HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
We have already agreed that, if we wish to grasp the real character of
spiritual life, we must avoid the temptation to look at it as merely a
historical subject. If it is what it claims to be, it is a form of
eternal life, as constant, as accessible to us here and now, as in any
so-called age of faith: therefore of actual and present importance, or
else nothing at all. This is why I think that the approach to it through
philosophy and psychology is so much to be preferred to the approach
through pure history. Yet there is a sense in which we must not neglect
such history; for here, if we try to enter by sympathy into the past, we
can see the life of the Spirit emerging and being lived in all degrees
of perfection and under many different forms. Here, through and behind
the immense diversity of temperaments which it has transfigured, we can
best realise its uniform and enduring character; and therefore our own
possibility of attaining to it, and the way that we must tread so to do.
History does not exhort us or explain to us, but exhibits living
specimens to us; and these specimens witness again and again to the fact
that a compelling power does exist in the world--little understood,
even by those who are inspired by it--which presses men to transcend
their material limitations and mental conflicts, and live a new creative
life of harmony, freedom and joy. Directly human character emerges as
one of man's prime interests, this possibility emerges too, and is never
lost sight of again. Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian,
Moslem and Christian all declare with more or less completeness a way of
life, a path, a curve of development which shall end in its attainment;
and history brings us face to face with the real and human men and women
who have followed this way, and found its promise to be true.
It is, indeed, of supreme importance to us that these men and women did
truly and actually thus grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the
pressure of a more intense life, and the demand of a more authentic
love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to
them, belong at bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not
of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to
our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it
could only have for us the interest of a noble dream: an interest
actually less than that of great poetry, for this has at least been
given to us by man's hard passionate work of expressing in concrete
image--and ever the more concrete, the greater his art--the results of
his transcendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. Thus, as the
tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, from Nazareth to Calvary, made
of Christianity a veritable human revelation of God and not a Gnostic
answer to the riddle of the soul; so the real and solid men and women of
the Spirit--eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the
circumstances of their own time--are the earnests of our own latent
destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to "grow taller in
Christ."[42] These powers--that ability--are factually present in the
race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which
may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow.
In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of
vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold
on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the
quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic
spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we
can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who
have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types,
varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that
form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured
with Eternal Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educative
for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle
of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens
exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less
picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete
thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs
now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as
some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden
atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves. Such
conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense;
and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the Spirit--that
is to say, with the Saints--they are particularly common and
particularly poisonous. As Benedetto Croce has observed, the very
condition of the existence of real history is that the deed celebrated
must live and be present in the soul of the historian; must be
emotionally realized by him _now,_ as a concrete fact weighted with
significance. It must answer to a present, not to a past interest of the
race, for thus alone can it convey to us some knowledge of its inward
truth.
Consider from this point of view the case of Richard Rolle, who has been
called the father of English mysticism. It is easy enough for those who
regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and its subjects as something
different from ourselves, to look upon Rolle's threefold experience of
the soul's reaction to God--the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of
his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his
austere, self-giving life[43]--as the probable result of the reaction of
a neurotic temperament to mediæval traditions. But if, for instance the
Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque
fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student--another Oxford
undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of time--who gave
up that university and the career it could offer him, under the
compulsion of another Wisdom and another Love, then he re-enters the
living past. If, standing by him in that small hut in the Yorkshire
wolds, from which the urgent message of new life spread through the
north of England, he hears Rolle saying "Nought more profitable, nought
merrier than grace of contemplation, the which lifteth us from low
things and presenteth us to God. What thing is grace but beginning of
joy? And what is perfection of joy but grace complete?"[44]--if, I say,
he so re-enters history that he can hear this as Rolle meant it, not as
a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed life's very secret--then,
his heart may be touched and he may begin to understand. And then it may
occur to him that this ardour, and the sacrifice it impelled, the hard
life which it supported, witness to another level of being; reprove his
own languor and comfort, his contentment with a merely physical mental
life, and are not wholly to be accounted for in terms of superstition
or of pathology.
When the living spirit in us thus meets the living spirit of the past,
our time-span is enlarged, and history is born and becomes contemporary;
thus both widening and deepening our vital experience. It then becomes
not only a real mode of life to us; but more than this, a mode of social
life. Indeed, we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into the time
stream to achieve by ourselves, and in defiance of tradition, a true
integration of existence. Thus to defy tradition is to refuse all the
gifts the past can make to us, and cut ourselves off from the cumulative
experiences of the race. The Spirit, as Croce[45] reminds us, is
history, makes history, and is also itself the living result of all
preceding history; since Becoming is the essential reality, the creative
formula, of that life in which we find ourselves immersed.
