PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
(I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND
Having interrogated history in our attempt to discover the essential
character of the life of the Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to
see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; and of
the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It
is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out,
would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an inquiry which we are not yet in
a position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming
available for it: but many of the principles involved are, even yet,
obscure. Therefore any conclusions at which we may arrive can only be
tentative; and the theories and schematic representations that we shall
be obliged to use must be regarded as mere working diagrams--almost
certainly of a temporary character--but useful to us, because they do
give us an interpretation of inner experience with which we can deal. I
need not emphasize the extent in which modern developments of psychology
are affecting our conceptions of the spiritual life, and our reading of
many religious phenomena on which our ancestors looked with awe. When we
have eliminated the more heady exaggerations of the psycho-analysts, and
the too-violent simplifications of the behaviourists, it remains true
that many problems have lately been elucidated in an unexpected, and
some in a helpful, sense. We are learning in particular to see in true
proportion those abnormal states of trance and ecstasy which were once
regarded as the essentials, but are now recognized as the by-products,
of the mystical life. But a good deal that at first sight seems
startling, and even disturbing to the religious mind, turns out on
investigation to be no more than the re-labelling of old facts, which
behind their new tickets remain unchanged. Perhaps no generation has
ever been so much at the mercy of such labels as our own. Thus many
people who are inclined to jibe at the doctrine of original sin welcome
it with open arms when it is reintroduced as the uprush of primitive
instinct. Opportunity of confession to a psychoanalyst is eagerly sought
and gladly paid for, by troubled spirits who would never resort for the
same purpose to a priest. The formulæ of auto-suggestion are freely used
by those who repudiate vocal prayer and acts of faith with scorn. If,
then, I use for the purpose of exposition some of those labels which are
affected by the newest schools, I do so without any suggestion that they
represent the only valid way of dealing with the psychic life of man.
Indeed, I regard these labels as little more than exceedingly clever
guesses at truth. But since they are now generally current and often
suggestive, it is well that we should try to find a place for spiritual
experience within the system which they represent; thus carrying through
the principle on which we are working, that of interpreting the abiding
facts of the spiritual life, so far as we can, in the language of the
present day.
First, then, I propose to consider the analysis of mind, and what It has
to tell us about the nature of Sin, of Salvation, of Conversion; what
light it casts on the process of purgation or self-purification which is
demanded by all religions of the Spirit; what are the respective parts
played by reason and instinct in the process of regeneration; and the
importance for religious experience of the phenomena of apperception.
We need not at this point consider again all that we mean by the life of
the Spirit. We have already considered it as it appears in history--its
inexhaustible variety, its power, nobility, and grace. We need only to
remind ourselves that what we have got to find room for in our
psychological scheme is literally, a changed and enhanced life; a life
which, immersed in the stream of history, is yet poised on the eternal
world. This life involves a complete re-direction of our desires and
impulses, a transfiguration of character; and often, too, a sense of
subjugation to superior guidance, of an access of impersonal strength,
so overwhelming as to give many of its activities an inspirational or
automatic character. We found that this life was marked by a rhythmic
alternation between receptivity and activity, more complete and
purposeful than the rhythm of work and rest which conditions, or should
condition, the healthy life of sense. This re-direction and
transfiguration, this removal to a higher term of our mental rhythm, are
of course psychic phenomena; using this word in a broad sense, without
prejudice to the discrimination of any one aspect of it as spiritual.
All that we mean at the moment is, that the change which brings in the
spiritual life is a change in the mind and heart of man, working in the
stuff of our common human nature, and involving all that the modern
psychologist means by the word psyche.
