CHAPTER XV

SUMMING UP OF THE WHOLE BOOK. BACK THROUGH ASCETICISM, SOCIAL RELIGION,

AND THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT OF MIND, TO THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION.

I now propose to conclude, by getting, through three successively

easier matters, back to the starting-point of this whole book,

and, in doing so, to sum up and delimitate, more and more clearly,

the practical lessons learnt during its long course. These three

last matters and points of observation shall be Asceticism,

Institutionalism, and Mental Activity and Discipline, or the Scientific

Habit--all three in their relation to the Mystical Element of Religion.

I. ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISM.

Now in the matter of Asceticism, we can again conveniently consider

three points.

1. _Ordinary Asceticism practised by Mystics._

There is, first, the (generally severe) Asceticism which is ever

connected with at least some one phase, an early one, of every genuine

Mystic’s history, yet which does not differ essentially from the direct

training in self-conquest to which practically all pre-Protestant, and

most of the old Protestant earnest Christians considered themselves

obliged.

(1) Now it is deeply interesting to note how marked has been, off

and on throughout the last century and now again quite recently,

the renewal of comprehension and respect for the general principle

of Asceticism, in quarters certainly free from all preliminary bias

in favour of Medieval Christianity. Schopenhauer wrote in 1843:

“Not only the religions of the East but also genuine Christianity

shows, throughout its systems, that fundamental characteristic of

Asceticism which my philosophy elucidates.… Precisely in its doctrines

of renunciation, self-denial, complete chastity, in a word, of

general mortification of the will, lie the deepest truth, the high

value, the sublime character of Christianity. It thus belongs to the

old, true, and lofty ideal of mankind, in opposition to the false,

shallow, and ruinous optimism of Greek Paganism, Judaism and Islam.”

“Protestantism, by eliminating Asceticism and its central point, the

meritoriousness of celibacy, has, by this alone, already abandoned the

innermost kernel of Christianity.… For Christianity is the doctrine

of the deep guilt of the human race … and of the heart’s thirst after

redemption from it, a redemption which can be acquired only through the

abnegation of self,--that is, through a complete conversion of human

nature.”[432]--And the optimistically tempered American Unitarian,

the deeply versed Psychologist, Prof. William James, tells us in

1902: “In its spiritual meaning, Asceticism stands for nothing less

than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy.” “The Metaphysical

mystery, that he who feeds on death, that feeds on men, possesses life

supereminently, and meets best the secret demands of the Universe,

is the truth of which Asceticism has been the faithful champion. The

folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has, yet, its

indestructible, vital meaning.… Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub

and sponge-cake in comparison.”[433]

(2) Indeed, the only thing at all special to Mysticism, in its attitude

towards this general principle and practice of Asceticism, is that

it ever practises Asceticism as a means towards, or at least as the

make-weight and safeguard of, Contemplation, which latter is as

essentially Synthetic, and, in so far, peaceful and delightful, as the

former is Analytic, polemical and painful; whereas non-Mystical souls

will practise Asceticism directly with a view to greater aloofness

from sin, and greater readiness and strength to perform the various

calls of duty. And hence, if we but grant the legitimacy of the general

principle of ordinary Asceticism, we shall find the Mystical form of

this Asceticism to be the more easily comprehensible variety of that

principle. For the Mystic’s practice, as concerns this point, is more

varied and inclusive than that of others, since he does not even tend

to make the whole of his inner life into a system of checks and of

tension. The expansive, reconciling movement operates in him most

strongly also, and, where of the right kind, this expansive movement

helps, even more than the restrictive one, to purify, humble, and

deepen his heart and soul.

2. _God’s Transcendence a source of suffering._

There is, however, a second, essentially different source and kind of

suffering in some sorts and degrees of Mysticism, and indeed in other

_attraits_ of the spiritual life, which is deeply interesting, because

based upon a profound Metaphysical apprehension. Although, at bottom,

the opposite extreme to Pantheism, it readily expresses itself, for

reasons that will presently appear, in terms that have a curiously

Pantheistic colour.

(1) St. John of the Cross writes in 1578: “It is a principle of

philosophy, that all means must … have a certain resemblance to the

end, such as shall be sufficient for the object in view. If therefore

the understanding is to be united to God, … it must make use of

those means which can effect that union, that is, means which are

most like unto God.… But there is no essential likeness or communion

between creatures and Him, the distance between His divine nature and

their nature is infinite. No creature therefore … nothing that the

imagination may conceive or the understanding comprehend … in this life

… can be a proximate means of union with God,” for “it is all most

unlike God, and most disproportionate to Him.” “The understanding …

must be pure and empty of all sensible objects, all clear intellectual

perceptions, resting on faith: for faith is the sole proximate and

proportionate means of the soul’s union with God.”[434]

Now it is certain, as we have already found, that the awakened human

soul ever possesses a dim but real experience of the Infinite, and

that, in proportion as it is called to the Mystical way, this sense

will be deepened into various degrees of the Prayer of Quiet and of

Union, and that here, more plainly than elsewhere, will appear the

universal necessity of the soul’s own response, by acts and the habit

of Faith, to all and every experience which otherwise remains but

so much unused material for the soul’s advance. And it is equally

certain that St. John of the Cross is one of the greatest of such

contemplatives, and that neither his intuition and actual practice,

nor even his sayings, (so long as any one saying belonging to one

trend is set off against another belonging to the other trend),

contravenes the Christian and Catholic positions.--Yet it cannot be

denied that, were we to press his “negative way” into becoming the only

one; and especially were we to take, without discount, such a virtual

repudiation, as is furnished by any insistence upon the above words,

of any essential, objective difference in value between our various

apprehensions of Him and approaches to Him: the whole system and

_rationale_ of External, Sacramental and Historical Religion, indeed of

the Incarnation, in any degree and form, would have to go, as so many

stumbling-blocks to the soul’s advance. For the whole principle of all

such Religion implies the profound importance of the Here and the Now,

the Contingent and the Finite, and of the Immanence of God, in various

degrees and ways, within them.

Indications of this incompatibility, as little systematically realized

here as in the Areopagite, are afforded by various remarks of his,

belonging in reality to another trend. Thus, immediately before his

denial of any essential likeness or communion between any creature and

God, he says: “It is true that all creatures bear a certain relation to

God and are tokens of His being, some more, some less, according to the

greater perfection of their nature.” And of Our Lord’s sacred Humanity

he says: “What a perfect living image was Our Saviour upon earth: yet

those who had no faith, though they were constantly about Him, and saw

His wonderful works, were not benefited by His presence.”[435] But even

here the immense importance, indeed downright necessity for Faith,

of such external and historical stimuli, objects and materials,--in

the latter instance all this at its very deepest,--remains

unemphasized, through his engrossment in the necessity of Faith for the

fructification of all these things.

In other places this Faith appears as though working so outside of all

things imageable, as to have to turn rapidly away from all picturings,

as, at best, only momentary starting-points for the advanced soul.

“Let the faithful soul take care that, whilst contemplating an

image, the senses be not absorbed in it, whether it be material or

in the imagination, and whether the devotion it excites be spiritual

or sensible. Let him … venerate the image as the Church commands

and lift up his mind at once from the material image to those whom

it represents. He who shall do this, will never be deluded.”[436]

Here, again, along the line of argument absorbing the saint in this

book, there is no fully logical ground left for the Incarnational,

Historical, Sacramental scheme of the Infinite immanent in the finite,

and of spirit stimulated in contact with matter, with everywhere the

need of the condescensions of God and of our ascensions by means of

careful attention to them.

Sören Kierkegaard, that deep solitary Dane, with so much about him

like to Pascal the Frenchman, and Hurrell Froude the Englishman, and

who, though Lutheran in all his bringing up, was so deeply attracted

by Catholic Asceticism, has, in recent times (he died in 1855), pushed

the doctrine of the qualitative, absolute difference between God and

all that we ourselves can think, feel, will or be, to lengths beyond

even the transcendental element,--we must admit this to be the greatly

preponderant one,--in the great Spaniard’s formal teaching. And it

is especially in this non-Mystical Ascetic that we get an impressive

picture of the peculiar kind of suffering and asceticism, which results

from such a conviction to a profoundly sensitive, absorbedly religious

soul; and here too we can, I think, discover the precise excess and

one-sidedness involved in this whole tendency. Professor Höffding,

in his most interesting monograph on his friend, tells us how “for

Kierkegaard, … the will gets monopolized by religious Ethics from the

very first; there is no time for Contemplation or Mysticism.” “To tear

the will away,” Kierkegaard himself says, “from all finite aims and

conditions … requires a painful effort and this effort’s ceaseless

repetition. And if, in addition to this, the soul has, in spite of all

its striving, to be as though it simply were not, it becomes clear

that the religious life signifies a dedication to suffering and to

self-destruction. What wonder, then, that, for the Jew, death was the

price of seeing God; or that, for the Gentile, the soul’s entering

into closer relations with the Deity meant the beginning of madness?”

For “the soul’s relation to God is a relation to a Being absolutely

different from Man, who cannot confront him as his Superlative or

Ideal, and who, nevertheless, is to rule in his inmost soul. Hence a

necessary division, ever productive of new pains, is operative within

man, as long as he perseveres in this spiritual endeavour.… A finite

being, he is to live in the Infinite and Absolute: he is there like a

fish upon dry land.”[437]

Now Prof. Höffding applies a double, most cogent criticism to this

position.--The one is religious, and has already been quoted. “A

God Who is not Ideal and Pattern is no God. Hence the contention

that the Nature of the Godhead is, of necessity, qualitatively

different from that of Man, has ever occasioned ethical and religious

misgivings.”--And the other is psychological. “Tension can indeed be

necessary for the truth and the force of life. But tension, taken

by itself, cannot furnish the true measure of life. For the general

nature of consciousness is a synthesis, a comprehensive unity: not only

contrast, but also concentration, must make itself felt, as long as the

life of consciousness endures.”[438]

It is deeply interesting to note how Catherine, and at bottom St. John

of the Cross and the Exclusive Mystics generally, escape, through

their practice and in some of their most emphatic teachings, from

Kierkegaard’s excess, no doubt in part precisely because they _are_

Mystics, since the exclusive Mystic’s contemplative habit is, at

bottom, a Synthetic one. Yet we should realize the deep truth which

underlies the very exaggerations of this one-sidedly Analytic and

Ascetical view. For if God is the deepest ideal, the ultimate driving

force and the true congenital element and environment of Man, such as

Man cannot but secretly wish to will deliberately, and which, at his

best, Man truly wills to hold and serve: yet God remains ever simply

incompatible with that part of each man’s condition and volition which

does not correspond to the best and deepest which that Man himself sees

or could see to be the better, _hic et nunc_; and, again, He is ever,

even as compared with any man’s potential best, infinitely more and

nobler, and, though here not in simple contradiction, yet at a degree

of perfection which enables Him, the Supreme Spirit, to penetrate, as

Immanent Sustainer or Stimulator, and to confront, as Transcendent

Ideal and End, the little human spirit, so great in precisely this its

keen sense of experienced contrast.

Catherine exhibits well this double relation, of true contradiction,

and of contrast, both based upon a certain genuine affinity between

the human soul and God. On one side of herself she is indeed a

veritable fish out of water; but, on the other side of her, she is a

fish happily disporting itself in its very element, in the boundless

ocean of God. On the one side, snapping after air, in that seemingly

over-rarified atmosphere in which the animal man, the mere selfish

individual, cannot live; on the other side, expanding her soul’s

lungs and drinking in light, life, and love, in that same truly rich

atmosphere, which, Itself Spirit, feeds and sustains her growing

spiritual personality. And the _Dialogo_, in spite of its frequently

painful abstractness and empty unity, has, upon the whole, a profound

hold upon this great doctrine.

Yet it is in Catherine’s own culminating intuition,--of the soul’s

free choice of Purgatory, as a joyful relief from the piercing pain of

what otherwise would last for ever,--the vividly perceived contrast

between God’s purity and her soul’s impurity, that we get, in the

closest combination, indeed mutual causation, this double sense of

Man’s nearness to and distance from, of his likeness and unlikeness to

God. For only if man is, in the deepest instincts of his soul, truly

related to God, and is capable of feeling, (indeed he ever actually,

though mostly dimly, experiences,) God’s presence and this, man’s

own, in great part but potential, affinity to Him: can suffering be

conceived to arise from the keen realization of the contrast between

God and man’s own actual condition at any one moment; and can any

expectation, indeed a swift vivid instinct, arise within man’s soul

that the painful, directly contradictory, discrepancy can and will,

gradually though never simply automatically, be removed. And though,

even eventually, the creature cannot, doubtless, ever become simply

God, yet it can attain, in an indefinitely higher degree, to that

affinity and union of will with God, which, in its highest reaches and

moments, it already now substantially possesses; and hence to that

full creaturely self-constitution and joy in which, utterly trusting,

giving itself to, and willing God, it will, through and in Him, form

an abidingly specific, unique constituent and link of His invisible

kingdom of souls, on and on.

3. _Discipline of fleeing and of facing the Multiple and Contingent._

But there is a third attitude, peculiar (because of its preponderance)

to the Mystics as such, an attitude in a manner intermediate between

that of ordinary Asceticism, and that of the Suffering just described.

The implications and effects of, and the correctives for, this third

attitude will occupy us up to the end of this book. I refer to the

careful turning-away from all Multiplicity and Contingency, from

the Visible and Successive, from all that does or can distract and

dissipate, which is so essential and prevailing a feature in all

Mysticism, which indeed, in Exclusive Mysticism, is frankly made into

the one sole movement towards, and measure of, the soul’s perfection.

(1) It is true that to this tendency, when and in so far as it has

come so deeply to permeate the habits of a soul as to form a kind of

second nature, the name Asceticism cannot, in strictness, be any more

applied; since now the pain will lie, not in this turning away from all

that dust and friction, but, on the contrary, in any forcing of the

soul back into that turmoil. And doubtless many, perhaps most, souls

with a pronouncedly mystical _attrait_, are particularly sensitive to

all, even partial and momentary, conflict. Yet we can nevertheless

appropriately discuss the matter under the general heading of

Asceticism, since, as a rule, much practice and sacrifice go to build

up this habit; since, in every case, this Abstractive Habit shares

with Ordinary Asceticism a pronounced hostility to many influences and

forces ever actually operative within and around the undisciplined

natural man; and since, above all, the very complements and correctives

for this Abstractiveness will have to come from a further, deeper and

wider Asceticism, to be described presently.

(2) As to Ordinary Asceticism and this Abstractiveness, the former

fights the world and the self directly, and then only in so far as they

are discovered to be positively evil or definitely to hinder positive

good; it is directly attracted by the clash and friction involved in

such fighting; and it has no special desire for even a transitory

intense unification of the soul’s life: whereas the Abstractiveness

turns away from, and rises above, the world and the phenomenal self;

their very existence, their contingency, the struggles alive within

them, and their (as it seems) inevitably disturbing effect upon the

soul,--are all felt as purely dissatisfying; and an innermost longing

for a perfect and continuous unification and overflowing harmony of its

inner life here possess the spirit.