It is from such an angle as this that I wish to approach the historical
aspect of the life of Spirit; re-entering the past by sympathetic
imagination, refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, but
seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate life, the features which
persist and have significance for it--getting, if we can, face to face
with those intensely living men and women who have manifested it. This
is not easy. In studying all such experience, we have to remember that
the men and women of the Spirit are members of two orders. They have
attachments both to time and to eternity. Their characteristic
experiences indeed are non-temporal, but their feet are on the earth;
the earth of their own day. Therefore two factors will inevitably appear
in those experiences, one due to tradition, the other to the free
movements of creative life: and we, if we would understand, must
discriminate between them. In this power of taking from the past and
pushing on to the future, the balance maintained between stability and
novelty, we find one of their abiding characteristics. When this balance
is broken--when there is either too complete a submission to tradition
and authority, or too violent a rejection of it--full greatness is not
achieved.
In complete lives, the two things overlap: and so perfectly that no
sharp distinction is made between the gifts of authority and of fresh
experience. Traditional formulæ, as we all know, are often used because
they are found to tally with life, to light up dark corners of our own
spirits and give names to experiences which we want to define.
Ceremonial deeds are used to actualize free contacts with Reality. And
we need not be surprised that they can do this; since tradition
represents the crystallization, and handling on under symbols, of all
the spiritual experiences of the race.
Therefore the man or woman of the Spirit will always accept and use some
tradition; and unless he does so, he is not of much use to his
fellow-men. He must not, then, be discredited on account of the
symbolic system he adopts; but must be allowed to tell his news in his
own way. We must not refuse to find reality within the Hindu's account
of his joyous life-giving communion with Ram, any more than we refuse to
find it within the Christian's description of his personal converse with
Christ. We must not discredit the assurance which comes to the devout
Buddhist who faithfully follows the Middle Way, or deny that Pagan
sacramentalism was to its initiates a channel of grace. For all these
are children of tradition, occupy a given place in the stream of
history; and commonly they are better, not worse, for accepting this
fact with all that it involves. And on the other hand, as we shall see
when we come to discuss the laws of suggestion and the function of
belief, the weight of tradition presses the loyal and humble soul which
accepts it, to such an interpretation of its own spiritual intuitions as
its Church, its creed, its environment give to it. Thus St. Catherine of
Genoa, St. Teresa, even Ruysbroeck, are able to describe their intuitive
communion with God in strictly Catholic terms; and by so doing renew,
enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow
them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the
current formulæ--Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the
sterility of the contemporary Church--were forced to find elsewhere some
tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it
in the Bible; Wesley in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic
system, when closely examined, is found to have many historic and
Christian connections. And all these regarded themselves far less as
bringers-in of novelty, than as restorers of lost truth. So we must be
prepared to discriminate the element of novelty from the element of
stability; the reality of the intuition, the curve of growth, the moral
situation, from the traditional and often symbolic language in which it
is given to us. The comparative method helps us towards this; and is
thus not, as some would pretend, the servant of scepticism, but rightly
used the revealer of the Spirit of Life in its variety of gifts. In this
connection we might remember that time--like space--is only of secondary
importance to us. Compared with the eons of preparation, the millions of
years of our animal and sub-human existence, the life of the Spirit as
it appears in human history might well be regarded as simultaneous
rather than successive. We may borrow the imagery of Donne's great
discourse on Eternity and say, that those heroic livers of the spiritual
life whom we idly class in comparison with ourselves as antique, or
mediæval men, were "but as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some
at seven, some at eight--all in one morning in respect of this day."[46]
Such a view brings them more near to us, helps us to neglect mere
differences of language and appearance, and grasp the warmly living and
contemporary character of all historic truth. It preserves us, too, from
the common error of discriminating between so-called "ages of faith" and
our own. The more we study the past, the more clearly we recognize that
there are no "ages of faith." Such labels merely represent the arbitrary
cuts which we make in the time-stream, the arbitrary colours which we
give to it. The spiritual man or woman is always fundamentally the same
kind of man or woman; always reaching out with the same faith and love
towards the heart of the same universe, though telling that faith and
love in various tongues. He is far less the child of his time, than the
transformer of it. His this-world business is to bring in novelty, new
reality, fresh life. Yet, coming to fulfil not to destroy, he uses for
this purpose the traditions, creeds, even the institutions of his day.
But when he has done with them, they do not look the same as they did
before. Christ himself has been well called a Constructive
Revolutionary,[47] yet each single element of His teaching can be found
in Jewish tradition; and the noblest of His followers have the same
character. Thus St. Francis of Assisi only sought consistently to apply
the teaching of the New Testament, and St. Teresa that of the Carmelite
Rule. Every element of Wesleyanism is to be found in primitive
Christianity; and Wesleyanism is itself the tradition from which the new
vigour of the Salvation Army sprang. The great regenerators of history
are always in fundamental opposition to the common life of their day,
for they demand by their very existence a return to first principles, a
revolution in the ways of thinking and of acting common among men, a
heroic consistency and single-mindedness: but they can use for their own
fresh constructions and contacts with Eternal Life the material which
this life offers to them. The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis,
Fox or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products of ages of faith.