We begin therefore with the nature of the psyche as this modern,
growing, changing psychology conceives it; for this is the raw material
of regenerate man. If we exclude those merely degraded and pathological
theories which have resulted from too exclusive a study of degenerate
minds, we find that the current conception of the psyche--by which of
course I do not mean the classic conceptions of Ward or even William
James--was anticipated by Plotinus, when he said in the Fourth Ennead,
that every soul has something of the lower life for the purposes of the
body and of the higher for the purposes of the Spirit, and yet
constitutes a unity; an unbroken series of ascending values and powers
of response, from the levels of merely physical and mainly unconscious
life to those of the self-determining and creative consciousness.[62] We
first discover psychic energy as undifferentiated directive power,
controlling response and adaption to environment; and as it develops,
ever increasing the complexity of its impulses and habits, yet never
abandoning anything of its past. Instinct represents the correspondence
of this life-force with mere nature, its effort as it were to keep its
footing and accomplish its destiny in the world of time. Spirit
represents this same life acting on highest levels, with most vivid
purpose; seeking and achieving correspondence with the eternal world,
and realities of the loftiest order yet discovered to be accessible to
us. We are compelled to use words of this kind; and the proceeding is
harmless enough so long as we remember that they are abstractions, and
that we have no real reason to suppose breaks in the life process which
extends from the infant's first craving for food and shelter to the
saint's craving for the knowledge of God. This urgent, craving life is
the dominant characteristic of the psyche. Thought is but the last come
and least developed of its powers; one among its various responses to
environment, and ways of laying hold on experience.
This conception of the multiplicity in unity of the psyche, conscious
and unconscious, is probably one of the most important results of
recent psychological advance. It means that we cannot any longer in the
good old way rule off bits or aspects of it, and call them intellect,
soul, spirit, conscience and so forth; or, on the other hand, refer to
our "lower" nature as if it were something separate from ourselves. I am
spirit when I pray, if I pray rightly. I am my lower nature, when my
thoughts and deeds are swayed by my primitive impulses and physical
longings, declared or disguised. I am most wholly myself when that
impulsive nature and that craving spirit are welded into one, subject to
the same emotional stimulus, directed to one goal. When theologians and
psychologists, ignoring this unity of the self, set up arbitrary
divisions--and both classes are very fond of doing so--they are merely
making diagrams for their own convenience. We ourselves shall probably
be compelled to do this: and the proceeding is harmless enough, so long
as we recollect that these diagrams are at best symbolic pictures of
fact. Specially is it necessary to keep our heads, and refuse to be led
away by the constant modern talk of the primitive, unconscious,
foreconscious instinctive and other minds which are so prominent in
modern psychological literature, or by the spatial suggestions of such
terms as threshold, complex, channel of discharge: remembering always
the central unity and non-material nature of that many-faced psychic
life which is described under these various formulæ.
If we accept this central unity with all its implications, it follows
that we cannot take our superior and conscious faculties, set them
apart, and call them "ourselves"; refusing responsibility for the more
animal and less fortunate tendencies and instincts which surge up with
such distressing ease and frequency from the deeps, by attributing these
to nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it become plain that
the sophisticated surface-mind which alone we usually recognize is the
smallest, the least developed, and in some respects still the least
important part of the real self: that whole man of impulse, thought and
desire, which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate
for God. That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, growing, plastic
unit; moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us, and carrying
with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices,
impulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to
us the extent in which the jungle and the Stone Age are still active in
our games, our politics and our creeds; how many of our motives are
still those of primitive man, and how many of our social institutions
offer him a discreet opportunity of self-expression.
Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old thoughts of
religion and the new thoughts of psychology may unite and complete one
another. Here the scientific conception of the psyche is merely
restating the fundamental Christian paradox, that man is truly one, a
living, growing spirit, the creature and child of the Divine Life; and
yet that there seem to be in him, as it were, two antagonistic
natures--that duality which St. Paul calls the old Adam and the new
Adam. The law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the
earthward-tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life
of re-directed desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are
conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise.
True, religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of
the facts. That which one calls original sin, the other calls the
instinctive mind: but the situation each puts before us is the same. "I
find a law," says St. Paul, "that when I would do good evil is present
with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man _but_ I
see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind....
With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law
of sin." Without going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst who said
in my hearing, "If St. Paul had come to me, I feel I could have helped
him," I think it is clear that we are learning to give a new content to
this, and many other sayings of the New Testament. More and more
psychology tends to emphasize the Pauline distinction; demonstrating
that the profound disharmony existing in most civilized men between the
impulsive and the rational life, the many conflicts which sap his
energy, arise from the persistence within us of the archaic and
primitive alongside the modern mind. It demonstrates that the many
stages and constituents of our psychic past are still active in each one
of us; though often below the threshold of consciousness. The blindly
instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety
and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried
over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when
we are off our guard. The more complex life of the human primitive; with
its outlook of wonder, self-interest and fear, developed under
conditions of ignorance, peril and perpetual struggle for life. The
history of primitive man covers millions of years: the history of
civilized man, a few thousand at the most. Therefore it is not
surprising that the primitive outlook should have bitten hard into the
plastic stuff of the developing psyche, and forms still the infantile
foundation of our mental life. Finally, there is the rational life, so
far as the rational is yet achieved by us; correcting, conflicting with,
and seeking to refine and control the vigour of primitive impulse.