(3) Now we have just seen how a movement of integration, of

synthesizing all the soul’s piecemeal, inter-jostling acquisitions,

of restful healing of its wounds and rents, of sinking back, (from

the glare and glitter of clear, and then ever fragmentary perception,

and from the hurry, strain and rapidly ensuing distraction involved

in all lengthy external action), into a peaceful, dim rumination and

unification, is absolutely necessary, though in very various degrees

and forms, for all in any way complete and mature souls.--And we have,

further back, realized that a certain, obscure but profoundly powerful,

direct instinct and impression of God in the soul is doubtless at work

here, and, indeed, throughout all the deeper and nobler movements of

our wondrously various inner life. But what concerns us here, is the

question whether the _complete_ action of the soul, (if man would

grow in accordance with his ineradicable nature, environment, and

specific grace and call), does not as truly involve a corresponding

counter-movement to this intensely unitive and intuitive movement

which, with most men, and in most moments of even the minority of men,

forms but an indirectly willed condition and spontaneous background of

the soul.

(4) We have been finding, further, that all the Contingencies,

Multiplicities and Mediations which, one and all, tend to appear to the

Mystic as so many resistances and distractions, can roughly be grouped

under two ultimate heads. These intruders are fellow-souls, or groups

of fellow-souls,--some social organism, the Family, Society, the State,

the Church, who provoke, in numberless degrees and ways, individual

affection, devotion, distraction, jealousy, as from person towards

person. Or else the intruders are Things and Mechanical Laws, and these

usually leave the Mystic indifferent or irritate or distract him; but

they can become for him great opportunities of rest, and occasions for

self-discipline.

Yet this distinction between Persons and Things, (although vital for

the true apprehension of all deeper, above all of the deepest Reality,

and for the delicate discrimination between what are but the means and

what are the ends in a truly spiritual life), does not prevent various

gradations within, and continuous interaction between, each of these

two great groups. For in proportion as, in the Personal group, the

Individual appears as but parcel and expression of one of the social

organisms, does the impression of determinist Law, of an impersonal

Thing or blind Force, begin to mix with, and gradually to prevail

over, that of Personality. And in proportion as, in the Impersonal

group, Science comes to include all careful and methodical study,

according to the most appropriate methods, of any and every kind of

truth and reality; and as it moves away from the conceptions of purely

quantitative matter, and of the merely numerically different, entirely

interchangeable, physical happenings, (all so many mere automatic

illustrations of mechanical Law), on, through the lowly organisms of

plant-life, and the ever higher interiority and richer consciousness of

animal life, up to Man, with his ever qualitative Mind, and his ever

non-interchangeable, ever “effortful,” achievements and elaborations

of types of beauty, truth and goodness in Human History,--does Science

itself come back, in its very method and subject-matter, ever more

nearly, to the great personal starting-point, standard and ultimate

motive of all our specifically human activity and worth.

(5) Indeed, the two great continuous facts of man’s life, first that

he thinks, feels, wills, and acts, in and with the help or hindrance

of that profoundly material Thing, his physical body, and on occasion

of, and with regard to, the materials furnished by the stimulations and

impressions of his senses; and again, that these latter awaken within

him those, in themselves, highly abstract and Thing-like categories of

his mind which penetrate and give form to these materials; are enough

to show how close is the pressure, and how continuous the effect, of

Things upon the slow upbuilding of Personality.

(6) Fair approximations to these two kinds of Things, with their quite

irreplaceable specific functions within the economy of the human mental

life,--the intensely concrete and particular Sense-Impressions, and

the intensely abstract and general Mental Categories,--reappear within

the economy of Characteristic Religion, in its Sacraments and its

Doctrine. And conversely, there exists, _in rerum natura_, no Science

worth having which is not, ultimately, the resultant of, and which does

not require and call forth, on and on, certain special qualities, and

combinations of qualities, of the truly ethical, spiritual Personality.

Courage, patience, perseverance, candour, simplicity, self-oblivion,

continuous generosity towards others and willing correction of even

one’s own most cherished views,--these things and their like are

not the quantitative determinations of Matter, but the qualitative

characteristics of Mind.

(7) I shall now, therefore, successively take Mysticism in its attitude

towards these two great groups of claimants upon its attention,

the Personal and the Impersonal, even though any strictly separate

discussion of elements which, in practice, ever appear together, cannot

but have some artificiality. And an apparent further complication will

be caused by our having, in each case, to contrast what Mysticism would

do, if it became Exclusive, with what it must be restricted to doing,

if it is to remain Inclusive, _i.e._ if it is to be but one element

in the constitution of that multiplicity in unity, the deep spiritual

Personality. The larger Asceticism will thus turn out to be a wider and

deeper means towards perfection than even genuine Mysticism itself,

since this Asceticism will have to include both this Mysticism and the

counter movement within the one single, disciplined and purified life

of the soul.

II. SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM.

_Introductory: the ruinousness of Exclusive Mysticism._

Prof. Harnack says in his _Dogmengeschichte_: “An old fairy tale tells

of a man who lived in ignorance, dirt and wretchedness; and whom God

invited, on a certain day, to wish whatsoever he might fancy, and it

should be given him. And the man began to wish things, and ever more

things, and ever higher things, and all these things were given him.

At last he became presumptuous, and desired to become as the great God

Himself: when lo, instantly he was sitting there again, in his dirt and

misery. Now the history of Religion,--especially amongst the Greeks

and Orientals,--closely resembles this fairy tale. For they began by

wishing for themselves certain sensible goods, and then political,

aesthetic, moral and intellectual goods: and they were given them all.

And then they became Christians and desired perfect knowledge and a

super-moral life: they even wished to become, already here below, as

God Himself, in insight, beatitude and life. And behold, they fell,

not at once indeed, but with a fall that could not be arrested, down

to the lowest level, back into ignorance, dirt and barbarism.… Like

unto their near spiritual relations, the Neo-Platonists, they were at

first over-stimulated, and soon became jaded, and hence required ever

stronger stimulants. And in the end, all these exquisite aspirations

and enjoyments turned into their opposite extreme.”[439]

However much may want discounting or supplementing here, there is,

surely, a formidable amount of truth in this picture. And, if so, is

Mysticism, at least in its Dionysian type, not deeply to blame? And

where is the safeguard against such terrible abuses?

Now Prof. Harnack has himself shown us elsewhere that there is a sense

in which Monasticism should be considered eternal, even among and for

Protestants. “Monasticism,” he says plaintively, in his account of the

first three centuries of Protestantism, “even as it is conceivable

and necessary among Evangelical Christians, disappeared altogether.

And yet every community requires persons, who live _exclusively_ for

its purposes; hence the Church too requires volunteers who shall

renounce ‘the world’ and shall dedicate themselves entirely to the

service of their neighbour.”[440]--And again, scholars of such breadth

of knowledge and independence of judgement as Professor Tiele and

his school, insist strongly upon the necessity of Ecclesiastical

Institutions and Doctrines. The day of belief in the normality,

indeed in the possibility for mankind in general, of a would-be quite

individual, entirely spiritual, quite “pure” religion, is certainly

over and gone, presumably for good and all, amongst all competent

workers.--Nor, once more, can the general Mystical sense of the

unsatisfying character of all things finite, and of the Immanence of

the Infinite in our poor lives, be, in itself, to blame: for we have

found these experiences to mingle with, and to characterize, all the

noblest, most fully human acts and personalities.--But, if so, what

are the peculiarities in the religion of those times and races, which

helped to produce the result pictured in the _Dogmengeschichte?_

Now here, to get a fairly final answer, we must throw together

the question of the ordinary Christian Asceticism and that of the

Abstraction peculiar to the Mystics; and we must ask whether the

general emotive-volitional attitude towards Man and Life,--the

theory and practice as to Transcendence and Immanence, Detachment

and Attachment, which, from about 500 A.D. to, say, 1450 _A.D._,

predominantly preceded, accompanied, and both expanded and deflected

the specific ally Christian and normally human experience in Eastern

Christendom, were not (however natural, indeed inevitable, and in

part useful for those times and races), the chief of the causes

which turned so much of the good of Mysticism into downright harm. At

bottom this is once more the question as to the one-sided character of

Neo-Platonism,--its incapacity to find any descending movement of the

Divine into Human life.

1. _True relation of the soul to its fellows. God’s “jealousy.”_

Let us take first the relation of the single human soul to its

fellow-souls.

(1) Now Kierkegaard tells us: “the Absolute is cruel, for it demands

_all_, whilst the Relative ever continues to demand _some_ attention

from us.”[441] And the Reverend George Tyrrell, in his stimulating

paper, _Poet and Mystic_, shows us that, as regards the relations

between man’s love for man and man’s love for God, there are two

conceptions and answers in reply to the question as to the precise

sense in which God is “a jealous God,” and demands to be loved alone.

In the first, easier, more popular conception, He is practically

thought of as the First of Creatures, competing with the rest for Man’s

love, and is here placed alongside of them. Hence the inference that

whatever love they win from us by reason of their inherent goodness,

is taken from Him: He is not loved perfectly, till He is loved alone.

But in the second, more difficult and rarer conception, God is placed,

not alongside of creatures but behind them, as the light which shines

through a crystal and lends it whatever lustre it may have. He is

loved here, not apart from, but through and in them. Hence if only

the affection be of the right kind as to mode and object, the more

the better. The love of Him is the “form,” the principle of order and

harmony; our natural affections are the “matter” harmonized and set in

order; it is the soul, they are the body, of that one Divine Love whose

adequate object is God in, and not apart from, His creatures.[442] Thus

we have already found that even the immensely abstractive and austere

St. John of the Cross tells us: “No one desires to be loved except

for his goodness; and when we love in this way, our love is pleasing

unto God and in great liberty; and if there be attachment in it, there

is greater attachment to God.” And this doctrine he continuously,

deliberately practises, half-a-century after his Profession, for he

writes to his penitent, Donna Juana de Pedrazas in 1589: “All that is

wanting now, is that I should forget you; but consider how that is to

be forgotten which is ever present to the soul.”[443]

But Father Tyrrell rightly observes: “To square this view with the

general ascetic tradition of the faithful at large is exceedingly

difficult.”[444] Yet I cannot help thinking that a somewhat different

reconciliation, than the one attempted by him,[445] really meets all

the substantial requirements of the case.

(2) I take it, then, that an all-important double law or twin fact, or

rather a single law and fact whose unity is composed of two elements,

is, to some extent, present throughout all characteristically human

life, although its full and balanced realization, even in theory

and still more in practice, is ever, necessarily, a more or less

unfulfilled ideal: viz. that not only there exist certain objects,

acts, and affections that are simply wrong, and others that are simply

right or perfect, either for all men or for some men: but that there

exist simply no acts and affections which, however right, however

obligatory, however essential to the perfection of us all or of some

of us, that do not require, on our own part, a certain alternation

of interior reserve and detachment away from, and of familiarity and

attachment to, them and their objects. This general law applies as

truly to Contemplation as it does to Marriage.

And next, the element of detachment which has to penetrate and purify

simply all attachments,--even the attachment to detachment itself,--is

the more difficult, the less obvious, the more profoundly spiritual

and human element and movement, although only on condition that ever

some amount of the other, of the outgoing element and movement, and

of attachment, remains. For here, as everywhere, there is no good and

operative yeast except with and in flour; there can be no purification

and unity without a material and a multiplicity to purify and to unite.

And again, given the very limited power of attention and articulation

possessed by individual man, and the importance to the human community

of having impressive embodiments and examples of this, in various

degrees and ways, universally ever all-but-forgotten, universally

difficult, universally necessary, universally ennobling renunciation:

we get the reason and justification for the setting apart of men

specially drawn and devoted to a maximum, or to the most difficult

kinds, of this renunciation. As the practically universal instinct,

or rudimentary capacity, for Art, Science, and Philanthropy finds its

full expression in artists, scientists, philanthropists, whose specific

glory and ever necessary corrective it is that they but articulate

clearly, embody massively and, as it were, precipitate what is dimly

and intermittingly present, as it were in solution, throughout the

consciousness and requirements of Mankind; and neither the inarticulate

instinct, diffused among all, would completely suffice for any one of

the majority, without the full articulation by a few, nor the full

articulation by this minority could thrive, even for this minority

itself, were it not environed by, and did it not voice, that dumb

yearning of the race at large: so, and far more, does the general

religiosity and sense of the Infinite, and even its ever-present

element and requirement of Transcendence and Detachment, seek and call

forth some typical, wholesomely provocative incorporation,--yet, here,

with an even subtler and stronger interdependence, between the general

demand and the particular supply.

And note that, if the minority will thus represent a maximum of

“form,” with a minimum of “matter,” and the majority a maximum of

“matter,” with a minimum of “form”: yet some form as well as some

matter must be held by each; and the ideal to which, by their mutual

supplementations, antagonisms, and corrections, they will have more

and more to approximate our corporate humanity will be a maximum of

“matter,” permeated and spiritualized by a maximum of “form.” If it

is easy for the soul to let itself be invaded and choked by the wrong

kind of “matter,” or even simply by an excess of the right kind, so

that it will be unable to stamp the “matter” with spiritual “form”; the

opposite extreme also, where the spiritual forces have not left to them

a sufficiency of material to penetrate or of life-giving friction to

overcome, is ever a most real abuse.

2. _Ordinary Ascesis corrected by Social Christianity._

Now it is very certain that Ordinary Asceticism and Social Christianity

are, in their conjunction, far less open to this latter danger than is

the Mystical and Contemplative Detachment. For the former combination

possesses the priceless conception of the soul’s personality being

constituted in and through the organism of the religious society,--the

visible and invisible Church. This Society is no mere congeries of

severally self-sufficing units, each exclusively and directly dependent

upon God alone; but, as in St. Paul’s grand figure of the body, an

organism, giving their place and dignity to each several organ, each

different, each necessary, and each influencing and influenced by all

the others. We have here, as it were, a great living Cloth of Gold,

with, not only the woof going from God to Man and from Man to God,

but also the warp going from Man to Man,--the greatest to the least,

and the least back to the greatest. And thus here the primary and

full Bride of Christ never is, nor can be, any individual soul, but

only this complete organism of all faithful souls throughout time and

space; and the single soul is such a Bride only in so far as it forms

an operative constituent of this larger whole.--And hence the soul of a

Mystical habit will escape the danger of emptiness and inflation if it

keeps up some,--as much indeed as it can, without permanent distraction

or real violation of its special helps and call,--of that outgoing,

social, co-operative action and spirit, which, in the more ordinary

Christian life, has to form the all but exclusive occupation of the

soul, and which here, indeed, runs the risk of degenerating into mere

feverish, distracted “activity.”