They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding
apathy and decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break with
society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with
the Spirit. Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and
spiritual greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly modern, even
eccentric at the time at which it appears. We are accustomed to think of
"The Imitation of Christ" as the classic expression of mediæval
spirituality. But when Thomas à Kempis wrote his book, it was the
manifesto of that which was called the Modern Devotion; and represented
a new attempt to live the life of the Spirit, in opposition to
surrounding apathy.
When we re-enter the past, what we find, there is the persistent
conflict between this novelty and this apathy; that is to say between
man's instinct for transcendence, in which we discern the pressure of
the Spirit and the earnest of his future, and his tendency to lag
behind towards animal levels, in which we see the influence of his
racial past. So far as the individual is concerned, all that religion
means by grace is resumed under the first head, much that it means by
sin under the second head. And the most striking--though not the
only--examples of the forward reach of life towards freedom (that is, of
conquering grace) are those persons whom we call men and women of the
Spirit. In them it is incarnate, and through them, as it were, it
spreads and gives the race a lift: for their transfiguration is never
for themselves alone, they impart it to all who follow them. But the
downward falling movement ever dogs the emerging life of spirit; and
tends to drag back to the average level the group these have vivified,
when their influence is withdrawn. Hence the history of the Spirit--and,
incidentally, the history of all churches--exhibits to us a series of
strong movements towards completed life, inspired by vigorous and
transcendent personalities; thwarted by the common indolence and
tendency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed. We have no reason to
suppose that this history is a closed book, or that the spiritual life
struggling to emerge among ourselves will follow other laws.
We desire then, if we can, to discover what it was that these
transcendent personalities possessed. We may think, from the point at
which we now stand, that they had some things which were false, or, at
least, were misinterpreted by them. We cannot without insincerity make
their view of the universe our own. But, plainly, they also possessed
truths and values which most of us have not: they obtained from their
religion, whether we allow that it had as creed an absolute or a
symbolic value, a power of living, a courage and clear vision, which we
do not as a rule obtain. When we study the character and works of these
men and women, observing their nobility, their sweetness, their power of
endurance, their outflowing love, we must, unless we be utterly
insensitive, perceive ourselves to be confronted by a quality of being
which we do not possess. And when we are so fortunate as to meet one of
them in the flesh, though his conduct is commonly more normal than our
own, we know then with Plotinus that the soul _has_ another life. Yet
many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies,
acknowledge the same scale of values and same moral law. But as
something, beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the
great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes
more vividly alive; so for these there was and is in religion a new,
intenser life which they can reach. They seem to represent favourable
variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life
and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the
race.
Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two
groups:
First, _Type._ What are the characters which mark this life of the
Spirit?
Secondly, _Process._ What is the line of development by which the
individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?
First, then, the _Spiritual Type._
What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated
that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort
to integrate life about its highest factors. Their central quality and
real source of power is this single-mindedness. They aim at God: the
phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the
Spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that "the householder
must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions."[48] Thus the Sufi says
he has but two laws--to look in one direction and to live in one
way.[49] Christians call this, and with reason, the Imitation of Christ;
and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that
all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed. The
New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of Our Lord's
life was His abiding sense of direct connection with and responsibility
to the Father; that His teaching and works of charity alike were
inspired by this union; and that He declared it, not as a unique fact,
but as a possible human ideal. This Is not a theological, but a
historical statement, which applies, in its degree to every man and
woman who has been a follower of Christ: for He was, as St. Paul has
said, "the eldest in a vast family of brothers." The same single-minded
effort and attainment meet us in other great faiths; though these may
lack a historic ideal of perfect holiness and love. And by a paradox
repeated again and again in human history, it is this utter devotion to
the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant
fruits in the temporal sphere; giving not only the strength to do
difficult things, but that creative charity which "wins and redeems the
unlovely by the power of its love."[50] The man or woman of prayer, the
community devoted to it, tap some deep source of power and use it in the
most practical ways. Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule was
the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the
soul; and it became one of the chief instruments in the civilization of
Europe, carrying forward not only religion, but education, pure
scholarship, art, and industrial reform. The object of St. Bernard's
reform was the restoration of the life of prayer. His monks, going out
into the waste places with no provision but their own faith, hope and
charity, revived agriculture, established industry, literally compelled
the wilderness to flower for God. The Brothers of the Common Life
joined together, in order that, living simply and by their own industry,
they might observe a rule of constant prayer: and they became in
consequence a powerful educational influence. The object of Wesley and
his first companions was by declaration the saving of their own souls
and the living only to the glory of God; but they were impelled at once
by this to practical deeds of mercy, and ultimately became the
regenerators of religion in the English-speaking world.
