

and that the most discursive meditation, and hence still more all

prayer as it becomes effective, often includes certain direct acts

which form an admixture and beginning of contemplation.”[178]

And as to any supposed necessary relations between the very highest

contemplation and the most complete state of Pure Love on the one hand,

and anything abnormal or miraculous on the other hand, Fénelon, in

this point remarkably more sober than Bossuet, well sums up the most

authoritative and classical Church-teaching on the matter: “‘Passive’

Contemplation is but Pure Contemplation: ‘Active’ Contemplation

being one which is still mixed with hurried and discursive acts.

When Contemplation has ceased to have any remnant of this hurry, of

this ‘activity,’ it is entirely ‘Passive,’ that is, peaceful, in

its acts.” “This free and loving look of the soul means acts of the

understanding,--for it is a look; and acts of the will, for the look

is a loving one; and acts produced by free-will, without any strict

necessity, for the look is a free look.” “We should not compare

Passive Contemplation,” as did Bossuet, “to prophecy, or to the gift

of tongues or of miracles; nor may we say that this mystical state

consists principally in something wrought by God within us without

our co-operation, and where, consequently, there neither is nor can

be any merit. We must, on the contrary, to speak correctly, say that

the substance of such Passive Prayer, taken in its specific acts,

is free, meritorious, and operated within us by a grace that acts

together with us.” “It is the attraction to the acts which the soul

now produces which, as by a secondary and counter-effect, occasions

a quasi-incapacity for those acts which it does not produce. Now

this attraction is not of a kind to deprive the soul of the use of

its free-will: we see this from the nature of the acts which this

attraction causes the soul to produce. Whence I conclude that this

same attraction does not, again, deprive it of its liberty with regard

to the acts which it prevents. The attraction but prevents the latter

in the way it produces the other,--by an efficacious influence that

involves no sheer necessity.” “‘Passivity,’ if it comes from God, ever

leaves the soul fully free for the exercise of the distinct virtues

demanded by God in the Gospel; the _attrait_ is truly divine only

in so far as it draws the soul on to the perfect fulfilment of the

evangelical counsels and promises concerning all the virtues.” “The

inspiration of the Passive state is but an habitual inspiration for

the interior acts of evangelical piety. It renders the Passive soul

neither infallible nor impeccable, nor independent of the Church even

for its interior direction, nor exempt from the obligation of meriting

and growing in virtue.… The inspiration of the passive soul differs

from that of actively just souls only in being purer; that is, more

exempt from all natural self-seeking, more full, more simple, more

continuous, and more developed at each moment. We have, throughout,

ever one and the same inspiration, which but grows in perfection and

purity in proportion as the soul renounces itself more, and becomes

more sensitive to the divine impressions.”[179]

Thus we get an impressive, simple and yet varied, conception of

spirituality, in which a real continuity, and a power and obligation of

mutual understanding and aid underlies all the changes of degree and

form, from first to last. For from first to last there are different

degrees, but of the same supernatural grace acting in and upon the same

human nature responsive in different degrees and ways. From first to

last there is, necessarily and at every step, the Supernatural: at no

point is there any necessary presence of, or essential connection with,

the Miraculous or the Abnormal.

4. _Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant._

Theology and Philosophy have not ceased to occupy themselves, at least

indirectly, with the substance of these great questions, since they

furnished the subject-matter to Bossuet and Fénelon in their memorable

controversy; somewhat over-subtle although some of it was in its

earlier phases, owing to Fénelon’s chivalrous anxiety to defend, as far

as possible, the very expressions, often so nebulous and shifting, of

his cousin, Madame Guyon.

(1) Indeed about twenty years before that controversy, Spinoza had,

in his _Theologico-Political Treatise_, and then, more impressively

still, in his _Ethics_, made a brilliant assault upon all, especially

all religious, self-seeking. Also on this point these writings showed

that strange, pathetic combination of grandly religious intuitions

and instincts with a Naturalistic system which, logically, leaves no

room for those deepest requirements of that great soul; and here they

revealed, in addition, considerable injustice towards the, doubtless

very mixed and imperfect, motives of average humanity.