But if it is to give an account of all the facts psychology must also
point out, and find place for, the last-comer in the evolutionary
series: the rare and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual
consciousness, bearing witness that we are the children of God, and
pointing, not backward to the roots but onward to the fruits of human
growth. But it cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as
something separate from, and wholly unconditioned by, our racial past.
We must rather conceive it as the crown of our psychic evolution, the
end of that process which began in the dawn of consciousness and which
St. Paul calls "growing up into the stature of Christ." Here psychology
is in harmony with the teaching of those mystics who invite us to
recognize, not a completed spirit, but rather a seed within us. In the
spiritual yearnings, the profound and yet uncertain stirrings of the
religious consciousness, its half-understood impulses to God, we
perceive the floating-up into the conscious field of this deep germinal
life. And psychology warns us, I think, that in our efforts to forward
the upgrowth of this spiritual life, we must take into account those
earlier types of reaction to the universe which still continue
underneath our bright modern appearance, and still inevitably condition
and explain so many of our motives and our deeds. It warns us that the
psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven; and that every one of us
still retains, though not always it is true in a recognizable form, many
of the characters of those stages of development through which the race
has passed--characters which inevitably give their colour to our
religious no less than to our social life.
"I desire," says à Kempis, "to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take
thee. I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and
unmortified passions depress me. I will in my mind be above all things
but in despite of myself I am constrained to be beneath, so I unhappy
man fight with myself and am made grievous to myself while the spirit
seeketh what is above and the flesh what is beneath. O what I suffer
within while I think on heavenly things in my mind; the company of
fleshly things cometh against me when I pray."[63]
"Oh Master," says the Scholar in Boehme's great dialogue, "the creatures
that live in me so withhold me, that I cannot wholly yield and give
myself up as I willingly would."[64]
No psychologist has come nearer to a statement of the human situation
than have these old specialists in the spiritual life.
The bearing of all this on the study of organized religion is of course
of great importance; and will be discussed in a subsequent section. All
that I wish to point out now is that the beliefs, and the explanations
of action, put forward by our rationalizing surface consciousness are
often mere veils which drape the crudeness of our real desires and
reactions to life; and that before life can be reintegrated about its
highest centres, these real beliefs and motives must be tracked down,
and their humiliating character acknowledged. The ape and the tiger, in
fact, are not dead in any one of us. In polite persons they are caged,
which Is a very different thing: and a careful introspection will teach
us to recognize their snarls and chatterings, their urgent requests for
more mutton chops or bananas, under the many disguises which they
assume--disguises which are not infrequently borrowed from ethics or
from religion. Thus a primitive desire for revenge often masquerades as
justice, and an unedifying interest in personal safety can be discerned
in at least some interpretations of atonement, and some aspirations
towards immortality.[65]
I now go on to a second point. It will already be clear that the modern
conception of the many-levelled psyche gives us a fresh standpoint from
which to consider the nature of Sin. It suggests to us, that the essence
of much sin is conservatism, or atavism: that it is rooted in the
tendency of the instinctive life to go on, in changed circumstances,
acting in the same old way. Virtue, perfect rightness of correspondence
with our present surroundings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our
best ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of crude instinct,
the steady control of impulse by such reason as we possess; and
perpetually forces us to use on new and higher levels that machinery of
habit-formation, that power of implanting tendencies in the plastic
psyche, to which man owes his earthly dominance. When our unstable
psychic life relaxes tension and sinks to lower levels than this, and
it Is always tending so to do, we are relapsing to antique methods of
response, suitable to an environment which is no longer there. Few
people go through life without knowing what it is to feel a sudden, even
murderous, impulse to destroy the obstacle in their path; or seize, at
all costs, that which they desire. Our ancestors called these uprushes
the solicitations of the devil, seeking to destroy the Christian soul;
and regarded them with justice as an opportunity of testing our
spiritual strength. It is true that every man has within him such a
tempting spirit; but its characters can better be studied in the
Zoological Gardens than in the convolutions of a theological hell.