It is well to emphasize this truth, for it conveys a lesson which we can
learn from history at the present time with much profit to ourselves. It
means that reconstruction of character and reorientation of attention
must precede reconstruction of society; that the Sufi is right when he
declares that the whole secret lies in looking in one direction and
living in one way. Again and again it has been proved, that those who
aim at God do better work than those who start with the declared
intention of benefiting their fellow-men. We must _be_ good before we
can _do_ good; be real before we can accomplish real things. No
generalized benevolence, no social Christianity, however beautiful and
devoted, can take the place of this centring of the spirit on eternal
values; this humble, deliberate recourse to Reality. To suppose that it
can do so, is to fly in the face of history and mistake effect for
cause.
This brings us to the _Second Character_: the rich completeness of the
spiritual life, the way in which it fuses and transfigures the
complementary human tendencies to contemplation and action, the
non-successive and successive aspects of reality. "The love of God,"
said Ruysbroeck, "is an indrawing _and_ outpouring tide";[51] and
history endorses this. In its greatest representatives, the rhythm of
adoration and work is seen in an accentuated form. These people seldom
or never answer to the popular idea of idle contemplatives. They do not
withdraw from the stream of natural life and effort, but plunge into it
more deeply, seek its heart. They have powers of expression and
creation, and use them to the full. St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard,
St. Francis, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius organizing families which shall
incarnate the gift of new life; Fox, Wesley and Booth striving to save
other men; Mary Slessor driven by vocation from the Dundee mill to the
African swamps--these are characteristic of them. We perceive that they
are not specialists, as more earthly types of efficiency are apt to be.
Theirs are rich natures, their touch on existence has often an artistic
quality, St. Paul in his correspondence could break into poetry, as the
only way of telling the truth. St. Jerome lived to the full the lives of
scholar and of ascetic. St. Francis, in his perpetual missionary
activities, still found time for his music songs; St. Hildegarde and St.
Catherine of Siena had their strong political interests; Jacopone da
Todi combined the careers of contemplative politician and poet. So too
in practical matters. St. Catherine of Genoa was one of the first
hospital administrators, St. Vincent de Paul a genius in the sphere of
organized charity, Elizabeth Fry in that of prison reform. Brother
Laurence assures us that he did his cooking the better for doing it in
the Presence of God. Jacob Boehme was a hard-working cobbler, and
afterwards as a writer showed amazing powers of composition. The
perpetual journeyings and activities of Wesley reproduced in smaller
compass the career of St. Paul: he was also an exact scholar and a
practical educationist. Mary Slessor showed the quality of a ruler as
well as that of a winner of souls. In the intellectual region, Richard
of St. Victor was supreme in contemplation, and also a psychologist far
in advance of his time. We are apt to forget the mystical side of
Aquinas; who was poet and contemplative as well as scholastic
philosopher.
And the third feature we notice about these men and women is, that this
new power by which they lived was, as Ruysbroeck calls it, "a spreading
light."[52] It poured out of them, invading and illuminating other men:
so that, through them, whole groups or societies were re-born, if only
for a time, on to fresh levels of reality, goodness and power. Their own
intense personal experience was valid not only for themselves. They
belonged to that class of natural, leaders who are capable,--of
infecting the herd with their own ideals; leading it to new feeding
grounds, improving the common level It is indeed the main social
function of the man or woman of the Spirit to be such a crowd-compeller
In the highest sense; and, as the artist reveals new beauty to his
fellow-men, to stimulate in their neighbours the latent human capacity
for God. In every great surge forward to new life, we can trace back the
radiance to such a single point of light; the transfiguration of an
individual soul. Thus Christ's communion with His Father was the
life-centre, the point of contact with Eternity, whence radiated the joy
and power of the primitive Christian flock: the classic example of a
corporate spiritual life. When the young man with great possessions
asked Jesus, "What shall I do to be saved?" Jesus replied in effect,
"Put aside all lesser interests, strip off unrealities, and come, give
yourself the chance of catching the Infection of holiness from Me."
Whatever be our view of Christian dogma, whatever meaning we attach to
the words "redemption" and "atonement," we shall hardly deny that in the
life and character of the historic Christ something new was thus evoked
from, and added to, humanity. No one can read with attention the Gospel
and the story of the primitive Church, without being struck by the
consciousness of renovation, of enhancement, experienced by all who
received the Christian secret in its charismatic stage. This new factor
is sometimes called re-birth, sometimes grace, sometimes the power of
the Spirit, sometimes being "in Christ." We misread history if we regard
it either as a mere gust of emotional fervour, or a theological idea, or
discount the "miracles of healing" and other proofs of enhanced power by
which it was expressed. Everything goes to prove that the "more abundant
life" offered by the Johannine Christ to His followers, was literally
experienced by them; and was the source of their joy, their enthusiasm,
their mutual love and power of endurance.