I take the right scheme for this complex matter to have been all but

completely outlined by Plato, in the first plan of his _Republic_, and

indeed to have been largely derived by Christian thinkers from this

source; and the excessive and one-sided conception to have been largely

determined by his later additions and changes in that great book,

especially as these have been all but exclusively enforced, and still

further exaggerated, by Plotinus and Proclus. As Erwin Rhode finely

says of this later teaching of Plato: “It was at the zenith of his

life and thinking that Plato completed his ideal picture of the State,

according to the requirements of his wisdom. Over the broad foundation

of a population discriminated according to classes, (a foundation

which, in its totality and organization, was to embody the virtue of

justice in a form visible even from afar, and which formerly had seemed

to him to fulfil the whole function of the perfect State), there now

soars, pointing up into the super-mundane ether, a highest crown and

pinnacle, to which all the lower serves but as a substructure to render

possible this life in the highest air. A small handful of citizens,

the Philosophers, form this final point of the pyramid of the State.

In this State, ordered throughout according to the ends of ethics,

these Philosophers will, it is true, take part in the Government, not

joyously, but for duty’s sake; as soon, however, as duty permits,

they will eagerly return to that super-mundane contemplation, which

is the end and true content of their life’s activity. Indeed, in

reality, the Ideal State is now built up, step by step, for the ‘one

ultimate’ purpose of preparing an abode for these Contemplatives, of

training them in their vocation, the highest extant, and of providing

a means for the insertion of Dialectic, as a special form of life and

the highest aim of human endeavour, into the general organism of the

earthly, civilized life. ‘The so-called virtues’ all here sink into the

shade before the highest force of the soul, the mystic Contemplation

of the Eternal.… To bring his own life to ripeness for its own

redemption, _that_ is now the perfect sage’s true, his immediate duty.

If, nevertheless, he has still to bethink himself of acting upon and of

moulding the world the virtues will spontaneously present themselves to

him: for he now possesses Virtue itself; it has become his essential

condition.”[446]

It is truly impressive to find here, in its most perfect and most

influential form, that ruinously untrue doctrine of the separation of

any one set of men from the mass of their fellows, and of Contemplation

from interest in other souls, taking the place, (in the same great

mind, in the same great book), of the beautifully humble, rich, and

true view of a constant, necessary interchange of gifts and duties

between the various constituents of a highly articulated organism, a

whole which is indefinitely greater than, and is alone the full means,

end and measure of, all its several, even its noblest, parts.--Yet the

Christian, indeed every at all specifically religious, reader, will

have strongly felt that the second scheme possesses, nevertheless, at

least one point of advantage over the earlier one. For it alone brings

out clearly that element of Transcendence, that sense and thirst of the

Infinite, which we have agreed upon as the deepest characteristic of

man. And if this point be thus true and important, then another,--the

making of Contemplation into a special vocation,--can hardly be

altogether incorrect.

But if this is our judgment, how are we to harmonize these two points

of Plato’s later scheme with the general positions of the earlier

one. Or, rather, how are we to actuate and to synthesize our complex

present-day requirements and duties, Christian and yet also Modern,

Transcendental and yet Immanental too? For if we have any delicately

vivid sense of, and sympathy with, the original, very simple, intensely

transcendental, form and emphasis of the Christian teaching, and any

substantial share in the present complex sense of obligation to various

laws and conceptions immanent in different this-world organizations and

systems: we shall readily feel how indefinitely more difficult and deep

the question has become since Plato’s, and indeed since the Schoolmen’s

time.

3. _Preliminary Pessimism and ultimate Optimism of Christianity._

Now I think it is Prof. Ernst Troeltsch who has most fully explicitated

the precise centre of this difficulty, which, in its acuteness, is a

distinctly modern one, and the direction in which alone the problem’s

true solution should be sought.

(1) “The chief problem of Christian Ethics,” he says, “is busy,” not

with the relation between certain subjective means and dispositions,

but “with the relation between certain objective ends, which have, in

some way, to be thought together by the same mind as so many several

objects, and to be brought by it and within it to the greatest possible

unity. And the difficulty here lies in the fact, that the sublunar

among these ends are none the less moral ends, bearing the full

specific character of moral values,--that they are ends-in-themselves,

and necessary for their own sakes, even at the cost of man’s natural

happiness; and yet that they operate in the visible world, and adhere

to historical formations which proceed from man’s natural constitution,

and dominate his earthly horizon; whilst the Super-worldly End cannot

share its rule with any other end. Yet the special characteristic

of modern civilization resides precisely in such a simultaneous

insistence upon the Inner-worldly Ends, as possessing the nature of

ends-in-themselves, and upon the Religious, Super-worldly End: it is

indeed from just this combination that this civilization derives its

peculiar richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful, interior

tension and its difficult problems.”

(2) The true solution of the difficulty surely is that “Ethical life is

not, in its beginnings, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amidst

a number of moral ends, whose unification is not his starting-point

but his problem. And this multiplicity can be still further defined

as the polarity of two poles, inherent in man’s nature, of which the

two chief types proceed respectively from the religious and from

the inner-worldly self-determination of the soul,--the polarity of

Religious, and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be dispensed

with without moral damage, yet which cannot be brought completely under

a common formula. On this polarity depends the richness, but also the

difficulty, of our life, since the sublunar ends remain, to a large

extent, conditioned by the necessities and prerequisites of their own

special subject-matters, and since only on condition of being thus

recognized as ends in themselves, can they attain to their morally

educative power.”[447]

(3) Or, to put the same matter from the point of view of definitely

Christian experience and conviction: “The formula, for the specific

nature of Christianity, can only be a complex conception,--the special

Christian form,” articulation and correction, “of the fundamental

thoughts concerning God, World, Man and Redemption which,” with

indefinite variations of fulness and worth, “are found existing

together in all the religions. And the tension present in this

multiplicity of elements thus brought together is of an importance

equal to that of the multiplicity itself; indeed in this tension

resides the main driving-force of Religion. Christianity” in particular

“embraces a polarity within itself, and its formula must be dualistic;

it resembles, not a circle with one centre, but an ellipse with two

focuses. For Christianity is,” unchangeably, “an Ethics of Redemption,

with a conception of the world both optimistic and pessimistic, both

transcendental and immanental, and an apprehension both of a severe

antagonism and of a close interior union between the world and God. It

is, in principle, a Dualism, and yet a Dualism which is ever in process

of abolition by Faith and Action. It is a purely Religious Ethic, which

concentrates man’s soul, with abrupt exclusiveness, upon the values of

the interior life; and yet, again, it is a Humane Ethic, busy with the

moulding and transforming of nature, and through love bringing about

an eventual reconciliation with it. At one time the one, at another

time the other, of these poles is prominent: but neither of them may be

completely absent, if the Christian outlook is to be maintained.--And

yet the original germ of the whole vast growth and movement ever

remains an intensely, abruptly Transcendent Ethic, and can never simply

pass over into a purely Immanental Ethic. The Gospel ever remains,

with all possible clearness and keenness, a Promise of Redemption,

leading us, away from the world, from nature and from sin, from earthly

sorrow and earthly error, on and on to God; and which cannot allow

the last word to be spoken in this life. Great as are its incentives

to Reconciliation, it is never entirely resolvable into them. And the

importance of that classical beginning ever consists in continuously

calling back the human heart, away from all Culture and Immanence, to

that which lies above both.”[448]

(4) We thus get at last a conception which really covers, I think,

all the chief elements of this complex matter. But the reader will

have noted that it does so by treating the whole problem as one of

Spiritual Dynamics, and not of Intellectual Statics. For the conception

holds and requires the existence and cultivation of three kinds of

action and movement in the soul. There are, first, the various centres

of human energy and duty of a primarily This-world character, each

of which possesses its own kind and degree of autonomy, laws, and

obligations. There is, next, the attempt at organizing an increasing

interaction between, and at harmonizing, (whilst never emasculating

or eliminating), these various, severally characteristic, systems of

life and production into an ever larger ultimate unity. And, lastly,

there is as strong a turning away from all this occupation with the

Contingent and Finite, to the sense and apprehension of the Infinite

and Abiding. And this dynamic system is so rich, even in the amount of

it which can claim the practice of the majority of souls, as to require

definite alternations in the occupations of such souls, ranging thus,

in more or less rhythmic succession, from earth to Heaven and from

Heaven back again to earth.

(5) And so great and so inexhaustible is this living system, even by

mankind at large, that it has to be more or less parcelled out amongst

various groups of men, each group possessing its own predominant

_attrait_,--either to work out one of those immanental interests, say

Art, Natural Science, Politics; or to fructify one or more of these

relatively independent interests, by crossing it with one or more of

the others; or to attempt to embrace the whole of these intra-mundane

interests in one preliminary final system; or to turn away from this

whole system and its contents to the Transcendent and Infinite; or

finally to strive to combine, as far as possible, this latter Fleeing

to the Infinite with all that former Seeking of the Finite.--We shall

thus get specialists within one single domain; and more many-sided

workers who fertilize one Science by another; and philosophers of

Science or of History, or of both, who strive to reach the _rationale_

of all knowledge of the Finite and Contingent; and Ascetics and

Contemplatives who, respectively, call forth and dwell upon the sense

and presence of the Infinite and Abiding, underlying and accompanying

all the definite apprehensions of things contingent; and finally, the

minds and wills that feel called to attempt as complete a development

and organization as possible of all these movements.

4. _Subdivision of spiritual labour: its necessity and its dangers._

And yet all the subdivision of labour we have just required can avoid

doing harm, directly or indirectly, (by leading to Materialism,

Rationalism, or Fanaticism, to one or other of the frequent but ever

mischievous “Atomisms”), only on condition that it is felt and worked

_as_ such a subdivision. In other words, every soul must retain and

cultivate some sense of, and respect for, the other chief human

activities not primarily its own. For, as a matter of fact, even the

least rich or developed individual requires and practises a certain

amount, in an inchoate form, of each and all of these energizings; and

he can, fruitfully for himself and others, exercise a maximum amount

of any one of them, only if he does not altogether and deliberately

neglect and exclude the others; and, above all, if, in imagination and

in actual practice, he habitually turns to his fellow-men, of the other

types and centres, to supplement, and to be supplemented by, them.

It will be found, I think, that the quite undeniable abuses that have

been special to the Ascetic and Contemplative methods and states,

have all primarily sprung from that most plausible error that, if

these energizings are, in a sense, the highest in and for man, then

they can, at least in man’s ideal action and condition, dispense with

other and lower energizings and objects altogether. Yet both for man’s

practice here and even for his ideal state in the hereafter, this is

not so. There is no such thing,--either in human experience or in the

human ideal, when both are adequately analyzed and formulated,--as

discursive reasoning, without intuitive reason; or clear analysis and

sense of contrast, without dim synthesis and a deep consciousness of

similarity or continuity; or detachment of the will from evil, without

attachment of the higher feelings to things good; or the apprehension

and requirements of Multiplicity, without those of Unity; or the vivid

experience of Contingency, Mutation, and the Worthlessly Subjective,

without the, if obscure yet most powerful, instinct of the Infinite

and Abiding, of the true Objective and Valuable Subjective. Thus, for

humanity at large entirely, and for each human individual more or less,

each member of these couples requires, and is occasioned by, the other,

and _vice versa_.

The maxims that follow from this great fact are as plain in reason,

and as immensely fruitful in practice, as they are difficult, though

ever freshly interesting, to carry out, at all consistently, even in

theory and still more in act. For the object of a wise living will now

consist in introducing an ever greater unity into the multiplicity of

our lives,--up to the point where this unity’s constituents would,

like the opposing metals in an electric battery, become too much alike

still to produce a fruitful interaction, and where the unity would,

thus and otherwise, become empty and mechanical; and an ever greater

multiplicity into the unity,--up to the point where that multiplicity

would, seriously and permanently, break up or weaken true recollection;

and in more and more expanding this whole individual organism, by its

insertion, as a constituent part, into larger groups and systems of

interests. The Family, the Nation, Human Society, the Church,--these

are the chief of the larger organizations into which the inchoate,

largely only potential, organism of the individual man is at first

simply passively born, yet which, if he would grow, (not in spite of

them, a hopeless task, but by them), he will have deliberately to

endorse and will, as though they were his own creations.

5. _Mystics and Spiritual Direction._

It is interesting to note the special characteristics attaching to the

one social relation emphasized by the medieval and modern varieties of

Western Catholic Mysticism; and the effect which a larger development

of the other chief forces and modalities of the Catholic spiritual life

necessarily has upon this relation. I am thinking of the part played

by the Director, the soul’s leader and adviser, in the lives of these

Mystics,--a part which differs, in three respects, from that of the

ordinary Confessor in the life of the more active or “mixed” type of

Catholic.

(1) For one thing, there is here a striking variety and range, in the

ecclesiastical and social position of the persons thus providentially

given and deliberately chosen. The early German Franciscan Preacher,

Berthold of Regensburg, owes his initiation into the Interior Life to

his Franciscan Novice-Master, the Partial Mystic, David of Augsburg,

whose writings still give forth for us their steady light and genial

warmth; the French widowed noblewoman and Religious Foundress, St.

Jane Frances de Chantal, is helped on her course to high contemplation

by the Secular Priest and Bishop, St. Francis de Sales; the French

Jesuit, Jean Nicolas Grou, is initiated, after twenty-four years’

life and training in his Order, by the Visitation Nun, Soeur Pélagie,

into that more Mystical spirituality, which constitutes the special

characteristic of his chief spiritual books; the great Spaniard, St.

Teresa herself, tells us how “a saintly nobleman … a married layman,

who had spent nearly forty years in prayer, seems to me to have been,

by the pains he took, the beginning of salvation to my soul”--“his

power was great”; and the English Anchorite, Mother Juliana of Norwich,

“a simple, unlettered creature,” seems to have found no special leader

on to her rarely deep, wide, and tender teachings, but to have been

led and stimulated, beyond and after her first general Benedictine

training, by God’s Providence alone, working through the few and quite

ordinary surroundings and influences of her Anchorage at Norwich.[449]

It would be difficult to find anything to improve in this noble liberty

of these great children of God; nor would a larger influence of the

other modalities necessarily restrict this ample range.