"External Reason," says Boehme, "supposes that hell is far from us. But
it is near us. Every one carries it in himself."[66] Many of our vices,
in fact, are simply savage qualities--and some are even savage
virtues--in their old age. Thus in an organized society the
acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive
dependent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy and
covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar,
the greed and egotism of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the
great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted
expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual
could hardly survive.
When therefore qualities which were once useful on their own level are
outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's
spiritualization, then--whatever they may be--they belong to the body of
death, not to the body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump--none
other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67]
Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as
religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich
declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul.
Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse
satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The
violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to
wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature--the old Adam, in
fact--leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength. He
obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with
the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality
keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural
instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures
came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.[68] St.
Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a
spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.[69] Games and sport
of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a
certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of
games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The
sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent
in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved:
failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the
moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this
fact: for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea, would in London
provoke the immediate attention of the police.
Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back to past levels of
conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its
conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which to
look at the idea of Salvation? We know that all religions of the spirit
have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation: on the
conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued, if
he is to achieve a satisfactory life. What is it, then, from which he
must be saved?
I think that the answer must be, from conflict: the conflict between the
pull-back of his racial origin and the pull-forward of his spiritual
destiny, the antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerging soul,
each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality. We may
as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts
and resistances: that the trite verse about "fightings and fears
within, without" does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive
mind with its ineffective struggles, its inveterate egotism, its
inconsistent impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason need some
reinforcement, some helping power, if they are to conquer and control
his archaic impulsive life. And this salvation, this extrication from
the wrongful and atavistic claims of primitive impulse in its many
strange forms, is a prime business of religion; sometimes achieved in
the sudden convulsion we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower
process of education. The wrong way to do it is seen in the methods of
the Puritan and the extreme ascetic, where all animal impulse is
regarded as "sin" and repressed: a proceeding which involves the risk of
grave physical and mental disorder, and produces even at the best a
bloodless pietism. The right way to do it was described once for all by
Jacob Boehme, when he said that it was the business of a spiritual man
to "harness his fiery energies to the service of the light--" that is to
say, change the direction of our passionate cravings for satisfaction,
harmonize and devote them to spiritual ends. This is true regeneration:
this is the salvation offered to man, the healing of his psychic
conflict by the unification of his instinctive and his ideal life. The
voice which St. Mechthild heard, saying "Come and be reconciled,"
expresses the deepest need of civilized but unspiritualized humanity.
This need for the conversion or remaking of the instinctive life,
rather than the achievement of mere beliefs, has always been appreciated
by real spiritual teachers; who are usually some generations in advance
of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the "root of evil," the
heart of the "old man" and best promise of the "new." Here is the raw
material both of vice and of virtue--namely, a mass of desires and
cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural
and self-regarding. "In will, imagination and desire," says William Law,
"consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature."[70]
The Divine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi "Set love in order, thou
that lovest Me!" declared the one law of mental growth.[71] To use for a
moment the language of mystical theology, conversion, or repentance, the
first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the
direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in
which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast
setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of
the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and
which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard,
conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and
higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true
self-conquest, that the spiritual life in man draws its earnestness,
reality and worth.
"Oh, Academicus," says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would
endorse, "forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a
plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that
there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth
of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives
within us. For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have
in truth none at all. For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and
rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed, and amended, as a
wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a
sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only
restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again as occasion shall
offer."[72] Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild
beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find
the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert
turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to
save his fellow-men. This transformation or sublimation is not the work
of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been
directed into a fresh channel of use.
We may now look a little more closely at the character and
potentialties of our instinctive life: for this life is plainly of the
highest importance to us, since it will either energize or thwart all
the efforts of the rational self. Current psychology, even more plainly
than religion, encourages us to recognize in this powerful instinctive
nature the real source of our conduct, the origin of all those dynamic
personal demands, those impulses to action, which condition the full and
successful life of the natural man. Instincts in the animal and the
natural man are the methods by which the life force takes care of its
own interests, insures its own full development, its unimpeded forward
drive. In so far as we form part of the animal kingdom our own safety,
property, food, dominance, and the reproduction of our own type, are
inevitably the first objects of our instinctive care. Civilized life has
disguised some of these crude demands and the behaviour which is
inspired by them, but their essential character remains unchanged. Love
and hate, fear and wonder, self-assertion and self-abasement, the
gregarious, the acquisitive, the constructive tendencies, are all
expressions of instinctive feeling; and can be traced back to our
simplest animal needs.