On lower levels, and through the inspiration of lesser teachers, history
shows us the phenomena of primitive Christianity repeated again and
again; both within and without the Christian circle of ideas. Every
religion looks for, and most have possessed, some revealer of the
Spirit; some Prophet, Buddha, Mahdi, or Messiah. In all, the
characteristic demonstrations of the human power of transcendence--a
supernatural life which can be lived by us--have begun in one person,
who has become a creative centre mediating new life to his fellow-men:
as were Buddha and Mohammed for the faiths which they founded. Such
lives as those of St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, Wesley,
Booth are outstanding examples of the operation of this law. The parable
of the leaven is in fact an exact description of the way in which the
spiritual consciousness--the supernatural urge--is observed to spread in
human society. It is characteristic of the regenerate type, that he
should as it were overflow his own boundaries and energize other souls:
for the gift of a real and harmonized life pours out inevitably from
those who possess it to other men. We notice that the great mystics
recognize again and again such a fertilizing and creative power, as a
mark of the soul's full vitality. It is not the personal rapture of the
spiritual marriage, but rather the "divine fecundity" of one who is a
parent of spiritual children; which seems to them the goal of human
transcendence, and evidence of a life truly lived on eternal levels, in
real union with God. "In the fourth and last degree of love the soul
brings forth its children," says Richard of St. Victor.[53] "The last
perfection to supervene upon a thing," says Aquinas, "is its becoming
the cause of other things."[54] In a word, it is creative. And the
spiritual life as we see it in history is thus creative; the cause of
other things.
History is full of examples of this law: that the man or woman of the
spirit is, fundamentally, a life-giver; and all corporate achievement of
the life of the spirit flows from some great apostle or initiator, is
the fruit of discipleship. Such corporate achievement is a form of group
consciousness, brought into being through the power and attraction of a
fully harmonized life, infecting others with its own sharp sense of
Divine reality. Poets and artists thus infect in a measure all those
who yield to their influence. The active mystic, who is the poet of
Eternal Life, does it in a supreme degree. Such a relation of master and
disciples is conspicuous in every true spiritual revival; and is the
link between the personal and corporate aspects of regeneration. We see
it in the little flock that followed Christ, the Little Poor Men who
followed Francis, the Friends of Fox, the army of General Booth. Not
Christianity alone, but Hindu and Moslem history testify to this
necessity. The Hindu who is drawn to the spiritual life must find a
_guru_ who can not only teach its laws but also give its atmosphere; and
must accept his discipline in a spirit of obedience. The S[=u]fi
neophyte is directed to place himself in the hands of his _sheikh_ "as a
corpse in the hands of the washer"; and all the great saints of Islam
have been the inspiring centres of more or less organized groups.
History teaches us, in fact, that God most often educates men through
men. We most easily recognize Spirit when it is perceived transfiguring
human character, and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic
contagion. Though the new light may flash, as it seems, directly into
the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous
outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even here, careful
analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment,
tradition, teaching literary or oral, have prepared the way for it.
There is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense with human
experience and education. Even the noblest of the sons and daughters of
God are also the sons and daughters of the race; and are helped by those
who go before them. And as regards the generality, not isolated effort
but the love and sincerity of the true spiritual teacher--and every man
and woman of the Spirit is such a teacher within his own sphere of
influence--the unselfconscious trust of the disciple, are the means by
which the secret of full life has been handed on. "One loving spirit,"
said St. Augustine, "sets another on fire"; and expressed in this phrase
the law which governs the spiritual history of man. This law finds
notable expression in the phenomena of the Religious Order; a type of
association, found in more or less perfection in every great religion,
which has not received the attention it deserves from students of
psychology. If we study the lives of those who founded these
Orders--though such a foundation was not always intended by them--we
notice one general characteristic: each was an enthusiast, abounding in
zest and hope, and became in his lifetime a fount of regeneration, a
source of spiritual infection, for those who came under his influence.
In each the spiritual world was seen "through a temperament," and so
mediated to the disciples; who shared so far as they were able the
master's special secret and attitude to life. Thus St. Benedict's sane
and generous outlook is crystallized in the Benedictine rule. St.
Francis' deep sense of the connection between poverty and freedom gave
Franciscan regeneration its peculiar character. The heroisms of the
early Jesuit missionaries reflected the strong courageous temper of St.
Ignatius. The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct inheritance
from St. Teresa's mystical experience. The great Orders in their purity
were families, inheriting and reproducing the salient qualities of their
patriarch; who gave, as a father to his children, life stamped with his
own characteristics.
Yet sooner or later after the withdrawal of its founder, the group
appears to lose its spontaneous and enthusiastic character. Zest fails.