True intuition speaks in his _Treatise_ (published in 1670) in the

words: “Since the love of God is man’s supreme beatitude and the final

end and scope of all human actions: it follows that only that man

conforms to the divine law, who strives to love God, not from fear of

punishment, nor from the love of some other thing, such as delights,

fame, and so forth, but from this motive alone, that he knows God, or

that he knows the knowledge and love of God, to be his supreme end.”

But a little further back we learn that “the more we know the things

of Nature, the greater and the more perfect knowledge of God do we

acquire”; a frank application of the pure Pantheism of his reasoned

system.

In his _Ethics_, again, a noble intuition finds voice where he says:

“Even if we did not know our Mind,” our individual soul, “to be

eternal, we should still put Piety and Religion and, in a word, all

those virtues that are to be referred to magnanimity and generosity,

first in our esteem.” But he is doubtless excessive in his picturing of

the downright, systematic immorality of attitude of ordinary men--the

“slaves” and “mercenaries.” “Unless this hope of laying aside the

burdens of Piety and Religion after death and of receiving the price

of their service, and this fear of being punished by dire punishments

after death were in men, and if they, contrariwise, believed that

their minds would perish with their bodies: they would let themselves

go to their natural inclination and would decide to rule all their

actions according to their lust.” And he is doubtlessly, though nobly,

excessive in his contrary ideal: “He who loves God cannot strive that

God shall love him in return,”--an ideal which is, however, certainly

in part determined by his philosophy, which knows no ultimate abiding

personality or consciousness either in God or man.

Yet, once again, we have him at his inspiring best when,

Catherine-like, he tells us: “The supreme Good of those who pursue

virtue is common to them all, and all are equally able to rejoice in

it”; and “this love towards God is incapable of being stained by the

passions of envy and bitterness, but is increased in proportion as we

figure to ourselves a larger number of men joined to God by the same

bonds of love”; when he declares: “we do not enjoy beatitude because we

master our passions; rather, contrariwise, do we master our passions

because we enjoy beatitude”; and when he insists, with no doubt too

indiscriminating, too Jacopone-like, a simplification, upon what,

in its substance, is a profound truth: “the intellectual,” the pure

“love of the soul for God is the very love of God, wherewith God loves

Himself.”[180]

(2) It was, however, the astonishingly circumspect and many-sided

Leibniz who, indefinitely smaller soul though he was, succeeded,

perhaps better than any other modern philosopher, in successfully

combining the divers constitutive elements of the act and state of

Pure Love, when he wrote in 1714: “Since true Pure Love consists in a

state of soul which makes me find pleasure in the perfections and the

felicity of the object loved by me, this love cannot but give us the

greatest pleasure of which we are capable, when God is that object.

And, though this love be disinterested, it already constitutes, even

thus simply by itself, our greatest-good and deepest interest.”

Or, as he wrote in 1698: “Our love of others cannot be separated

from our true good, nor our love of God from our felicity. But it is

equally certain that the consideration of our own particular good, as

distinguished from the pleasure which we taste in seeing the felicity

of another, does not enter into Pure Love.” And earlier still he

had defined the act of loving as “the finding one’s pleasure in the

felicity of another”; and had concluded thence that Love is for man

essentially an enjoyment, although the specific motive of love is not

the pleasure or the particular good of him who loves, but the good or

the felicity of the beloved object.[181]

(3) Yet it is especially Kant who, with his predominant hostility to

all Eudaemonism in Morality and Religion, has, more than all others,

renewed the controversy as to the relations between virtue and piety

on the one hand, and self-seeking motives on the other, and who is

popularly credited with an entirely self-consistent antagonism to even

such a wise and necessary attitude as are the amended positions of

Fénelon and those of Leibniz. And yet I sincerely doubt whether (if

we put aside the question as to the strictly logical consequences of

his Critical Idealism, such as that Idealism appears in its greatest

purity in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, 1781; and if we neglect the

numerous, often grossly unjust, Spinoza-like sallies against the

supposed undiluted mercenariness of ordinary piety, which abound in his

_Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason_, 1793), we could readily

find any explicit pronouncement hopelessly antagonistic to the Catholic

Pure-Love doctrine.