But instincts are not fixed tendencies: they are adaptable. This can be
seen clearly in the case of animals whose environment Is artificially
changed. In the dog, for instance, loyalty to the interests of the pack
has become loyalty to his master's household. In man, too, there has
already been obvious modification and sublimation of many instincts.
The hunting impulse begins in the jungle, and may end in the
philosopher's exploration of the Infinite. It is the combative instinct
which drives the reformer headlong against the evils of the world, as it
once drove two cave men at each others' throats. Love, which begins in
the mergence of two cells, ends in the saint's supreme discovery, "Thou
art the Love wherewith the heart loves Thee."[73] The much advertized
herd instinct may weld us into a mob at the mercy of unreasoning
passions; but it can also make us living members of the Communion of
Saints. The appeals of the prophet and the revivalist, the Psalmist's
"Taste and see," the Baptist's "Change your hearts," are all invitations
to an alteration in the direction of desire, which would turn our
instinctive energies in a new direction and begin the domestication of
the human soul for God.
This, then, is the real business of conversion and of the character
building that succeeds it; the harnessing of instinct to idea and its
direction into new and more lofty channels of use, transmuting the
turmoil of man's merely egoistic ambitions, anxieties and emotional
desires into fresh forms of creative energy, and transferring their
interest from narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The seven
deadly sins of Christian ethics--Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth,
Gluttony, and Lust--represent not so much deliberate wrongfulness, as
the outstanding forms of man's uncontrolled and self-regarding
instincts; unbridled self-assertion, ruthless acquisitiveness, and
undisciplined indulgence of sense. The traditional evangelical virtues
of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience which sum up the demands of the
spiritual life exactly oppose them. Over against the self-assertion of
the proud and angry is set the ideal of humble obedience, with its wise
suppleness and abnegation of self-will. Over against the acquisitiveness
of the covetous and envious is set the ideal of inward poverty, with its
liberation from the narrow self-interest of I, Me and Mine. Over against
the sensual indulgence of the greedy, lustful and lazy is set the ideal
of chastity, which finds all creatures pure to enjoy, since it sees them
in God, and God in all creatures. Yet all this, rightly understood, is
no mere policy of repression. It is rather a rational policy of release,
freeing for higher activities instinctive force too often thrown away.
It is giving the wild beast his work to do, training him. Since the
instincts represent the efforts of this urgent life in us to achieve
self-protection and self-realization, it is plain that the true
regeneration of the psyche, its redirection from lower to higher levels,
can never be accomplished without their help. We only rise to the top of
our powers when the whole man acts together, urged by an enthusiasm or
an instinctive need.
Further, a complete and ungraduated response to stimulus--an
"all-or-none reaction"--is characteristic of the instinctive life and of
the instinctive life alone. Those whom it rules for the time give
themselves wholly to it; and so display a power far beyond that of the
critical and the controlled. Thus, fear or rage will often confer
abnormal strength and agility. A really dominant instinct is a veritable
source of psycho-physical energy, unifying and maintaining in vigour all
the activities directed to its fulfilment.[74] A young man in love is
stimulated not only to emotional ardour, but also to hard work in the
interests of the future home. The explorer develops amazing powers of
endurance; the inventor in the ecstasy of creation draws on deep vital
forces, and may carry on for long periods without sleep or food. If we
apply this law to the great examples of the spiritual life, we see in
the vigour and totality of their self-giving to spiritual interests a
mark of instinctive action; and in the power, the indifference to
hardship which these selves develop, the result of unification, of an
"all-or-none" response to the religious or philanthropic stimulus. It
helps us to understand the cheerful austerities of the true ascetic; the
superhuman achievement of St. Paul, little hindered by the "thorn in the
flesh"; the career of St. Joan of Arc; the way in which St. Teresa or
St. Ignatius, tormented by ill-health, yet brought their great
conceptions to birth; the powers of resistance displayed by George Fox
and other Quaker saints. It explains Mary Slessor living and working
bare-foot and bare-headed under the tropical sun, disdaining the use of
mosquito nets, eating native food, and taking with impunity daily risks
fatal to the average European.[75] It shows us, too, why the great
heroes of the spiritual life so seldom think out their positions, or
husband their powers. They act because they are impelled: often in
defiance of all prudent considerations! yet commonly with an amazing
success. Thus General Booth has said that he was driven by "the impulses
and urgings of an undying ambition" to save souls. What was this impulse
and urge? It was the instinctive energy of a great nature in a
sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced power is experienced
will determine its value for life; but its character is much the same in
the convert at a revival, in the postulant's vivid sense of vocation and
consequent break with the world? in the disinterested man of science
consecrated to the search for truth, and in the apostle's self-giving to
the service of God, with its answering gift of new strength and
fruitfulness. Its secret, and indeed the secret of all transcendence is
implied In the direction of the old English mystic: "Mean God all, all
God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God,"[76]
The over-belief, the religious formula in which this instinctive
passion is expressed, is comparatively unimportant The revivalist,
wholly possessed by concrete and anthropomorphic ideas of God which are
impossible to a man of different--and, as we suppose,
superior--education, can yet, because of the burning reality with which
he lives towards the God so strangely conceived, infect those with whom
he comes in contact with the spiritual life.