Unless a fresh leader be forthcoming, it inevitably settles down again
towards the general level of the herd. Thence it can only be roused by
means of "reforms" or "revivals," the arrival of new, vigorous leaders,
and the formation of new enthusiastic groups: for the bulk of men as we
know them cannot or will not make the costing effort needed for a
first-hand participation in eternal life. They want a "crowd-compeller"
to lift them above themselves. Thus the history of Christianity is the
history of successive spiritual group-formations, and their struggle to
survive; from the time when Jesus of Nazareth formed His little flock
with the avowed aim of "bringing in the Kingdom of God"--transmuting the
mentality of the race, and so giving it more abundant life.
Christians appeal to the continued teaching and compelling power of
their Master, the influence and infection of His spirit and atmosphere,
as the greatest of the regenerative forces still at work within life:
and this is undoubtedly true of those devout spirits able to maintain
contact with the eternal world in prayer. The great speech of Serenus de
Cressy in "John Inglesant" described once for all the highest type of
Christian spirituality.[55] But in practice this link and this influence
are too subtle for the mass of men. They must constantly be
re-experienced by ardent and consecrated souls; and by them be mediated
to fresh groups, formed within or without the institutional frame. Thus
in the thirteenth century St. Francis, and in the fourteenth the Friends
of God, created a true spiritual society within the Church, by restoring
in themselves and their followers the lost consistency between Christian
idea and Christian life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Fox and Wesley possessed by the same essential vision, broke away from
the institution which was no longer supple enough to meet their needs,
and formed their fresh groups outside the old herd.
When such creative personalities appear and such groups are founded by
them, the phenomena of the spiritual life reappear in their full vigour,
and are disseminated. A new vitality, a fresh power of endurance, is
seen in all who are drawn within the group and share its mind. This is
what St. Paul seems to have meant, when he reminded his converts that
they had the mind of Christ. The primitive friars, living under the
influence of Francis, did practice the perfect poverty which is also
perfect joy. The assured calm and willing sufferings of the early
Christians were reproduced in the early Quakers, secure in their
possession of the inner light. We know very well the essential
characters of this fresh mentality; the power, the enthusiasm, the
radiant joy, the indifference to pain and hardship it confers. But we
can no more produce it from these raw materials than the chemist's
crucible can produce life. The whole experience of St. Francis is
implied in the Beatitudes. The secret of Elizabeth Fry is the secret of
St. John. The doctrine of General Booth is fully stated by St. Paul. But
it was not by referring inquirers to the pages of the New Testament that
the first brought men fettered by things to experience the freedom of
poverty; the second faced and tamed three hundred Newgate criminals, who
seemed at her first visit "like wild beasts"; or the third created
armies of the redeemed from the dregs of the London Slums. They did
these things by direct personal contagion; and they will be done among
us again when the triumphant power of Eternal Spirit is again exhibited,
not in ideas but in human character.
I think, then, that history justifies us in regarding the full living of
the spiritual life as implying at least these three characters. First,
single-mindedness: to mean only God. Second, the full integration of the
contemplative and active sides of existence, lifted up, harmonized, and
completely consecrated to those interests which the self recognizes as
Divine. Third, the power of reproducing this life; incorporating it in a
group. Before we go on, we will look at one concrete example which
illustrates all these points. This example is that of St. Benedict and
the Order which he founded; for in the rounded completeness of his life
and system we see what should be the normal life of the Spirit, and its
result.
Benedict was born in times not unlike our own, when wars had shaken
civilization, the arts of peace were unsettled, religion was at a low
ebb. As a young man, he experienced an intense revulsion from the
vicious futility of Roman society, fled into the hills, and lived in a
cave for three years alone with his thoughts of God. It would be easy to
regard him as an eccentric boy: but he was adjusting himself to the real
centre of his life. Gradually others who longed for a more real
existence joined him, and he divided them into groups of twelve, and
settled them in small houses; giving them a time-table by which to live,
which should make possible a full and balanced existence of body, mind
and soul. Thanks to those years of retreat and preparation, he knew what
he wanted and what he ought to do; and they ushered in a long life of
intense mental and spiritual activity. His houses were schools, which
taught the service of God and the perfecting of the soul as the aims of
life. His rule, in which genial human tolerance, gentle courtesy, and a
profound understanding of men are not less marked than lofty
spirituality, is the classic statement of all that the Christian
spiritual life implies and should be.[56]
What, then, is the character of the life which St. Benedict proposed as
a remedy for the human failure and disharmony that he saw around him? It
was framed, of course, for a celibate community: but it has many
permanent features which are unaffected by his limitation. It offers
balanced opportunities of development to the body, the mind and the
spirit; laying equal emphasis on hard work, study, and prayer. It aims
at a robust completeness, not at the production of professional
ascetics; indeed, its Rule says little about physical austerities,
insists on sufficient food and rest, and countenances no extremes.