Certainly the position taken up towards this point in that very

pregnant and curious, largely-overlooked little treatise, _The Canon

of Pure Reason_, which (evidently an earlier and complete sketch), has

been inserted by him into his later, larger, but materially altered

scheme of the _Critique_ of 1781, (where it now forms the _Zweite

Hauptstück_ of the _Transcendentale Methodenlehre_, ed. Kehrbach,

Reclam, pp. 603-628), appears to be substantially acceptable.[182]

“Happiness consists in the satisfaction of all our inclinations,

according to their various character, intensity, and duration. The

law of practical action, in so far as it is derived from the motive

of happiness, I call Pragmatic, a Rule of Good Sense; the same law,

in so far as it has for its motive only the becoming worthy of such

happiness, I call Moral, the Moral Law. Now Morality already by itself

constitutes a system, but Happiness does not do so, except in so far as

Happiness is distributed in exact accordance with Morality. But such a

distribution is only possible in the intelligible world,”--the world

beyond phenomena which can be reached by our reason alone--“and under

a wise Originator and Ruler. Such an One, together with life in such a

world--a world which we are obliged to consider as a future one--reason

finds itself forced to assume, or else to look upon the moral laws as

empty phantoms, since the necessary result of these laws,--a result

which that same reason connects with their very idea,--would have to

fall away, if that assumption were to go. Hence every one looks upon

the moral laws as _commandments_, a thing which they could not be,

if they did not conjoin with their rule consequences of _a priori_

appropriateness, and hence if they did not carry with them _promises_

and _threats_. But this too they can do only if they lie within the

compass of a Single Necessary Being, Itself the Supreme Good, Which

alone can render possible such a unity embracing both means and

end.--Happiness alone is, for our reason, far from being the Complete

Good, for reason does not approve of Happiness unless it be united with

the being worthy of Happiness, _i.e._ Moral Rectitude. But Morality

alone, and with it the simple being worthy of happiness, is also far

from the Complete Good. Even if reason, free from any consideration of

any interest of its own, were to put itself in the position of a being

that had to distribute all happiness to others alone, it could not

judge otherwise: for, in the complete idea of practical action, both

points are in essential conjunction, yet in suchwise that it is the

moral disposition which, as condition, first renders possible a sharing

in happiness, and not the prospect of happiness which first gives

an opening to the moral disposition. For, in this latter case, the

disposition would not be moral, and, consequently, would not deserve

that complete happiness to which reason can assign no other limitation

than such as springs from our own immoral attitude of will.”[183]

In his _Foundation of the Metaphysic of Morals_, 1785, the noble

apostrophe to the Good Will no doubt appears formally to proclaim

as possible and desirable a complete human disposition, in which no

considerations of Happiness play any part: “The good will is good,

not through what it effects or produces, not through its utility for

the attainment of any intention or end, but it is good through the

quality of the volition alone; that is, it is good in itself.…” “If,

with its greatest efforts, nothing were to be effected by it, and only

the good will itself were to remain, this bare will would yet shine in

lonely splendour as a jewel,--as something which has its full value in

itself.” But further on he shows us how, after all, “this good will

cannot, then, be the only and the whole good, but still it is the

highest good and the condition for all the rest, even for our desire of

happiness.”[184] Certain exaggerations, which are next developed by

him here, shall be considered in a later chapter.

5. _Four important points._

Here I will but put together, in conclusion, four positions which I

have rejoiced to find in two such utterly, indeed at times recklessly,

independent writers as Professor Georg Simmel of Berlin and Professor

A. E. Taylor.

(1) Dr. Simmel declares, with admirable cogency: “The concept of

religion completely loses in Kant, owing to his rationalistic manner

of discovering in it a mere compound of the moral interest and the

striving after happiness, its most specific and deepest character.

No doubt these two apprehensions are also essential to religion, but

precisely the direction in which Kant conjoins them,--that duty issues

in happiness, is the least characteristic of religion, and is only

determined by his Moralism, which refuses to recognize the striving

after happiness as a valuable motive. The opposite direction appears to

me as far more decisively a part of religion and of its incomparable

force: for we thus find in religion precisely that ideal power, which

makes it the duty of man to win his own salvation. According to the

Kantian Moralism, it is every man’s private affair how he shall meet

his requirement of happiness; and to turn such a private aspiration

into an objective, ideal claim, would be for Kant a contradiction and

abomination. In reality, however, religion itself _requires_ that man

should have a care for his own welfare and beatitude, and in this

consists its incomparable force of attraction.”[185] Let the reader

note how entirely this agrees with, whilst properly safeguarding, the

doctrine of Pure Love: it is the precise position of the best critics

of the unamended Fénelon.