We are now in a position to say that the first necessity of the life of
the Spirit is the sublimation of the instinctive life, involving the
transfer of our interest and energy to new objectives, the giving of our
old vigour to new longings and new loves. It appears that the invitation
of religion to a change of heart, rather than a change of belief, is
founded on solid psychological laws. I need not dwell on the way in
which Divine love, as the saints have understood it, answers to the
complete sublimation of our strongest natural passion; or the extent in
which the highest experiences of the religious life satisfy man's
instinctive craving for self-realization within a greater Reality, how
he feels himself to be fed with a mysterious food, quickened by a fresh
dower of life, assured of his own safety within a friendly universe,
given a new objective for his energy. It is notorious that one of the
most striking things about a truly spiritual man is, that he has
achieved a certain stability which others lack. In him, the central
craving of the psyche for more life and more love has reached its
bourne; instead of feeding upon those secondary objects of desire which
may lull our restlessness but cannot heal it He loves the thing which he
ought to love, wants to do the deeds which he ought to do, and finds all
aspects of his personality satisfied in one objective. Every one has
really a forced option between the costly effort to achieve this
sublimation of impulse, this unification of the self on spiritual
levels, and the quiet evasion of it which is really a capitulation to
the animal instincts and unordered cravings of our many-levelled being.
We cannot stand still; and this steady downward pull keeps us ever in
mind of all the backward-tending possibilities collectively to be
thought of as sin, and explains to us why sloth, lack of spiritual
energy, is held by religion to be one of the capital forms of human
wrongness.
I go on to another point, which I regard as of special importance.
It must not be supposed that the life of the Spirit begins and with the
sublimation of, the instinctive and emotional life; though this is
indeed for it a central necessity. Nor must we take it for granted that
the apparent redirection of impulse to spiritual objects is always and
inevitably an advance. All who are or may be concerned with the
spiritual training, help, and counselling of others ought clearly to
recognize that there are elements in religious experience which
represent, not a true sublimation, but either disguised primitive
cravings and ideas, or uprushes from lower instinctive levels: for these
experiences have their special dangers. As we shall see when we come to
their more detailed study, devotional practices tend to produce that
state which psychologists call mobility of the threshold of
consciousness; and may easily permit the emergence of natural
inclinations and desires, of which the self does not recognize the real
character. As a matter of fact, a good deal of religious emotion is of
this kind. Instances are the childish longing for mere protection, for a
sort of supersensual petting, the excessive desire for shelter and rest,
voiced in too many popular hymns; the subtle form of self-assertion
which can be detected in some claims to intercourse with God--e.g. the
celebrated conversation of Angela of Foligno with the Holy Ghost;[77]
the thinly veiled human feelings which find expression in the personal
raptures of a certain type of pious literature, and in what has been
well described as the "divine duet" type of devotion. Many, though not
all of the supernormal phenomena of mysticism are open to the same
suspicion: and the Church's constant insistence on the need of
submitting these to some critical test before, accepting them at face
value, is based on a most wholesome scepticism. Though a sense of meek
dependence on enfolding love and power is the very heart of religion,
and no intense spiritual life is possible unless it contain a strong
emotional element, it is of first importance to be sure that its
affective side represents a true sublimation of human feelings and
desires, and not merely an oblique indulgence of lower cravings.