According to Abbot Butler, St. Benedict's day was divided into three and
a half hours for public worship, four and a half for reading and
meditation, six and a half for manual work, eight and a half for sleep,
and one hour for meals. So that in spite of the time devoted to
spiritual and mental interests, the primitive Benedictine did a good
day's work and had a good night's rest at the end of it. The work might
be anything that wanted doing, so long as the hours of prayer were not
infringed. Agriculture, scholarship, education, handicrafts and art have
all been done perfectly by St. Benedict's sons, working and willing in
quiet love. This is what one of the greatest constructive minds of
Christendom regarded as a reasonable way of life; a frame within which
the loftiest human faculties could grow, and man's spirit achieve that
harmony with God which is its goal. Moreover, this life was to be
social. It was in the beginning just the busy useful life of an Italian
farm, lived in groups--in monastic families, under the rule and
inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a Father who really was the
spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility,
obedience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character which are the
authentic fruits of the Spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has
something still to say to us; some reproof to administer to our hurried
and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time
for reality. We shall find in it and its creator, if we look, all those
marks of the regenerate life of the Spirit which history has shown to us
as normal: namely the transcendent aim, the balanced career of action
and contemplation, the creative power, and above all the principle of
social solidarity and discipleship.
We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on the second point, the
process by which the individual normally develops this life of the
Spirit, the serial changes it demands; for plainly, to know this is of
practical importance to us. The full inwardness of these changes will be
considered when we come to the personal aspect of the spiritual life.
Now we are only concerned to notice that history tends to establish the
constant recurrence of a normal process, recognizable alike in great and
small personalities under the various labels which have been given to
it, by which the self moves from its usually exclusive correspondence
with the temporal order to those full correspondences with reality, that
union with God, characteristic of the spiritual life. This life we must
believe in some form and degree to be possible for all; but we study it
best on heroic levels, for here its moments are best marked and its
fullest records survive.
The first moment of this process seems to be, that man falls out of love
with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it.
Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his
nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he
has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict,
disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis,
abandoning his gay and successful social existence; in Richard Rolle,
turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit's life; in the restless
misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; in Fox, desperately seeking "something
that could speak to his condition"; and also in two outstanding
examples from modern India, those of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore
and the Sadhu Sundar Singh. This dissatisfaction, sometimes associated
with the negative vision or conviction of sin, sometimes with the
positive longing for holiness and peace, is the mental preparation of
conversion; which, though not a constant, is at least a characteristic
feature of the beginning of the spiritual life as seen in history. We
might, indeed, expect some crucial change of attitude, some inner
crisis, to mark the beginning of a new life which is to aim only at God.
Here too we find one motive of that movement of world-abandonment which
so commonly follows conversion, especially in heroic souls. Thus St.
Paul hides himself in Arabia; St. Benedict retires for three years to
the cave at Subiaco; St. Ignatius to Manresa. Gerard Groot, the
brilliant and wealthy young Dutchman who founded the brotherhood of the
Common Life, began his new life by self-seclusion in a Carthusian cell.
St. Catherine of Siena at first lived solitary in her own room. St.
Francis with dramatic completeness abandoned his whole past, even the
clothing that was part of it. Jacopone da Todi, the prosperous lawyer
converted to Christ's poverty, resorted to the most grotesque devices to
express his utter separation from the world. Others, it is true, have
chosen quieter methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls the
cell of self-knowledge the solitude they required; but _some_ decisive
break was imperative for all. History assures us that there is no easy
sliding into the life of the Spirit.
A secondary cause of such world refusal is the first awakening of the
contemplative powers; the intuition of Eternity, hitherto dormant, and
felt at this stage to be--in its overwhelming reality and appeal--in
conflict with the unreal world and unsublimated active life. This is the
controlling idea of the hermit and recluse. It is well seen in St.
Teresa; whom her biographers describe as torn, for years, between the
interests of human intercourse and the imperative inner voice urging her
to solitary self-discipline and prayer. So we may say that in the
beginning of the life of the Spirit, as history shows it to us, if
disillusion marks the first moment, some measure of asceticism, of
world-refusal and painful self-schooling, is likely to mark the second
moment.
What we are watching is the complete reconstruction of personality; a
personality that has generally grown into the wrong shape. This is
likely to be a hard and painful business; and indeed history assures us
that it is, and further that the spiritual life is never achieved by
taking the line of least resistance and basking in the divine light.