(2) Professor Taylor insists that “it is possible to desire directly

and immediately pleasant experiences which are not my own.… Because

it is _I_ who in every case have the pleasure of the anticipation, it

is assumed that it must be I who am to experience the realization of

the anticipation.” Yet “it is really no more paradoxical that I should

anticipate with pleasure some event which is not to form part of my own

direct sensible experience, than it is that I should find pleasure in

the anticipation at twenty of myself at eighty.” “The austerest saints

will and can mortify themselves as a thing well-pleasing to God.”[186]

In this way the joy of each constituent of the Kingdom of God in the

joys of all the rest, and in the all-pervading joy of God, is seen to

be as possible as it is undoubtedly actual: the problem of the relation

between pleasure and egoism is solved.

(3) And Professor Taylor again insists upon how pleasant experiences,

which do not owe their pleasantness to their relation to a previous

anticipation, are not, properly speaking, good or worthy. It is by

“satisfactions” and not by mere “pleasures” that “even the most

confirmed Hedonist must compute the goodness of a life.… Only when

the pleasant experience includes in itself the realization of an idea

is it truly good.”[187] But, if so, then the experience will be good,

not in proportion as it is unpleasant, as Kant was so prone to imply;

nor directly in proportion as it is pleasant, although pleasantness

will accompany or succeed it, of a finer quality if not of a greater

intensity, according as the idea which it embodies is good: but

directly in proportion to the goodness of that idea. Thus all things

licit, from sense to spirit, will find their place and function in such

acts, and in a life composed of such acts, spirit expressing itself

in terms of sense. And the purification, continuously necessary for

the ever more adequate expression of the one in and by the other, will

be something different from any attempt at suppressing this means of

expression. Thus here again the great Christian Incarnation-Doctrine

appears as the deepest truth, and as the solution of the problem as to

the relations of pleasure and duty.[188]

(4) And finally, as to the ever-present need and importance of a theory

concerning these matters, Professor Taylor points out, not only that

some such theory is necessary to the full human life, but that it must

place an infinite ideal before us: paradox though it may sound, nothing

less is truly practical, for “any end that is to be permanently felt

as worth striving for, must be infinite,” and therefore “in a sense

infinitely remote”; and hence “if indifference to the demand for a

practicable ideal be the mark of a dreamer or a fanatic, contentment

with a finite and practicable ideal is no less undeniably the mark of

an _esprit borné_.”[189]

Here Fénelon has adequately interpreted the permanent and complete

requirements of the religious life and spirit. “You tell me,” he

says to his adversaries, “that ‘Christianity is not a school of

Metaphysicians.’ All Christians cannot, it is true, be Metaphysicians;

but the principal Theologians have great need to be such. It was by a

sublime Metaphysic that St. Augustine soared above the majority of the

other Fathers, who were, for the rest, as fully versed in Scripture

and Tradition. It was by his lofty Metaphysic that St. Gregory of

Nazianzum has merited the distinguishing title of _Theologian_.

It is by Metaphysic that St. Anselm and St. Thomas have been such

great luminaries of the Church. True, the Church is not ‘a school of

Metaphysicians,’ who dispute without docility, as did the ancient sects

of philosophers. Yet she is a school in which St. Paul teaches that

Charity is more perfect than Hope, and in which the holiest Doctors

declare, in accordance with the principles of the Fathers, that Love

is more perfect, precisely because it ‘abides in God, not in view of

any benefit that may accrue to us from so doing.’” “I know well,” he

writes to a friend, “that men misuse the doctrines of Pure Love and

Resignation; I know that there are hypocrites who, under cover of

such noble terms, overthrow the Gospel. Yet it is the worst of all

procedures to attempt the destruction of perfect things, from a fear

that men will make a wrong use of them.” Notwithstanding all misuse of

the doctrine--“the very perfection of Christianity is Pure Love.”[190]