Again, we have to remember that the instinctive self, powerful though it
be? does not represent the sum total of human possibility. The maximum
of man's strength is not reached until all the self's powers, the
instinctive and also the rational, are united and set on one objective;
for then only is he safe from the insidious inner conflict between
natural craving and conscious purpose which saps his energies, and is
welded into a complete and harmonious instrument of life, "The source of
power," says Dr. Hadfield in "The Spirit," "lies not in instinctive
emotion alone, but in instinctive emotion expressed in a way with which
the whole man can, for the time being at least, identify himself.
Ultimately, this is impossible without the achievement of a harmony of
all the instincts _and_ the approval of the reason."[78]
Thus we see that any unresolved conflict or divorce between the
religious instinct and the intellect will mar the full power of the
spiritual life: and that an essential part of the self's readjustment to
reality must consist in the uniting of these partners, as intellect and
intuition are united in creative art. The noblest music, most satisfying
poetry are neither the casual results of uncriticized inspiration nor
the deliberate fabrications of the brain, but are born of the perfect
fusion of feeling and of thought; for the greatest and most fruitful
minds are those which are rich and active on both levels--which are
perpetually raising blind impulse to the level of conscious purpose,
uniting energy with skill, and thus obtaining the fiery energies of the
instinctive life for the highest uses. So too the spiritual life is only
seen in its full worth and splendour when the whole man is subdued to
it, and one object satisfies the utmost desires of heart and mind. The
spiritual impulse must not be allowed to become the centre of a group of
specialized feelings, a devotional complex, in opposition to, or at
least alienated from, the intellectual and economic life. It must on the
contrary brim over, invading every department of the self. When the
mind's loftiest and most ideal thought, its conscious vivid aspiration,
has been united with the more robust qualities of the natural man; then,
and only then, we have the material for the making of a possible saint.
We must also remember that, important as our primitive and instinctive
life may be--and we should neither despise nor neglect it--its religious
impulses, taken alone, no more represent the full range of man's
spiritual possibilities than the life of the hunting tribe or the
African kraal represent his full social possibilities. We may, and
should, acknowledge and learn from our psychic origins. We must never be
content to rest in them. Though in many respects, mental as well as
physical, we are animals still; yet we are animals with a possible
future in the making, both corporate and individual, which we cannot yet
define. All other levels of life assure us that the impulsive nature is
peculiarly susceptible to education. Not only can the whole group of
instincts which help self-fulfilment be directed to higher levels,
united and subdued to a dominant emotional interest; but merely
instinctive actions can, by repetition and control, be raised to the
level of habit and be given improved precision and complexity. This, of
course, is a primary function of devotional exercises; training the
first blind instinct for God to the complex responses of the life of
prayer. Instinct is at best a rough and ready tool of life: practice is
required if it is to produce its best results. Observe, for instance,
the poor efforts of the young bird to escape capture; and compare this
with the finished performance of the parent.[79] Therefore in estimating
man's capacity for spiritual response, we must reckon not only his
innate instinct for God, but also his capacity for developing this
instinct on the level of habit; educating and using its latent powers to
the best advantage. Especially on the contemplative side of life,
education does great things for us; or would do, if we gave it the
chance. Here, then, the rational mind and conscious will must play their
part in that great business of human transcendence, which is man's
function within the universal plan.
It is true that the deep-seated human tendency to God may best be
understood as the highest form of that out-going instinctive craving of
the psyche for more life and love which, on whatever level it be
experienced, is always one. But some external stimulus seems to be
needed, if this deep tendency is to be brought up into consciousness;
and some education, if it is to be fully expressed. This stimulus and
this education, in normal cases, are given by tradition; that is to say,
by religious belief and practice. Or they may come from the countless
minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few
of us have the subtlety to analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or
environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual
order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied,
the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule,
this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of
conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and
reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus. There is, however,
nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself. It has its parallel
in other drastic readjustments to other levels of life; and is merely a
method by which selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the
union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability.