With world-refusal, then, is intimately connected stern moral conflict;
often lasting for years, and having as its object the conquest of
selfhood in all its insidious forms. "Take one step out of yourself,"
say the S[=u]fis, "and you will arrive at God."[57] This one step is the
most difficult act of life; yet urged by love, man has taken it again
and again. This phase is so familiar to every reader of spiritual
biography, that I need not insist upon it. "In the field of this body,"
says Kabir, "a great war goes forward, against passion, anger, pride and
greed. It is in the Kingdom of Truth, Contentment and Purity that this
battle is raging, and the sword that rings forth most loudly is the
sword of His Name."[58] "Man," says Boehme, "must here be at war with
himself if he wishes to be a heavenly citizen ... fighting must be the
watchword, not with tongue and sword, but with mind and spirit; and not
to give over."[59] The need of such a conflict, shown to us in history,
is explained on human levels by psychology. On spiritual levels it is
made plain to all whose hearts are touched by the love of God. By this
way all must pass who achieve the life of the Spirit; subduing to its
purposes their wayward wills, and sublimating in its power their
conflicting animal impulses. This long effort brings, as its reward a
unification of character, an inflow of power: from it we see the mature
man or woman of the Spirit emerge. In St. Catherine of Genoa this
conflict lasted for four years, after which the thought of sin ceased to
rule her consciousness.[60] St. Teresa's intermittent struggles are
said to have continued for thirty years. John Wesley, always deeply
religious, did not attain the inner stability he calls assurance till he
was thirty-five years old. Blake was for twenty years in mental
conflict, shut off from the sources of his spiritual life. So slowly do
great personalities come to their full stature, and subdue their
vigorous impulses to the one ruling idea.
The ending of this conflict, the self's unification and establishment in
the new life, commonly means a return more or less complete to that
world from which the convert had retreated; taking up of the fully
energized and fully consecrated human existence, which must express
itself in work no less than in prayer; an exhibition too of the capacity
for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the "first
return" of the Buddhist saint is "from the absolute world to the world
of phenomena to save all sentient beings."[61] Thus St. Benedict's and
St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for
their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a
disappointed and world-weary woman and then a penitent, emerges as a
busy and devoted hospital matron and inspired teacher of a group of
disciples. St. Teresa's long interior struggles precede her vigorous
career as founder and reformer; her creation of spiritual families, new
centres of contemplative life. The vast activities of Fox and Wesley
were the fruits first of inner conflict, then of assurance--the
experience of God and of the self's relation to Him. And on the highest
levels of the spiritual life as history shows them to us, this
experience and realization, first of profound harmony with Eternity and
its interests, next of a personal relation of love, last of an
indwelling creative power, a givenness, an energizing grace, reaches
that completeness to which has been given the name of union with God.
The great man or woman of the Spirit who achieves this perfect
development is, it is true, a special product: a genius, comparable with
great creative personalities in other walks of life. But he neither
invalidates the smaller talent nor the more general tendency in which
his supreme gift takes its rise. Where he appears, that tendency is
vigorously stimulated. Like other artists, he founds a school; the
spiritual life flames up, and spreads to those within his circle of
influence. Through him, ordinary men, whose aptitude for God might have
remained latent, obtain a fresh start; an impetus to growth. There is a
sense in which he might say with the Johannine Christ, "He that
receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me"; for yielding to his magnetism,
men really yield to the drawing of the Spirit itself. And when they do
this, their lives are found to reproduce--though with less
intensity--the life history of their leader. Therefore the main
characters of that life history, that steady undivided process of
sublimation; are normal human characters. We too may heal the discords
of our moral nature, learn to judge existence in the universal light,
bring into consciousness our latent transcendental sense, and keep
ourselves so spiritually supple that alike in times of stress and hours
of prayer and silence we are aware of the mysterious and energizing
contact of God. Psychology suggests to us that the great spiritual
personalities revealed in history are but supreme instances of a
searching self-adjustment and of a way of life, always accessible to
love and courage, which all men may in some sense undertake.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 42: Everard, "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 555]
[Footnote 43: _Canor Dulcor, Canor;_ cf. Rolle: "The Fire of Love," Bk.
1, Cap. 14]
[Footnote 44: Rolle: "The Mending of Life," Cap. XII.]
[Footnote 45: Benedetto Croce: "Theory and History of Historiography,"
trans. by Douglas Ainslie, p. 25.]
[Footnote 46: "Donne's Sermons," p. 236.]
[Footnote 47: B.H. Streeter, in "The Spirit," p. 349 _seq_.]
[Footnote 48: "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
23.]
[Footnote 49: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. i.]
[Footnote 50: Baron von Hügel In the "Hibbert Journal," July, 1921.]
[Footnote 51: Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 10.]
[Footnote 52: Ruysbroeck: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk.
II, Cap. 39.]
[Footnote 53: R. of St. Victor: "De Quatuor Gradibus Violentæ
Charitatis" (Migne, Pat. Lat.) T. 196, Col. 1216.]
[Footnote 54: "Summa Contra Gentiles," Bk. III, Cap. 21.]
[Footnote 55: J.E. Shorthouse: "John Inglesant," Cap. 19.]
[Footnote 56: Cf. Delatte: "The Rule of St. Benedict"; and C. Butler:
"Benedictine Monachism."]
[Footnote 57: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. 1.]
[Footnote 58: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 44.]
[Footnote 59: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 111.]
[Footnote 60: Cf. Von Hügel: "The Mystical Element of Religion," Vol. I,
Pt. II.]
[Footnote 61: McGovern: "An Introduction to Mahãyãna Buddhism," p. 175.]