(2) Again, the souls of this type seem, for the most part, to realize

more fully and continuously than those of the ordinary, simply active

and ascetical kind, that the “blind obedience” towards such leaders, so

often praised in their disciples and penitents, is, where wholesome

and strengthening, essentially a simple, tenacious adherence, during

the inevitable times of darkness and perplexity, to the encouragements

given by the guide to persevere along the course and towards the truths

which this soul itself saw clearly, often through the instrumentality

of this leader, when it was in light and capable of a peaceful,

deliberate decision. For however much the light may have been given it

through this human mediation, (and the most numerous, and generally

the most important, of our lights, have been acquired thus through

the spoken, written, or acted instrumentality of fellow-souls),--yet

the light was seen, and had (in the first instance), to be seen, by

the disciple’s own spiritual eye; and it is but to help it in keeping

faithful to this light (which, in the first and last instance, is God’s

light and its own) that the leader stands by and helps. But, given

this important condition, there remains the simple, experimental fact

that, not only can and do others often see our spiritual whereabouts

and God’s _attrait_ for us more clearly than we do ourselves, but such

unselfseeking transmission and such humbly simple reception of light

between man and man adds a moral and spiritual security and beauty to

the illumination, (all other conditions being equal and appropriate),

not to be found otherwise. It is interesting to note the courageous,

balanced, and certainly quite unprejudiced, testimony borne to these

important points, by so widely read, and yet upon the whole strongly

Protestant, a pair of scholars, as Miss Alice Gardner and her very

distinguished brother, Professor Percy Gardner.[450]

(3) And finally, the souls of this type have, (at least for the two

purposes of the suscitation of actual insight, and for bearing witness

to this, now past, experience during the soul’s periods of gloom),

often tended,--in Western Christendom and during Medieval and still

more in Modern times,--to exalt the office and power of the Director,

in the life of the soul of the Mystical type, very markedly beyond the

functions, rights and duties of the ordinary Confessor in the spiritual

life of the ordinary Catholic.

Indeed they and their interpreters have, in those times and places,

often insisted upon the guarantee of safety thus afforded, and upon the

necessity of such formal and systematic mediation, with an absoluteness

and vehemence impossible to conciliate with any full and balanced,

especially with any at all orthodox, reading of Church History. For

this feature is as marked in the condemned book of Molinos and of most

of the other Quietists, as it is in such thoroughly approved Partial

Mysticism as that of Père Lallemant and Père Grou: hence it alone

cannot, surely, render a soul completely safe against excesses and

delusions. And this feature was markedly in abeyance, often indeed,

for aught we know, completely wanting, at least in any frequent and

methodic form, in the numerous cases of the Egyptian and other Fathers

of the Desert: hence it cannot be strictly essential to all genuine

Contemplation in all times and places.

(4) The dominant and quite certain fact here seems to be that, in

proportion as the Abstractive movement of the soul is taken as

self-sufficient, and a Contemplative life is attempted as something

substantially independent of any concrete, social, and devotional helps

and duties, the soul gets into a state of danger, which no amount

of predominance of the Director can really render safe; whereas, in

proportion as the soul takes care to practise, in its own special

degree and manner, the outgoing movement towards Multiplicity and

Contingency, (particular attention to particular religious facts and

particular service of particular persons), does such right, quite

ordinary-seeming, active subordination to, and incorporation within,

the great sacred organisms of the Family, Society, and the Church,

or of any wise and helpful subdivision of these, furnish material,

purgation and check for the other movement, and render superfluous any

great or universal predominance of Direction. St. Teresa is, here also,

wonderfully many-sided and balanced. Just as she comes to regret having

ever turned aside from Christ’s Sacred Humanity, so too she possesses,

indeed she never loses, the sense of the profoundly social character of

Christianity: she dies as she had lived, full of an explicit and deep

love for the Kingdom of God and the Church.

6. _Mysticism predominantly Individualistic._

Yet it is clear that the strong point of the Mystics, as such, does not

lie in the direction of the great social spirituality which finds God

in our neighbour and in the great human organizations, through and in

which, after all, man in great part becomes and is truly man. They are,

as such, Individualistic; the relation between God and the individual

soul here ever tends to appear as constituted by these two forces

alone. A fresh proof, if one were still wanting, that Mysticism is but

one of the elements of Religion,--for Religion requires both the Social

and the Individual, the Corporate and the Lonely movement and life.

It is truly inspiring to note how emphatic is the concurrence of

all the deepest and most circumspect contemporary Psychology,

Epistemology, Ethics, and History and Philosophy of the Sciences and

of Religion, in these general conclusions, which find, within the slow

and many-sided growth and upbuilding of the spiritual personality, a

true and necessary place and function for all the great and permanent

capabilities, aspirations and energizings of the human soul. Thus no

system of religion can be complete and deeply fruitful which does not

embrace, (in every possible kind of healthy development, proportion

and combination), the several souls and the several types of souls

who, between them, will afford a maximum of clear apprehension and

precise reasoning, _and_ of dim experience and intuitive reason; of

particular attention to the Contingent (Historical Events and Persons,

and Institutional Acts and Means) _and_ of General Recollection and

Contemplation and Hungering after the Infinite; and of reproductive

Admiration and Loving Intellection, _and_ of quasi-creative, truly

productive Action upon and within Nature and other souls, attaining, by

such Action, most nearly to the supreme attribute, the Pure Energizing

of God.

Thus Pseudo-Dionysius and St. John of the Cross will, even in their

most Negative doctrines, remain right and necessary in all stages of

the Church’s life,--on condition, however, of being taken as but one

of two great movements, of which the other, the Positive movement,

must also ever receive careful attention: since only between them is

attained that all-important oscillation of the religious pendulum,

that interaction between the soul’s meal and the soul’s yeast, that

furnishing of friction for force to overcome, and of force to overcome

the friction, that material for the soul to mould, and in moulding

which to develop itself, that alternate expiration and inspiration,

upon which the soul’s mysterious death-in-life and life-in-death so

continuously depends.

III. THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM.

_Introductory. Difficulty yet Necessity of finding a True Place and

Function for Science in the Spiritual Life._

Now it is certain that such an oscillatory movement, such a

give-and-take, such a larger Asceticism, built up out of the alternate

engrossment in and abstraction from variously, yet in each case

really, attractive levels, functions and objects of human life and

experience, is still comparatively easy, as long as we restrict it

to two out of the three great groups of energizings which are ever,

at least potentially, present in the soul, and which ever inevitably

help to make or mar, to develop or to stunt, the totality of the

soul’s life, and hence also of the strictly spiritual life. The

Historical-Institutional, and the Mystical-Volitional groups and

forces, the High-Church and the Low-Church trend, the Memory- and

the Will-energies, do indeed coalesce, in times of peace, with the

Reason-energy, though, even then, with some difficulty. But in times

of war,--on occasion of any special or excessive action on the part of

this third group, the Critical-Speculative, the Broad-Church trend,

and the energizing of the Understanding,--they readily combine against

every degree of the latter. It is as though the fundamental vowels A

and U could not but combine to oust the fundamental vowel I; or as if

the primary colours Red and Blue _must_ join to crush out the primary

colour Yellow.

Indeed, it is undoubtedly just this matter of the full and continuous

recognition of, and allocation of a special function to, this third

element within the same great spiritual organism which englobes the

other two, which is now the great central difficulty and pressing

problem of more or less every degree and kind of religious life. For

the admission of this third element appears frequently to be ruinous to

the other two; yet the other two, when kept away from it, seem to lose

their vigour and persuasive power.--And yet it is, I think, exactly

at this crucial point that the conception of the spiritual life as

essentially a Dynamism, a slow constitution of an ever fuller, deeper,

more close-knit unity in, and by means of, the soul’s ineradicable

trinity of forces, shows all its fruitfulness, if we but work down to a

sufficiently large apprehension of the capacities and requirements of

human nature, moved and aided by divine grace, and to a very precise

delimitation of the special object and function of Mysticism.

1. _Science and Religion: each autonomous at its own level; and, thus,

each helpful to the other._

Erwin Rhode has well described Plato’s attitude towards Science

and Mysticism respectively, and towards the question of their

inter-relation. “The flight from the things of this World is, for

Plato, already in itself an acquisition of those of the Beyond, and

an assimilation to the Divine. For this poor world, that solicits our

senses, the philosopher has, at bottom, nothing but negation. Incapable

as it is of furnishing a material that can be truly known, the whole

domain of the Transitory and Becoming has no intrinsic significance

for Science as understood by him. The perception of things which are

ever merely relative, and which simultaneously manifest contradictory

qualities, has its sole use in stimulating and inviting the soul to

press on to the Absolute.”[451]

Here we should frankly admit that the soul’s hunger for the Infinite

is, as the great Athenian so deeply realized, the very mainspring of

Religion; and yet we must maintain that it is precisely this single

bound away, instead of the ever-repeated double movement of a coming

and a going, which not only helped to suppress, or at least gravely

to stunt, the growth of the sciences of external observation and

experiment, but (and this is the special point,--the demonstrable

other side of the medal,) also, in its degree, prevented religion from

attaining to its true depth, by thus cutting off, as far as Plato’s

conviction prevailed, the very material, stimulation, and in part the

instruments, for the soul’s outgoing, spiritualizing work, together

with this work’s profound reflex effect upon the worker, as a unique

occasion for the growth and self-detachment of the soul.

Now the necessity for such a first stage and movement, which, as far

as possible both immanental and phenomenalist, shall be applied and

restricted to the special methods, direct objects, and precise range

of each particular Science, and the importance of the safeguarding of

this scientific liberty, are now clearly perceived, by the leading men

of Religion, Philosophy, Psychology and Physics, in connection with

the maintenance and acquisition of sincere and fruitful Science.--It

is also increasingly seen that, even short of Religion, a second,

an interpretative, an at least Philosophical stage and movement is

necessary for the full explicitation of Science’s own assumptions and

affinities. And the keeping of these two movements clearly distinct or

even strongly contrasted, is felt, by some far-sighted Theologians,

to be a help towards securing, not only a candid attitude of Science

towards its own subject matters, but also a right independence of

Philosophy and Theology towards the other Sciences. Thus Cardinal

Newman has brought out, with startling force, the necessarily

non-moral, non-religious character of Physico-Mathematical Science,

taken simply within its direct subject-matter and method. “Physical

science never travels beyond the examination of cause and effect.

Its object is to resolve the complexity of phenomena into simple

elements and principles; but when it has reached those first elements,

principles and laws, its mission is at an end; it keeps within that

material system with which it began, and never ventures beyond the

‘flammantia moenia mundi.’ The physicist as such will never ask himself

by what influence, external to the universe, the universe is sustained;

simply because he is a physicist. If, indeed, he be a religious man,

he will, of course, have a very different view of the subject; … and

this, not because physical science says anything different, but simply

because it says nothing at all on the subject, nor can do by the very

undertaking with which it set out.” Or, as he elsewhere sympathetically

sums up Bacon’s method of proceeding: “The inquiry into physical causes

passes over for the moment the existence of God. In other words,

physical science is, in a certain sense, atheistic, for the very reason

that it is not theology.”[452]

2. _Science builds up a preliminary world that has to be corrected by

Philosophy and Religion, at and for their deeper levels._

The additional experience and analysis of the last half-century

apparently forces us, however, to maintain not only that

Physico-Mathematical Science, and all knowledge brought strictly to

the type of that Science, does not itself pronounce on the Ultimate

Questions; but that this Science, as such, actually presents us with a

picture of reality which, at the deeper level even of Epistemology and

of the more ultimate Psychology, and still more at that of Religion,

requires to be taken as more or less artificial, and as demanding, not

simply completion, but, except for its own special purposes, correction

as well. Thus we have seen how M. Bergson finds Clock-Time to be an

artificial, compound concept, which seriously travesties Duration, the

reality actually experienced by us; and Space appears as in even a

worse predicament. M. Emil Boutroux in France, Dottore Igino Petrone

in Italy, Profs. Eucken and Troeltsch in Germany, Profs. James Ward

and Pringle Pattison in Great Britain, and Profs. William James, Hugo

Münsterberg and Josiah Royce in America are, in spite of differences

on other points, united in insistence upon, or have even worked out

in much detail, such a distinction between the first stage and level

of Determinist, Atomistic, Inorganic Nature and our concepts of it,

and the second stage and level of Libertarian, Synthetic, and Organic

Spiritual Reality, and our experience of it. And the penetrating

labours of Profs. Windelband, Rickert, and others, towards building up

a veritable _Organon_ of the Historical Sciences, are bringing into

the clearest relief these two several degrees of Reality and types

of Knowledge, the Historical being the indefinitely deeper and more

adequate, and the one which ultimately englobes the other.[453]

A profoundly significant current in modern philosophy will thus be

brought, in part at least, to articulate expression and application.

This current is well described by Prof. Volkelt. “German philosophy

since Kant reveals, in manifold forms and under various disguises, the

attempt to recognize, in Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics, such

kinds of Certainty, such domains of Being, such human Volitions and

Values, as lie beyond reason, constitute a something that it cannot

grasp, and are rooted in some other kind of foundation. In variously

struggling, indeed stammering utterances, expression is given to the

assurance that not everything in the world is resolvable into Logic

and Thought, but that mighty resisting remainders are extant, which

perhaps even constitute the most important thing in the world.… Such a

longing after such a Reality can be traced in Hamann, Jacobi, Herder,

in Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the youthful Schleiermacher, and Jean

Paul. Indeed, even in Hegel, the adorer of Reason, the movement of

Negation, which is the very soul of his philosophy, is, at bottom,

nothing but the Irrational,” the Super-Rational, “element violently

pressed into the form of Reason; and again the single Thing, the This,

the Here and the Now, are felt by him as … a something beyond Reason.

And has not the Irrational found expression in Kant, in his doctrines

of the unconditional Liberty of the Will and of Radical Evil? In the

later Schelling and his spiritual relatives the Irrational has found

far more explicit recognition; whilst Schopenhauer brings the point

to its fullest expression. Yet even Nietzsche still possesses such an

element, in his doctrine of the ‘Over-Man.’”[454] And in England we

find this same element, in various degrees and in two chief divergent

forms, in the Cambridge Platonists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas

Hill Green on the one hand; and in Bishop Butler and Cardinal Newman on

the other hand.

We can thus point to much clear recognition, or at least to a

considerable influence, of the profound truth that Science and Wisdom

can each prosper and help and supplement the other, only if each

possesses a certain real autonomy, a power fully to become and to

remain itself, and, in various degrees and ways, to stimulate, check

and thwart the other. And this truth ever presupposes, what human

experience, in the long run, proves to be a fact,--that the different

kinds, spheres, and levels of man’s apprehension, and of the total

reality thus apprehended by him, are already immanently planned each

for the other, within a great, largely dormant system of the world.

Thus Man can and should call this congenital inter-relatedness into

ever more vigorous and more fruitful play; whereas, if it were not

already present deep within the very nature of things, no amount of

human effort or ingenuity could ever evoke or insert it. Prof. Volkelt

has, as we have seen, illustrated this great fact very strikingly,

with regard to the relation extant between the apparently sheer

contingencies of human History and the requirements of Philosophy, of

normative thought and ideal truth. Yet a similar inter-connection can

be traced elsewhere, between any other two or more levels and spheres

of wholesome and permanent human apprehension and action, in their

relation to various degrees and kinds of reality, as this environs man

or inheres in him.

3. _Necessity of the “Thing-element” in Religion._

But let us note that the recognition, of an at all emphatic, systematic

kind, of such inter-relatedness is, so far, almost limited to the

moods and persons preoccupied with the right claims of Science or of

Philosophy upon each other or upon the remainder of Life; and is, as

yet, all but wanting, when Life is approached from the side of the

specifically Religious requirements and of the Spiritual consolidation

of man’s soul. Yet here especially, at by far the most important point

of the whole matter, the unique place and significance of Science can

now be very clearly grasped.

Indeed it is deeply interesting to note how largely the fundamental

characteristics of Catholicism really meet, or rather how they strictly

require, some such vivid conception and vigorous use of the Determinist

Thing and of its level for the full constitution of our true depth,

our Spiritual Personality itself. If we take, _e.g._, the criticisms

addressed, by so earnest and acute a mind as the intensely Protestant

Emile Sulze, to the whole Thing-Element and -Concept, as these are at

work in the Catholic practice and position, we shall find his sense of

the difference between Thing and Spirit to be as enviably keen, and his

idea of the end and ultimate measure of Religion to be as sound and

deep, as his conception of the means towards developing Religion and

the Spirit is curiously inadequate.

(1) “Personality,” says Sulze, “is, for Religion and Morality, the

supreme Good, of which the source is in God, and the end, the fruit,

and the manifestation is in Man.”[455] This I take to be profoundly

true, especially if we insist upon Perfect Personality being Supreme

and Perfect Spirit; and, again, upon our imperfect personality

and spirit as possessed of certain profound affinities to, and as

penetrable and actually moved by, that Perfect Spirit.

(2) “The value of Personality nowhere finds a full recognition in

Catholicism; Catholicism indeed is Pantheism.” Now this harsh judgment

is based upon two sets of allegations, which, though treated by Sulze

as of the same nature, are, I would submit, essentially different, and

this because of their definitely different places and functions in the

Catholic system.

“The Impersonal Godhead, the bond which unites the three Persons,

stands above the Persons. Hence those who took religion seriously had

to lose themselves, pantheistically, in the abyss of the Divinity.

And in Christ the Person was even looked upon as the product of

two Natures, the Divine and the Human, hence of two Impersonal

Forces.”[456] Here two peculiarities in the early Conciliar Definitions

are emphasized, which were doubtless as helpful, indeed necessary,

for the apprehension of the great abiding truths thus conveyed to the

Graeco-Roman mind, as they are now in need of reinterpretation in the

light of our greater sensitiveness to the difference, in character and

in value, which obtains between the concept of Spirit and Personality

and that of Substances and Things.

But Sulze continues, without any change in the kind or degree of his

criticism: “Impersonal miraculous means, created by the Hierarchy, are

put by it in the place of the sanctifying mutual intercourse of the

children of God.” “Christianity, torn away from the religious and moral

life, became thus a special, technical apparatus, without any religious

or spiritual worth. Ecclesiastical Christianity has become a Pantheism,

Materialism, indeed Atheism.”[457] We have so continuously ourselves

insisted upon the profound danger, and frequently operative abuse, of

any and all complete apartness between any one means, function, or

_attrait_ of the spiritual life and the others, that we can, without

any unfairness, restrict ourselves here to the attack upon the general

acceptation of Impersonal means as helps towards the constitution of

Personality. Now Sulze’s principle here,--that only directly personal

means can help to achieve the end of Personality,--is most undoubtedly

false, unless Mathematico-Physical Science is also to be ruled out

of life, as necessarily destructive of, or at least as necessarily

non-conductive to, Personality.

(3) Indeed Sulze himself tells us, most truly, that, “for Religion

also, Science is a bath of purification”; and that “Doctrine and the

Sacraments are aids, in the hands of Christ and of the Community,

towards representing the riches of their interior life and offering

these to believing hearts.”[458] This latter pronouncement is, however,

still clearly insufficient. For if there is a double truth which,

at the end of well-nigh five centuries, ought to have burnt itself

indelibly into the mind and conscience of us all, it is, surely,

the following. On the one hand, Man, unless he develops a vigorous

alternating counter-movement, ever grows like to the instruments of

his labour and self-development, and hence, whilst busy with Things,

(whether these be Natural Happenings and their Sciences, or Religious

Institutions and Doctrines), he inclines to become, quite unawares,

limited and assimilated to them,--himself thus a Thing among Things,

instead of, through such various Things, winning an ever fuller

apprehension of and growth in Spiritual Personality. Yet, on the

other hand, without such a movement of close contact with the Thing,

(both the intensely concrete, the Here and Now Contingency, and the

profoundly Abstract, the stringent Universal Law) and without the

pleasure and pain derived from the accompanying sense of contraction

and of expansion, of contrast, conflict, supplementation and

renovation,--there is no fullest discipline or most solid growth of the

true spiritual Personality.

(4) Thus Science, as Sulze himself clearly sees, not merely aids us

to represent and to communicate our personality acquired elsewhere,

but the shock, friction, contrast, the slow, continuous discipline,

far more, beyond doubt, than any positive content furnished by such

science, can and should constitute an essential part of the soul’s

spiritual fertilization. And similarly, if we move on into the directly

religious life, the Sacramental contacts and Doctrinal systems (the

former so intensely concrete, the latter often so abstract,) are

not simply means towards representing and transmitting spirituality

acquired elsewhere: but they are amongst the means, and, in some form

and degree, the necessary, indeed actually universal means, towards

the awakening and developing and fulfilling of this our spiritual

personality.

4. _Three possible relations between Thing and Thought, Determinism and

Spirit._

It remains no doubt profoundly true that, with the awakening of the

Mystical sense, will come a more or less acute consciousness of an at

least superficial and preliminary, difference between this sense, with

its specific habits and informations, and those means and forms, in

part so contingent and external, in part so intensely abstract and yet

so precise. But it is equally certain that such a soul, and at such a

stage, even as it continues to require, in some respects more than

ever, for its general balanced development, some of the irreplaceable

discipline and manly, bracing humiliation of the close external

observation and severe abstract generalization of Science: so also

does it continue to require, for the deepening of the spirit and for

the growth of creatureliness, the contact with religious Things,--the

profoundly concrete Sacraments and the intensely abstract Doctrines of

the religious community.

(1) In one of Trendelenburg’s most penetrating essays, he shows us

how, between blind Force and conscious Thought,--if we presuppose

any tendency towards unity to exist between them,--there can be but

three possible relations. “Either Force stands before Thought, so that

Thought is not the primitive reality, but the result and accident of

blind Force; or Thought stands before Force, so that blind Force is not

itself the primitive reality, but the effluence of Thought; or finally,

Thought and Force are, at bottom, only one and the same thing, and

differ only in our mind’s conception of them.” And only one of these

three positions can, by any possibility, be the true one: hence their

internecine conflict.[459]

(2) Now Religion, in its normal, central stream, stands most

undoubtedly for Thought before Force, the second, the Theistic view.

And yet it would be profoundly impoverishing for our outlook and

practice, and would but prepare a dangerous reaction in ourselves or

others, were we ever to ignore the immense influence, in the history,

not only of philosophical speculation, but even of religious feeling

and aspiration, not indeed of the first, the Materialist, view, (which

owes all its strength to non-religious causes or to a rebound against

religious excesses), but of the third, the Pantheistic, Monistic, view,

whose classical exponent Spinoza will probably remain unto all time.

(3) If we examine into what constitutes the religious plausibility and

power of this view, we shall find, I think, that it proceeds, above

all, from the fact that, only too often, the second, the Theistic view

and practice, leaves almost or quite out of sight the purification

and slow constitution of the Individual into a Person, by means of

the Thing-element, the apparently blind Determinism of Natural Law

and Natural Happenings. Yet nothing can be more certain than that we

must admit and place this undeniable, increasingly obtrusive, element

and power _somewhere_ in our lives: if we will not own it as a means,

it will grip us as our end. The unpurified, all but merely natural,

animal, lustful and selfish individual man, is far too like to the

brutes and plants, indeed even to the inorganic substances that so

palpably surround him, for it not to be a fantastic thought to such

thinkers as Spinoza, (and indeed it would be an excessive effort to

himself,) to believe that he is likely, taken simply in this condition,

to outlast, and is capable of dominating, the huge framework of the

visible world, into which his whole bodily and psychical mechanism

is placed, and to which it is bound by a thousand ties and closest

similarities: his little selfish thinkings cannot but seem mere bubbles

on a boundless expanse of mere matter; all creation cannot, surely,

originate in, depend from, and move up to, a Mind and Spirit in any way

like unto this trivial ingenuity.

(4) It is true, of course, that Spinoza ended,--as far as the logic

of his system went,--by “purifying” away not only this animal

Individualism, but Spiritual Personality as well, and this because he

takes Mathematico-Physical concepts to be as directly applicable and as

adequate to Ultimate Reality as are the Ethico-Spiritual categories.

We have then to admit that even so rich and rare, so deeply religious

a spirit as Spinoza could insist upon purification by the “preliminary

Pantheism,” and yet could remain, in theory, the eager exponent of

an ultimate Pantheism. Like the Greeks, he not only passes through

a middle distance, a range of experience which appears dominated

by austere Fate and blind Fortune, but finds Fate even in ultimate

Reality. Whilst, however, the Greeks often thought of Fate as superior

even to the Gods, Spinoza finds Ultimate Reality to be neither Nature

nor Spirit, but simply Being in General, with a Law which is neither

Natural nor Spiritual Law, but Law in general. This General Being and

General Law then bifurcate, with the most rigorous determinism and

complete impartiality, step by step, into parallel and ever co-present

manifestations of Nature and of Spirit, and of their respective laws,

which, though different, are also each strictly determined within their

own series.[460]

(5) But Spinoza’s error here undoubtedly lies in his _de facto_

violent bending (in spite of this theoretical Parallelism) of all

Knowledge, Reality, and Life, under the sole Mathematico-Physical

categories and method; and in the insistence upon attaining to ultimate

Truth by one single bound and with complete adequacy and clearness.

And the greatness here consists in the keen and massive sense of three

profound truths. He never forgets that Mathematico-Physical Science

is rigidly determinist, and that it stands for a certain important

truth and penetrates to a certain depth of reality. He never ceases

to feel how impure, selfish, petty is the natural man, and how pure,

disinterested, noble, can and should be the spiritual personality. And

he never lets go the sense that, somehow, that science must be able to

help towards this purification.

(6) Now these three truths must be preserved, whilst the

Mathematico-Physical one-sidedness and the “one-step” error must

be carefully eliminated. And indeed it is plain that only by such

elimination can those truths operate within a fully congenial

system. For only thus, with a dissimilarity between the Ultimate,

Libertarian, Spiritual Reality, and the Intermediate, Determinist,

Physico-Mathematical Range, can we explain and maintain the pain, not

only of the selfish but also of the true self, in face the Mere Thing;

and only thus is all such pain and trouble worth having, since only

thus it leads to the fuller development and the solid constitution of

an abiding, interior, mental and volitional Personality.

5. _Purification of the Personality by the impersonal._

Prof. H. J. Holtzmann has got an eloquent page concerning the kind of

Dualism which is more than ever desirable for souls, if they would

achieve a full and virile personality in this our day. “It would appear

to be the wiser course for us to recognize the incompatibility between

merely natural existence and truly personal life, just as it is, in

its whole acute non-reconciliation; to insert this conflict into our

complete outlook on to Life in its full breadth and depth, and to find

the harmonization in God the Infinite, in whom alone such parallels can

meet, and not deliberately to blind our right eye or our left, in order

to force that outlook into one single aspect,--a degree of unification

which, when achieved in this violent manner, would mean for us, at the

same time, a point of absolute inertia, of eternal stagnation.” And

he then shows how it is precisely the interaction within our minds,

feelings, and volitions, of, on the one hand, the boundless world

of nature, with its majestic impersonality, and on the other hand,

the inexhaustible, indefinitely deeper realm of personal life, as it

appears within the stream of human history, which is best adapted

to give us some fuller glimpses of the greatness of God and of the

specific character of religion.[461]

The religious imagination, mind, heart, and will,--that is to say,

the complete, fully normal human being at his deepest,--has thus been

more and more forced, by an increasingly articulated experience of

the forces and requirements of actual life, to hold and to practise,

with ever-renewed attempts at their most perfect inter-stimulation and

mutual supplementation, a profoundly costing, yet immensely fruitful,

trinity in unity of convictions on this point.

In every time, place, and race, man will continue to be or to become

religious, in proportion to his efficacious faith in, and love of,

the overflowing reality and worth of the great direct objects of

religion,--God and the soul, and their inter-relation in and through

the Kingdom of God, the Church, and its Divine-Human Head,--the whole

constituting God’s condescension towards and immanence in man, and

man’s response and orientation towards the transcendent God.

And again, in every age, place, and race, man will be or will become

deeply religious, in proportion to the keenness with which he realizes

the immense need of spiritual growth and purification for his, at best,

but inchoate personality.

But,--and this third point we must admit, in the precise extension and

application given to it here, to be characteristically modern,--man

will, (if he belongs to our time and to our Western races, and is

determined fully to utilize our special circumstances, lights and

trials, as so many means towards his own spiritualization), have

carefully to keep in living touch with that secondary and preliminary

reality, the Thing-world, the Impersonal Element, Physical Science and

Determinist Law. He will have to pass and repass beneath these Caudine

forks; to plunge and to replunge into and through this fiery torrent;

and, almost a merely animal individual at the beginning and on this

side of such docile bendings and such courageous plungings, he will,

(if he combines them with, and effects them through, those two other,

abiding and ultimate, directly religious convictions), straighten

himself up again to greater heights, and will come forth from the

torrent each time a somewhat purer and more developed spiritual person

than he was before such contraction and purgation.

6. _This position new for Science, not for Religion._

Yet even this third point has, if we will but look to its substantial

significance and religious function, been equivalently held and

practised ever since the Twice-Born life, the deeper religion, has been

lived at all.

(1) The Ascetic’s self-thwarting, and the Mystic’s self-oblivion and

seeking after Pure Love, what are they but the expressions of the very

same necessities and motives which we would wish to see fully operative

here? For we are not, of course, here thinking of anything simply

intellectual, and fit only for the educated few. Any poor laundry-girl,

who carefully studies and carries out the laws of successful washing,

who moves, in alternation, away from this concentration on the Thing,

to recollection and increasingly affective prayer and rudimentary

contemplation, and who seeks the fuller growth of her spirit and of

its union with God, in this coming and going, to and from the Visible

and Contingent, to and from the Spiritual and Infinite, and in what

these several levels have of contrast and of conflict; or any lowly

farm-labourer or blacksmith or miner, who would proceed similarly with

his external determinist mechanical work, and with his deeply internal

requirements and spiritual growth and consolidation: would all be

carrying out precisely what is here intended.

(2) As a matter of fact, the source of such novelty, as may be

found here, is not on the side of religion, but on that of science.

For the conception of Nature of the ancient Greek Physicists, and

indeed that of Aristotle, required to be profoundly de-humanized,

de-sentimentalized: a rigorous mathematical Determinism and soulless

Mechanism became the right and necessary ideal of Physical Science.

But, long before the elaboration of this concept of the ruthless Thing,

and of its blind Force, Our Lord had, by His Life and Teaching, brought

to man, with abidingly unforgettable, divine depth and vividness, the

sense of Spirit and Personality, with its liberty and interiority, its

far-looking wisdom and its regenerating, creative power of love. And

for some thirteen centuries after this supreme spiritual revelation

and discovery, that old anthropomorphic and anthropocentric conception

of the Physical Universe continued, well-nigh unchanged, even among

the earlier and middle schoolmen, and was readily harmonized with

that Spiritual world. Yet they were harmonized, upon the whole, by a

juxtaposition which, in proportion as the conception of Nature became

Determinist and Mechanical, has turned out more and more untenable;

and which, like all simple juxtapositions, could not, as such, have

any spiritually educative force. But Spiritual Reality has now,--for

those who have become thoroughly awake to the great changes operated,

for good and all, in man’s conception of the Physical Universe during

now three centuries,--to be found under, behind, across these Physical

Phenomena and Laws, which both check and beckon on the mind and soul of

man, in quest of their ultimate mainstay and motivation.

(3) And let us note how much some such discipline and asceticism is

required by the whole Christian temper and tradition, and the weakening

of some older forms of it.

During the first three generations Christians were profoundly sobered

by the keen expectation of Our Lord’s proximate Second Coming, and

of the end of the entire earthly order of things, to which all their

natural affections spontaneously clung; and again and again, up to

well-nigh the Crusading Age, this poignant and yet exultant expectation

seized upon the hearts of Christians. And then, especially from St.

Augustine’s teaching onwards, an all-pervading, frequently very severe,

conviction as to the profound effects of Original Sin, a pessimistic

turning away from the future of this sublunar world, as leading up

to the great Apostacy, and a concentration upon Man’s prehistoric

beginnings, as incomparably eclipsing all that mankind would ever

achieve here below, came and largely took the place, as the sobering,

detaching element in Christianity, of the vivid expectation of the

Parousia which had characterized the earlier Christian times.

Clearly, the Parousia and the Original Sin conception have ceased to

exercise their old, poignantly detaching power upon us. Yet we much

require some such special channel and instrument for the preservation

and acquisition of the absolutely essential temper of Detachment

and Other-Worldiness. I think that this instrument and channel of

purification and detachment--if we have that thirst for the More and

the Other than all things visible can give to our souls, (a thirst

which the religious sense alone can supply and without which we are

religiously but half-awake)--is offered to us now by Science, in the

sense and for the reasons already described.

7. _Three kinds of occupation with Science._

Let the reader note that thus, and, I submit, thus only, we can and

do enlist the religious passion itself on the side of disinterested,

rightly autonomous science. For thus the harmony between the different

aspects and levels of life is not, (except for our general faith in

its already present latent reality, and in its capacity for ultimate

full realization and manifestation), the static starting-point or

automatically persisting fact in man’s life; but it is, on the

contrary, his ever difficult, never completely realized goal,--a goal

which can be reached only by an even greater transformation within the

worker than within the materials worked upon by him,--a transformation

in great part effected by the enlargement and purification, incidental

to the inclusion of that large range of Determinist Thing-laws and

experiences within the Spirit’s Libertarian, Personal life.

It is plain that there are three kinds and degrees of occupation with

Things and Science, and with their special level of truth and reality;

and that in proportion as their practice within, and in aid of, the

spiritual life is difficult, in the same proportion, (given the soul’s

adequacy to this particular amount of differentiation and pressure)--is

this practice purifying. And though but few souls will be called to

any appreciable amount of activity within the third degree, all souls

can be proved, I think, to require a considerable amount of the first

two kinds, whilst mankind at large most undoubtedly demands careful,

thorough work of all three sorts.

The first kind is that of the man with a hobby. His directly religious

acts and his toilsome bread-winning will thus get relieved and

alternated by, say, a little Botany or a little Numismatics, or by any

other “safe” science, taken in a “safe” dose, in an easy, _dilettante_

fashion, for purposes of such recreation. This kind is already in

fairly general operation, and is clearly useful in its degree and way,

but it has, of course, no purificatory force at all.

The second kind is that of the man whose profession is some kind

of science which has, by now, achieved a more or less secure place

alongside of, or even within, religious doctrines and feelings,--such

as Astronomy or Greek Archaeology. Here the purification will be in

proportion to the loyal thoroughness with which he fully maintains,

indeed develops, the special characteristics and autonomy both of

these Sciences, as the foreground, part-material and stimulation, and

of Religion, as the groundwork, background and ultimate interpreter

and moulder of his complete and organized life; and with which he

makes each contribute to the development of the other and of the

entire personality, its apprehensions and its work. This second kind

is still comparatively rare, doubtless, in great part, because of the

considerable cost and the lifelong practice and training involved in

what readily looks like a deliberate complicating and endangering of

things, otherwise, each severally, simple and safe.

And the third kind is that of him whose systematic mental activity

is devoted to some science or research, which is still in process of

winning full and peaceful recognition by official Theology,--say,

Biological Evolution or Biblical Criticism. Here the purification will,

for a soul capable of such a strain, be at its fullest, provided such a

soul is deeply moved by, and keeps devotedly faithful to, the love of

God and of man, of humble labour and of self-renouncing purification,

and, within this great ideal and determination, maintains and

ameliorates with care the methods, categories and tests special both to

these sciences and investigations, and to their ultimate interpretation

and utilization in the philosophy and life of religion. For here there

will, as yet, be no possibility of so shunting the scientific activity

on to one side, or of limiting it to a carefully pegged-out region,

as to let Religion and Science energize as forces of the same kind

and same level, the same clearness and same finality; but the Science

will here have to be passed through, as the surface-level, on the way

to Religion as underlying all. What would otherwise readily tend to

become, as it were, a mental Geography, would thus here give way to

what might be pictured as a spiritual Geology.

8. _Historical Science, Religion’s present, but not ultimate, problem._

The reader will have noted that, for each of these three stages, I have

taken an Historico-Cultural as well as a Mathematico-Physical Science,

though I am well aware of the profound difference between them, both as

to their prerequisites and method, and their aim and depth. And, again,

I know well that, for the present, the chief intellectual difficulty

of Religion, or at least the main conflict or friction between the

Sciences and Theology, seems to proceed, not from Physical Science but

from Historical Criticism, especially as applied to the New Testament,

so that, on this ground also, I ought, apparently, to keep these two

types of Science separate.--Yet it is clear, I think, that, however

distinct, indeed different, should be the methods of these two sorts of

Science, they are in so far alike, if taken as a means of purification

for the soul bent upon its own deepening, that both require a slow,

orderly, disinterested procedure, capable of fruitfulness only by

the recurring sacrifice of endless petty self-seekings and obstinate

fancies, and this in face of that natural eagerness and absoluteness

of mind which strong religious emotions will, unless they too be

disciplined and purified, only tend to increase and stereotype.

The matters brought up by Historical Criticism for the study and

readjustment of Theology, and for utilization by Religion, are indeed

numerous and in part difficult. Yet the still more general and

fundamental alternatives lie not here, but with the questions as to the

nature and range of Science taken in its narrower sense,--as concerned

with Quantity, Mechanism, and Determinism alone.

If Science of this Thing-type be all that, in any manner or degree, we

can apprehend in conformity with reality or can live by fruitfully:

then History and Religion of every kind must be capable of a strict

assimilation to it, or they must go. But if such Science constitute

only one kind, and, though the clearest and most easily transferable,

yet the least deep, and the least adequate to the ultimate and

spiritual reality, among the chief levels of apprehension and of life

which can be truly experienced and fruitfully lived by man; and if the

Historical and Spiritual level can be shown to find room for, indeed to

require, the Natural and Mechanical level, whilst this latter, taken

as ultimate, cannot accommodate, but is forced to crush or to deny,

the former: then a refusal to accept more than can be expressed and

analyzed by such Physico-Mathematical Science would be an uprooting and

a discrowning of the fuller life, and would ignore the complete human

personality, from one of whose wants the entire impulse to such Science

took its rise.

As a matter of fact, we find the following three alternatives.

Level all down to Mathematico-Physical Science, and you deny the

specific constituents of Spirituality, and you render impossible the

growth of the Person out of, and at the expense of, the Individual.

Proclaim the Person and its Religion, as though they were static

substances adequately present from the first, and ignore, evade or

thwart that Thing-level and method as far as ever you can, and you

will, in so far, keep back the all but simply animal Individual from

attaining to his full spiritual Personality. But let grace wake up,

in such an Individual, the sense of the specific characteristics of

Spirituality and the thirst to become a full and ever fuller Person,

and this in contact and conflict with, as well as in recollective

abstraction from, the apparently chance contingencies of History and

Criticism, and the seemingly fatalistic mechanisms of Physics and

Mathematics: and you will be able, by humility, generosity, and an

ever-renewed alternation of such outgoing, dispersive efforts and of

such incoming recollection and affective prayer, gradually to push out

and to fill in the outlines of your better nature, and to reorganize it

all according to the Spirit and to Grace, becoming thus a deep man, a

true personality.

Once again: take the intermediate, the Thing-level as final, and you

yourself sink down more and more into a casual Thing, a soulless Law;

Materialism, or, at best, some kind of Pantheism, must become your

practice and your creed.--Take the anterior, the Individual-level as

final, and you will remain something all but stationary, and if not

merely a Thing yet not fully a Person; and if brought face to face

with many an Agnostic or Pantheist of the nobler sort, who is in

process of purification from such childish self-centredness by means

of the persistently frank and vivid apprehension of the Mechanical,

Determinist, Thing-and-Fate level of experience and degree of truth,

you will, even if you have acquired certain fragmentary convictions and

practices of religion, appear strangely less, instead of more, than

your adversary, to any one capable of equitably comparing that Agnostic

and yourself--you who, if Faith be right, ought surely to be not less

but more of a personality than that non-believing soul.

But take the last, the Spiritual, Personal level as alone ultimate,

and yet as necessarily requiring, to be truly reached and maintained,

that the little, selfish, predominantly animal-minded, human being

should ever pass and repass from this, his Individualistic plane

and attitude, through the Thing-and-Fate region, out and on to the

“shining table-land, whereof our God Himself is sun and moon”: and

you will, in time, gain a depth and an expansion, a persuasive force,

an harmoniousness and intelligibleness with which, everything else

being equal, the Pantheistic or Agnostic self-renunciation cannot

truly compare. For, in these circumstances, the latter type will, at

best, but prophesy and prepare the consummation actually reached by

the integrational, dynamic religiousness, the Individual transformed

more and more into Spirit and Person, by the help of the Thing and of

Determinist Law. Freedom, Interiority, Intelligence, Will, Grace, and

Love, the profoundest Personality, a reality out of all proportion

more worthy and more ultimate than the most utterly unbounded universe

of a simply material kind could ever be, thus appear here, in full

contradiction of Pantheism, as ultimate and abiding; and yet all

that is great and legitimate in Pantheism has been retained, as an

intermediate element and stage, of a deeply purifying kind.

9. _Return to Saints John of the Cross and Catherine of Genoa._

And thus we come back to the old, sublime wisdom of St. John of the

Cross, in all that it has of continuous thirst after the soul’s

purification and expansion, and of a longing to lose itself, its

every pettiness and egoistic separateness, in an abstract, universal,

quasi-impersonal disposition and reality, such as God here seems

to require and to offer as the means to Himself. Only that now we

have been furnished, by the ever-clearer self-differentiation of

Mathematico-Physical Science, with a zone of pure, sheer Thing, mere

soulless Law, a zone capable of absorbing all those elements from out

of our thought and feeling which, if left freely to mingle with the

deeper level of the growing Spiritual Personality, would give to this

an unmistakably Pantheistic tinge and trend. Hence, now the soul will

have, in one of its two latter movements, to give a close attention to

contingent facts and happenings and to abstract laws, possessed of no

direct religious significance or interpretableness which, precisely

because of this, will, if practised as part of the larger whole of

the purificatory, spiritual upbuilding of the soul, in no way weaken,

but stimulate and furnish materials for the other movement, the one

specially propounded by the great Spaniard, in which the soul turns

away, from all this particularity, to a general recollection and

contemplative prayer.

And we are thus, perhaps, in even closer touch with Catherine’s

central idea,--the soul’s voluntary plunge into a painful yet joyous

purgation, into a state, and as it were an element, which purges away,

(since the soul itself freely accepts the process), all that deflects,

stunts, or weakens the realization of the soul’s deepest longings,--the

hard self-centredness, petty self-mirrorings, and jealous claimfulness,

above all. For though, in Catherine’s conception, this at first both

painful and joyful, and then more and more, and at last entirely,

joyful, ocean of light and fire is directly God and His effects upon

the increasingly responsive and unresisting soul: yet the apparent

Thing-quality here, the seemingly ruthless Determinism of Law, in

which the little individual is lost for good and all, and which only

the spiritual personality can survive, are impressively prominent

throughout this great scheme. And though we cannot, of course, take the

element and zone of the sheer Thing and of Determinist Law as God, or

as directly expressive of His nature, yet we can and must hold it, (in

what it is in itself, in what it is as a construction of our minds,

and in its purificatory function and influence upon our unpurified but

purifiable souls), to come from God and to lead to Him. And thus here

also we escape any touch of ultimate Pantheism, without falling into

any cold Deism or shallow Optimism. For just because we retain, at the

shallower level, the ruthlessly impersonal element, can we, by freely

willed, repeated passing through such fatalistic-seeming law, become,

from individuals, persons; from semi-things, spirits,--spirits more and

more penetrated by and apprehensive of the Spirit, God, the source and

sustainer of all this growth and reality.

And yet, let us remember once more, the foreground and preliminary

stage to even the sublimest of such lives will never, here below at

least, be abidingly transcended, or completely harmonized with the

groundwork and ultimate stage, by the human personality. Indeed our

whole contention has been that, with every conceivable variation of

degree, of kind, and of mutual relation, these two stages, and some

sort of friction between them, are necessary, throughout this life,

for the full development, the self-discipline, and the adequate

consolidation, at the expense of the childish, sophistic individual, of

the true spiritual Personality.

IV. FINAL SUMMARY AND RETURN TO THE STARTING-POINT OF THE WHOLE

INQUIRY: THE NECESSITY, AND YET THE ALMOST INEVITABLE MUTUAL HOSTILITY,

OF THE THREE GREAT FORCES OF THE SOUL AND OF THE THREE CORRESPONDING

ELEMENTS OF RELIGION.

Our introductory position as to the three great forces of the soul,

with the corresponding three great elements of religion, appears, then,

to have stood the test of our detailed investigation. For each of these

forces and corresponding elements has turned out to be necessary to

religion, and yet to become destructive of itself and of religion in

general where this soul-force and religious element is allowed gravely

to cripple, or all but to exclude, the other forces and elements, and

their vigorous and normal action and influence.

1. _Each of these three forces and elements is indeed necessary, but

ruinously destructive where it more or less ousts the other two._

(1) The psychic force or faculty by which we remember and picture

things and scenes; the law of our being which requires that

sense-impressions should stimulate our thinking and feeling into

action, and that symbols, woven by the picturing faculty out of these

impressions, should then express these our thoughts and feelings; and

the need we have, for the due awakening, discipline and supplementation

of every kind and degree of experience and action, that social

tradition, social environment, social succession should ever be before

and around and after our single lives: correspond to and demand the

Institutional and Historical Element of Religion. This element is as

strictly necessary as are that force and that law.

Yet if this force and need of the soul, and this religious element

are allowed to emasculate the other two primary soul-forces and needs

and the religious elements corresponding to them, it will inevitably

degenerate into more or less of a Superstition,--an oppressive

materialization and dangerous would-be absolute fixation of even quite

secondary and temporary expressions and analyses of religion; a ruinous

belief in the direct transferableness of religious conviction; and a

predominance of political, legal, physically coercive concepts and

practices with regard to those most interior, strong yet delicate,

readily thwarted or weakened, springs of all moral and religious

character,--spiritual sincerity and spontaneity and the liberty of

the children of God. We thus get too great a preponderance of the

“Objective,” of Law and Thing, as against Conviction and Person; of

Priest as against Prophet; of the movement from without inwards, as

against the movements from within outwards.

The Spanish Inquisition we found to be probably the most striking

example and warning here. Yet the Eastern Christian Churches have

doubtless exhibited these symptoms, if less acutely, yet more

extensively and persistently. And the Protestant Reformation-Movement,

(even in the later lives of its protagonists, Luther, Zwingli, and

Calvin), much of orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism, and some forms and

phases of Anglican Highchurchism and of Scotch Presbyterianism, show

various degrees and forms of a similar one-sidedness. In Judaism the

excesses in the Priestly type of Old Testament religion, especially

as traceable after the Exile, and their partial continuation in

Rabbinism, furnish other, instructive instances of such more or less

partial growth,--the Pharisees and the Jerusalem Sanhedrin being here

the fullest representatives of the spirit in question. The classical

Heathen Roman religion was, throughout, too Naturalistic for its,

all but exclusive, externalism and legalism to be felt as seriously

oppressive of any other, considerable element of that religion. And

much the same could doubtless be said of Indian Brahmanism to this

day. But in orthodox Mohammedanism we get the truly classical instance

of such a predominance, in all its imposing strength and terrible,

because all but irremediable, weakness--with its utterly unanalytic,

unspeculative, unmystical, thing-like, rock-solid faith; its detailed

rigidity and exhaustive fixity; its stringent unity of organization

and military spirit of entirely blind obedience; its direct, quite

unambiguous intolerance, and ever ready appeal to the sword, as the

normal and chief instrument for the propagation of the spirit; and its

entirely inadequate apprehension of man’s need of purification and

regeneration in all his untutored loves, fears, hopes and hates.

(2) Then there is the soul-force by which we analyze and synthesize,

and the law of our being which requires us to weigh, compare, combine,

transfer, or ignore the details and the evidential worth of what has

been brought home to us through the stimulation of our senses, by our

picturing faculty and memory, and by means of our Social, Historical,

and Institutional environment, and which orders us to harmonize all

these findings into as much as may be of an intelligible whole of

religion, and to integrate this religious whole within some kind of,

at least rough, general conception as to our entire life’s experience.

And this force and law are answered by the Critical-Historical and

Synthetic-Philosophical element of religion. We thus get Positive

and Dogmatic Theology. And this element is as humanly inevitable and

religiously necessary as is that soul-force and law.

Yet here again, if this force, law, and element are allowed

superciliously to ignore, or violently to explain away, the other kinds

of approaches and contributions to religious truth and experience,

special to the other two soul-forces and religious elements, we shall

get another destructive one-sidedness, a Rationalistic Fanaticism,

only too often followed by a lengthy Agnosticism and Indifference.

Whilst the Rationalist Fanaticism lasts, everything will doubtless

appear clear and simple to the soul, but then this “everything” will

but represent the merest skimmings upon the face of the mighty deep

of living, complete religion,--a petty, artificial arrangement by the

human mind of the little which, there and then, it can easily harmonize

into a whole, or even simply a direct hypostatizing of the mind’s own

bare categories.

The worship of the Goddess of Reason at Notre-Dame of Paris we found to

be here, perhaps, the most striking instance. Yet Rationalist excesses,

varying from a cold Deism down to an ever short-lived formal Atheism,

and the lassitude of a worldly-wise Indifferentism, are traceable

within all the great religions. Thus a large proportion of the educated

members of the ancient Graeco-Roman world were, from the Sophists and

the Second Punic War onward, stricken with such a blight. The Sadducees

are typical of this tendency among the Jews for some two centuries.

The tough persistence of a mostly obscure current of destructive

free-thought throughout Western Europe in the Middle Ages shows well

the difficulty and importance of a mental and spiritual victory over

these forces of radical negation, and of not simply driving them

beneath the surface of society. And the ready lapse of the most daring

and intense of the Medieval, Jewish and Christian, Scholastics into a

thoroughly Pantheistic Panlogism, points to the prevalence, among these

circles, of a certain tyranny of the abstractive and logical faculty

over the other powers and intimations of the soul.--Unitarianism again

is, in its origins and older form, notwithstanding its even excessive

anti-Pantheism, strongly Scholastic in its whole temper and method, and

this without the important correctives and supplementations brought

to that method by the largely Mystical and Immanental Angel of the

Schools. The greater part of the “Aufklärung”-Movement was vitiated

by an often even severer, impoverishment of the whole conception of

religion. And, in our day, the Liberal movements within the various

Christian bodies, and again among Brahmanic religionists in India,

rarely escape altogether from ignoring or explaining away the dark

and toilsome aspects of life, and the inevitable excess of all deep

reality, and indeed of our very experience of it, above our clear,

methodical, intellectual analysis and synthesis of it. Too often and

for too long all such groups have inclined to assimilate all Experience

to clear Knowledge, all clear Knowledge to Physico-Mathematical

Science, all Religion to Ethics, and all Ethics to a simple belief

in the ultimacy of Determinist, Atomistic Science. The situation is

decidedly improving now; History and Culture are being found to have

other, more ultimate categories, than are those of Mathematics and

Physics, and to bring us a larger amount of reality, and Ethics and

Religion are discovered to be as truly distinct as they are closely

allied and necessary, each to the deepest development of the other.

(3) The faculty and action of the soul, finally, by which we have an

however dim yet direct and (in its general effects) immensely potent,

sense and feeling, an immediate experience of Objective Reality, of

the Infinite and Abiding, of a Spirit not all unlike yet distinct from

our own, Which penetrates and works within these our finite spirits

and in the world at large, especially in human history; and by which

we will, and give a definite result and expression to, our various

memories, thinkings, feelings, and intuitions, as waked up by their

various special stimulants and by the influence of each upon all the

others: is met by the Mystical and the directly Operative element of

Religion. And here again we have a force and law of the human spirit,

and a corresponding element of religion, which can indeed be starved

or driven into a most dangerous isolation and revolt, but which are

simply indestructible.

The Apocalyptic Orgies of the Münster Anabaptists we found to be

perhaps the most striking illustration of the dire mischief that can

spring from this third group of elemental soul-forces, when they ignore

or dominate the other two. Yet some such Emotional Fanaticism can be

traced, in various degrees and forms, throughout all such religious

groups, schools, and individuals as seriously attempt to practise Pure

Mysticism,--that is, religious Intuition and Emotion unchecked by the

other two soul-forces and religious elements, or by the alternation of

external action and careful contact with human Society and its needs

and helps, Art and Science, and the rest.

Thus we find that, after the immense, luxuriant prevalence of an

intensely intuitive, emotional, tumultuously various apprehension

and manifestation of religion during the first two generations

of Christians, and even after the deep, wise supplementation and

spiritualization of this element by St. Paul, who in his own person so

strikingly combined the Institutional, Rational and Intuitive-Emotional

forces and elements, this whole force and element rapidly all but

disappeared for long from Western Christian orthodoxy. And Montanism

in still early times, and, during the very height of the Middle

Ages, the Waldensian and Albigensian movements--all predominantly

intuitive, enthusiastic, individualist--appear as so many revolutionary

explosions, threatening the whole fabric of Christendom with

dissolution. The “Eternal Gospel” movement of Abbot Joachim, on

the other hand, gives us the intuitional-emotive element in a more

purified, institutionally and rationally supplemented form.

Again we find that, for a while, in reaction from an all but hopelessly

corrupt civilization, the Fathers of the Desert attained in many cases,

by means of an all but Exclusive Mysticism, to a type of sanctity

and to the inculcation of a lesson which the Church has gratefully

recognized. We have to admit that many of the Italian, French and

Spanish Quietists of the Seventeenth Century were no doubt excessively,

or even quite unjustly, suspected or pursued, as far at least as their

own personal motives and the effect of their doctrines upon their own

characters were concerned; and that the general reaction against even

the proved, grave excesses of some of these men and women, went often

dangerously far in the contrary direction. Indeed even the fierce

fanaticism of the Dutch-Westphalian Apocalyptic Intuitionists can but

excuse, not justify, the policy of quite indiscriminately ruthless

extermination pursued by Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, and by their

official churches after their deaths, towards any and all Illuminism,

however ethically pure and socially operative. The “Society of Friends”

which, measured by the smallness of its numbers, has given to the world

an astonishingly large band of devoted lovers of humankind, is a living

witness to the possibility of such an Illuminism.

And we can note how the sane and solid, deep and delicate constituents,

which had existed, mixed up with all kinds of fantastic, often

hysterical and anti-moral exaltations, within most of those all but

purely Intuitionist circles, gradually found their escape away into all

sorts of unlikely quarters, helping to give much of their interiority

and religious warmth, not only to various, now fairly sober-minded,

Nonconformist Protestant bodies on the Continent, in England and

America, but also to the more religious-tempered and more spiritually

perceptive among modern philosophers--such as Spinoza, Kant, Fichte,

Schleiermacher, Schelling and Fechner.

Within the Jewish world, we get much of this element at its noblest

and at its worst, in the true and false Prophets respectively; then

among the Essenes, for the times between the Maccabean resistance and

the revolt of Bar Cochba; and later on in the Kabbala. The Mohammedans

still furnish the example of the Sufi-movement. The Classical Heathen

world produced the Neo-Platonist and the Mithraic movements; and we can

still study, as a living thing, the Buddhist Mysticism of Thibet.

We have then, here too, something thoroughly elemental, which requires

both persistent operative recognition and a continuous and profound

purification and supplementation by becoming incorporated within a

large living system of all the fundamental forces of the soul, each

operating and operated upon according to the intrinsic nature and

legitimate range of each.

2. _Each element double; endless combinations and conflicts._

We have also found that these three forces and elements are each

double, and that collisions, but also most fruitful interactions, can

and do obtain between even these yoke-fellows: between Institutionalise

and History,--the Present and the Past, a direct Sense-Impression and

Picture and a Memory; between Criticism and Construction,--Analysis

and acuteness of mind, and Synthesis and richness and balance of

imagination, head, heart, and will; and between Mysticism and Action,

as respectively Intuitive and quiescent and Volitional and effortful.

And both the three forces and elements as a whole, and the single

members of each pair, can and do appear in every possible variety of

combination with, and of opposition against, the others, although

there is a special affinity between the Critical-Speculative and the

Intuitive-Volitional pairs (in combination against the Sense-and-Memory

pair); between the Sense-and-Memory pair and the single member of

Action; and between the single members of Speculation and of Intuition.

Yet, ultimately, not any one pair or member can bear its fullest fruit,

without the aid of all the others; and there is not one that, in actual

human nature, does not tend to emasculate, or to oust as much as

possible from the soul, the other pairs or single members.

3. _Our entire religious activity but one element of our complete

spirit-life._

And we have noted further, how even the fullest development in

any one soul of all these three couples of specifically religious

activities--even supposing that they could be developed to their

fullest, without any participation in and conflict with other degrees

and kinds of life and reality--do not, by any means, exhaust the range

of even the simplest soul’s actual energizings.

(1) For over and beyond the specifically religious life--though this,

where genuine, is ever the deepest, the central life--every soul lives,

and has to live, various other lives. And indeed--and this is the

point which specially concerns religion--the soul cannot attain to its

fullest possible spiritual development, without the vigorous specific

action and differentiation of forces and functions of a not directly

religious character, which will have to energize, each according

to its own intrinsic nature, within the ever ampler, and ever more

closely-knit, organization of the complete life of the soul.

(2) And within this complete life, the three pairs of religious forces

and elements each possess their own special affinities and antipathies

for certain of the forces and elements which constitute the other,

less central organizations of man’s marvellously rich activity.

The Historical-Institutional element of Religion has necessarily

a special affinity for, and borrows much of its form from, social,

legal, political history and institutions of a general kind. The

Critical-Speculative element of religion is necessarily cognate to, and

in a state of interchange with, the general historical criticism and

philosophical insight attained during the ages and amongst the races in

which any particular religion is intellectually systematized. And the

Mystical-Operative element is necessarily influenced by, and largely

utilizes the general emotive and volitional gifts and habits, peculiar

to the various ages and peoples within which this double religious

element is in operation.

(3) It is thus abundantly clear how greatly a work so manifold in its

means, and so harmonious in its end, requires, if it is to come to

a considerable degree of realization, that single souls, and single

classes and types of souls, should have around them a large and varied

Historical and Institutional, a Social life both of a specifically

religious and of a general kind, and that, within this large ambit of

the actualized religion of others and of the still largely potential

religion of their own souls, they shall develop and be helped to

realize their own deepest spiritual capacities and _attrait_. They

will have to develop these special capabilities to the utmost degree

compatible with some practice of the other chief elements of religion,

with a continuous respect for and belief in the necessity of the other

types of soul, and with a profound belief in, and love of, the full,

organized community of all devoted souls, which builds up, and is built

up by, all this variety in unity. The Kingdom of God, the Church, will

thus be more and more found and made to be the means of an ever more

distinct articulation, within an ever more fruitful interaction, of

the various _attraits_, gifts, vocations, and types of souls which

constitute its society. And these souls in return will, precisely

by this their articulation within this ampler system, bring to this

society an ever richer content of variety in harmony, of action and

warfare within an ever deeper fruitfulness and peace.

4. _Two conditions of the fruitfulness of the entire process._

Yet even the simplest effort, within this innumerable sequence and

simultaneity of activities, will lack the fullest truth and religious

depth and fruitfulness, unless two experiences, convictions and motives

are in operation throughout the whole, and penetrate its every part,

as salt and yeast, atmosphere and light penetrate, and purify and

preserve our physical food and bodily senses.

The vivid, continuous sense that God, the Spirit upholding our poor

little spirits, is the true originator and the true end of the whole

movement, in all it may have of spiritual beauty, truth, goodness

and vitality; that all the various levels and kinds of reality and

action are, in whatever they have of worth, already immanently

fitted to stimulate, supplement and purify each other by Him Who, an

Infinite Spiritual Interiority Himself, gives thus to each one of us

indefinite opportunities for actualizing our own degree and kind of

spiritual possibility and ideal; and that He it is Who, however dimly

yet directly, touches our souls and awakens them, in and through all

those minor stimulations and apprehensions, to that noblest, incurable

discontent with our own petty self and to that sense of and thirst for

the Infinite and Abiding, which articulates man’s deepest requirement

and characteristic: this is the first experience and conviction,

without which all life, and life’s centre, religion, are flat and

dreary, vain and philistine.

And the second conviction is the continuous sense of the ever

necessary, ever fruitful, ever bliss-producing Cross of Christ--the

great law and fact that only through self-renunciation and suffering

can the soul win its true self, its abiding joy in union with the

Source of Life, with God Who has left to us, human souls, the choice

between two things alone: the noble pangs of spiritual child-birth, of

painful-joyous expansion and growth; and the shameful ache of spiritual

death, of dreary contraction and decay.

Now it is especially these two, ever primary and supreme, ever deepest

and simplest yet most easily forgotten, bracing yet costing, supremely

virile truths and experiences--facts which increasingly can and

ever should waken up, and themselves be vivified by, all the other

activities and gifts of God which we have studied--these two eyes

of religion and twin pulse-beats of its very heart, that have been

realized, with magnificent persistence and intensity, by the greatest

of the Inclusive Mystics.

And amongst these Mystics, Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna, the Saint

of Genoa, has appeared to us as one who, in spite of not a little

obscurity and uncertainty and vagueness in the historical evidences for

her life and teaching, of not a few limitations of natural character

and of opportunity, and of several peculiarities which, wonderful to

her _entourage_, can but perplex or repel us now, shines forth, in

precisely these two central matters, with a penetrating attractiveness,

rarely matched, hardly surpassed, by Saints and Heroes of far more

varied, humorous, readily understandable, massive gifts and actions.

And these very limits and defects of her natural character and

opportunities, of her contemporary disciples and later panegyrists,

and of our means for studying and ascertaining the facts and precise

value of the life she lived, and of the legend which it occasioned,

may, we can hope, but help to give a richer articulation and wider

applicability to our study of the character and necessity, the limits,

dangers and helpfulness of the Mystic Element of Religion.

INDEX

(_Some corrections of mistakes in names and references, as given in the

foregoing work, have been silently effected in the following Index_)

I. OF SUBJECT-MATTERS

Abelard, I. 61

Absorptions of St. Catherine, I. 226-229

Acarie, Madame, I. 89

Acquasola, Genoa, I. 144, 145 _n._ 1, 168

Action (reflex), its three elements, I. 57-58

Adorni Family, I. 96, =101=, 102

various, I. 102, 145 _n._ 1, 151, 153-155, 173, 300, 327, 377

Adorno, Giuliano, I. =101=, =102=, 103, 138, 145 _n._ 1, =149=, 153,

173, 187, 225, 296, 297 _n._ 1, 300, 307, 308, 309, 311, 313,

325 _n._ 1, 377, 378, 379, 382, 386, 388, 394, 454, 455; II. 29, 74

he becomes a Tertiary of the Order of St. Francis, I. 130

his bankruptcy, I. 128-129

character, I. 102

conversion, I. 129

his death, I. 149-156, 379

his illness, I. 149 _n._ 1.

his life in the little house within the Hospital, I. 129-131

his monument, I. 297 _n._ 1

his natural daughter, I. 129

his will, I. =151-152=, 378-379

moves into the Hospital, I. 141, 142

sells his palace, I. 148 _n._ 1

Adorno Palazzo, I. 108, 128, 148, 327, 377, 379, 403

Aeschylus, II. 189, 271

Afer, Victorinus, I. 266 _n._ 3

Affinities, human, furthered by Mysticism, II. 331-335

After-life beliefs, in Asiatic countries, II. 183-185

in Greece, II. 185-189

of the Jews, II. 189-191

problems, ethico-practical difficulties of, II. 197-199

historical difficulties of, II. 182-194

philosophical difficulties of, II. 194-197

After-life, its forecasts in St. Catherine, II. 200-203

Plato’s influence on them, II. 203-211

Agnosticism (Mystical), criticism of, II. 287-296

Agrigentum, II. 188

Aix, Cathedral of, and triptych, I. 96

Akiba, Rabbi, II. 233, 268, 292

Alacoque, St. Marie Marguerite, II. 42, 56, 58

Albigensian movement, II. 391

Alcantara, St. Peter of, II. 143

Alexander VI, Pope (Borgia), I. 95

VII, Pope (Chigi), II. 168 _n._ 1

Alexandrian School, I. 61

Alfred, King, II. 44

Aloysius, St. Gonzaga, I. 88

Alvarez, Venerable Balthazar, S.J., I. 64

Ambrosian Library, Milan, I. 411 _n._ 1, 466

America, II. 370, 392

Amos, II. 189, 268

Anabaptists, I. 9, 63; II. 391

their orgies, I. 10, 340; II. 391

Anaxagoras, I. 12

Andrew, Monastery of St., Genoa, I. 325 _n._ 2

Andrewes, Anglican Bp. Lancelot, I. 63

Angelica Library, Rome, I. 411 _n._ 1

Angelo, Castel S., Rome, I. 327

of Chiavasso, Blessed, O.S.F., I. 116

Anglican Highchurchism, II. 63, 388

Anglicanism, its three elements, I. 8, 9, 63

Anguisola, Donna Andronica, I. 359, 361, 363, 364, 403, 413, 416

Animal-life, St. Catherine’s sympathy with, I. 163, 164

Anjou, Charles I. of, I. 96

Margaret of, I. 96

René of, King of Naples, I. 96

Annunciation, Church of the, Sturla, I. 451

Annunziata in Portorio, Church of Sma., Genoa, I. 98 _n._ 1 (99), 130,

201 _n._ 3, 297 _n._ 1, 313, 325 _n._ 1

Monastery of, I. 319, 325

Annunziata, Piazza della Sma., Genoa, I. 102

Anselm, St., Archbishop, I. 78; II. 142, 181

Anthony, St., I. 373

Antiochene School, I. 61

Antiochus Epiphanes, II. 292

Antonietta (servant), I. 149, 153, 226

Apocalypse, II. 269

Apollo Katharsios, II. 93

Apostles, I. 27, 389

Apprehension, Mystical, no distinct faculty of, II. =283-284=

Arc, Jeanne d’, Ven., II. 47

Archives, Archiepiscopal, of Genoa, I. 411 _n._ 1

of the Cathedral Chapter, Genoa, I. 384

Archivio di Stato in Genoa, I. 153 _n._ 1, 172, 176 _n._ 1, 2,

378 _n._ 1, 379 _n._ 1, 381 _n._ 1, 203 _n._ 1, 213; II. 10 _n._ 1.

Argentina, del Sale (de Ripalta), I. 149, 151, 162 _n._ 2 (163),

=169-171=, 173, 175, 197 _n._ 4 (198), 210 _n._ 1, 213 _n._ 1,

=215-219=, 223, 226, 297 _n._ 1, 298, 299, 367, 310-312, =313=,

=314=, 387-389, 402, =452=, =453=, 464; II. 4, 26

adopted by St. Catherine, I. 170, 171

her fate, I. 313, 314

much alone with St. Catherine in 1510, she helps on growth of

legends, I. 203; II. 4, 26, 197 _n._ 4 (198), 203, 209, 210 _n._ 1,

219, 452, 453

wills of, I. 313, 381

Arias, Francisco, S.J., I. 89

Aristotle, I. 7, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 41, 42; II. 131, 132, 194, 203, 249,

250, 252, 264, 310, 311, 312, 320, 324, 379

his conception of “Unmoving Energy,” II. =131=, =132=, 250

of the Noûs, II. 32

of God as sheer abstract Thought, II. 251

his general doctrine, I. 19-23

Arnold, Dr. Thomas, of Rugby, I. 63

Ars, Curé d’, the Bl. J. B. Vianney, II. 143

Arvenza, on the Riviera, I. 318

Asceticism and Mystical abstractiveness, II. 348-349

ordinary and social Christianity, II. 355-358

ordinary, as practised by Mystics, II. 341-343

Asia Minor, II. 188

Assyria, II. 185

Atman, II. 183

Augsburg, David of, O. S. F., II. 363

Augustine, St., I. 61, 100; II. 117, 129, 131, 142, 205, 211, 212, 213,

214, 215, 261, 266 _n._ 3, 270, 282, 298, 380

on Evil as negative, II. 293

on fire of Hell, II. 216

on mitigation of sufferings of the Lost, II. 225

on Purgatory, II. 216, 217

on soul’s Rest between death and resurrection, II. 211, 212

on Original Sin, II. 298-301

on God and the soul as out of Space, II. =212=, =213=

on Time and Eternity, II. 165 _n._, =248=

Augustinian Canonesses, I. 103 _n._ 1; II. 62

Canons, I. 103 _n._ 1

Augustinianesses, Chapel of the, Genoa, I. 109, 170

Avicebron, _see_ Gebirol Ibn

Avicenna, II. 317

Avignon exile, I. 94

Azzolini, Cardinal, I. 305

dei Manfredi, cavaliere, I. 99 _n._

Babylonia, II. 185

Bacon, Francis, II. 369

Baius, condemnation of, II. 242

Balilla, via, Genoa, I. 129

Ballerini, Father Antonio, S. J., I. 121

Bar Cochba, revolt of, II. 392

Barnabites, I. 340

Baronius, Cardinal, I. 318

Basil, St., II. 166

Beethoven, L. von, II. 27, 42, 265

Beguards, II. 131 _n._ 1

Bellarmine, Cardinal, S.J., I. 88

Bell’Huomo, G., S.J., II. 144

Benedetta Lombarda, servant, I. 130, 149, 153, 172, 176, 226,

=311=, =312=, 317, 379

Benedict XIV, Pope (Lambertini), I. 136, 253

St., I. 104, 127, 240, 460

Benedictines, I. =63=, =64=, 103 _n._ 1, 373; II. 161,

363

Bentham, Jeremy, II. 272

Bergson, Henri, Professor, II. 247, 282, 370

Bernard, St., of Clairvaux, I. 7, 61, 69; II. 242, 182

Claude, II. 192

Bernières-Louvigny, Jean de, II. 141

Bernouilli, Dr. C. A., I. 373

Berulle, Venerable Cardinal de, I. 88, 317

Bible, Catherine’s love of the, I. 258

Biographies, religious, the three attitudes possible concerning,

I. =374-375=

Biography, religious, laws regulating its growth, I. =371=

Bismarck, Otto von, II. 272

Bliss, its “pain”-element, II. =255=

Blondel, Prof. Maurice, II. 282

Body, Catherine’s view concerning it, and the elements of this view,

II. 123-126

dualistic view concerning it, ever only pragmatic, II. =126-129=

dualistic view, un-Catholic, II. 126, 127

its valuation in the N. T., II. 122-123

Boerio, Maestro G. B., I. 200, 201 _n._ 3, 202, 208, 217, 218, 389, 451,

464; II. 14, 15, 17

Don Giovanni, I. 201 _n._ 3 (202), 208, 451

Boetius, II. 317

Bollandists, I. 372

Bona, Cardinal, Cistercian, I. 88

Boniface VIII, Pope (Gaetani), II. 83

his Bull “Unam Sanctam,” I. 94

Bosco Bartolomeo, I. 130

Bossuet, Bishop J. B., I. 64, 89; II. 141, 161, 162, 171, 173

Boudon, Archdeacon H. M., II. 141

Bousset, Prof. W., on individual experience and traditional form, II. 309

Brahman, II. 183

Brahmanism, II. 388

its three elements, I. 60

Brescia, Hospital in, I. 322

Vincenzo da, painter, I. 99

Bridgettines, Convent of the, Genoa, I. 312

Browning, Robert, II. 57, 108, 223, 227, 271

Buddha, Gautama, I. 71; II. 184, 268

Buddhism, II. 183, 184, 273

its three elements, I. 60

Buddhist Mysticism, II. 392

Bunyan, John, his works, I. 63

Burke, Edmund, II. 271

Burmah, II. 183

Burnet, Anglican Bishop Gilbert, II. 145

Busenbaum, Hermann, S. J., I. 121

Butler, Anglican Bishop Joseph, II. 371

Caesar, II. 272

Caird, Professor Edward, II. 91 _n._ 1, 282

Cajetanus, Thomas de Vio, Cardinal, O.P., II. 162

Callisto da Piacenza, Padre, I. 323, 324

Calvin, I. 341, 414, 415; II. 117, 118, 388, 392

_Institutio Religionis Christianæ_ I. 340

Calvinism, I. 9, 63

early stages of, I. 339-341

Cambridge Platonists, the, II. 371

Camillus of Lellis, St., I. 129 _n._ 2

Campanaro Family, of Genoa, I. 101

Campion, Blessed Edmund, S.J., I. 64; II. 129

Campofregoso, Paolo, of Genoa, I. 101

Canada, II. 141

_Canticle of Canticles_, I. 258, 356

its imagery dear to V. Battista Vernazza, I. 111, 356, 432

remote from St. Catherine’s mind, I. 229, 258, 432;

II. 100, 101, 107

Capuchins, I. 311, 340, 341

Caraccioli, Cardinal, Archbishop of Naples, II. 139

Caraffa, Cardinal, _see_ also Paul IV. (Pope), I. 327, 340

Carenzio, Don Jacobo, 155 _n._ 1, 175, 202, 204 _n._ 1, 213, 216, 217,

295, 299, 301, =307-309=, 310 _n._ 1, 384, 464; II. 26

his fate, I. 307-309

Carenzio, Don Jacobo, his funeral, I. 381

Carlyle, Thomas, II. 271

Cassian, I. 78

Cassino, Monte, I. 103 _n._ 1

Castagneto, Brigidina, I. 175

Catherine, of Alexandria, St., I. 97, 348