Now we have behind us and within us all humanity's funded instinct for
the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the
Divine. But its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet to very
little. Thus we see that the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" spoke as
a true psychologist when he said that "a secret blind love pressing
towards God" held more hope of success than mere thought can ever do;
"for He may well be loved but not thought--by love He may be gotten and
holden, but by thought never."[80] Nevertheless, if that consistency of
deed and belief which is essential to full power is to be achieved by
us, every man's conception of the God Whom he serves ought to be the
very best of which he is capable. Because ideas which we recognize as
partial or primitive have called forth the richness and devotion of
other natures, we are not therefore excused from trying all things and
seeking a Reality which fulfils to the utmost our craving for truth and
beauty, as well, as our instinct for good. It is easy, natural, and
always comfortable for the human mind to sink back into something just a
little bit below its highest possible. On one hand to wallow in easy
loves, rest in traditional formulæ, or enjoy a "moving type of devotion"
which makes no intellectual demand. On the other, to accept without
criticism the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, and keep safely in
the furrow of intelligent agnosticism.
Religious people have a natural inclination to trot along on mediocre
levels; reacting pleasantly to all the usual practices, playing down to
the hopes and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving for
comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in symbols and spells, and
satisfying its devotional inclinations by any "long psalter unmindfully
mumbled in the teeth."[81] And a certain type of intelligent people have
an equally natural tendency to dismiss, without further worry, the
traditional notions of the past. In so far as all this represents a
slipping back in the racial progress, it has the character of sin: at
any rate, it lacks the true character of spiritual life. Such life
involves growth, sublimation, the constant and difficult redirection of
energy from lower to higher levels; a real effort to purge motive, see
things more truly, face and resolve the conflict between the deep
instinctive and the newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the
nature of their own mental processes sin against the light if they do
not do with them the very best that they possibly can: and the penalty
of this sin must be a narrowing of vision, an arrest. The laws of
apperception apply with at least as much force to our spiritual as to
our sensual impressions: what we bring with us will condition what we
obtain.
"We behold that which we are!" said Ruysbroeck long ago.[82] The mind's
content and its ruling feeling-tone, says psychology, all its memories
and desires, mingle with all incoming impressions, colour them and
condition those which our consciousness selects. This intervention of
memory and emotion in our perceptions is entirely involuntary; and
explains why the devotee of any specific creed always finds in the pure
immediacy of religious experience the special marks of his own belief.
In most acts of perception--and probably, too, in the intuitional
awareness of religious experience--that which the mind brings is bulkier
if less important than that which it receives; and only the closest
analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this
machinery of apperception--humbling though its realization must be to
the eager idealist--does not merely confuse the issue for us; or compel
us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the
contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to many theological
puzzles; whilst its existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual
experiences we should otherwise miss, because it gives to us the means
of interpreting them. Pure immediacy, as such, is almost ungraspable by
us. As man, not as pure spirit, the High Priest entered the Holy of
Holies: that is to say, he took to the encounter of the Infinite the
finite machinery of sense. This limitation is ignored by us at our
peril. The great mystics, who have sought to strip off all image and
reach--as they say--the Bare Pure Truth, have merely become inarticulate
in their effort to tell us what it was that they knew. "A light I cannot
measure, goodness without form!" exclaims Jacopone da Todi.[83] "The
Light of the _World_--the Good _Shepherd_," says St. John, bringing a
richly furnished poetic consciousness to the vision of God; and at once
gives us something on which to lay hold.
Generally speaking, it is only in so far as we bring with us a plan of
the universe that we can make anything of it; and only in so far as we
bring with us some idea of God, some feeling of desire for Him, can we
apprehend Him--so true is it that we do, indeed, behold that which we
are, find that which we seek, receive that for which we ask. Feeling,
thought, and tradition must all contribute to the full working out of
religious experience. The empty soul facing an unconditioned Reality may
achieve freedom but assuredly achieves nothing else: for though the
self-giving of Spirit is abundant, we control our own powers of
reception. This lays on each self the duty of filling the mind with the
noblest possible thoughts about God, refusing unworthy and narrow
conceptions, and keeping alight the fire of His love. We shall find that
which we seek: hence a richly stored religious consciousness, the lofty
conceptions of the truth seeker, the vision of the artist, the boundless
charity and joy in life of the lover of his kind, really contribute to
the fulness of the spiritual life; both on its active and on its
contemplative side. As the self reaches the first degrees of the
prayerful or recollected state, memory-elements, released from the
competition of realistic experience, enter the foreconscious field.
Among these will be the stored remembrances of past meditations,
reading, and experiences, all giving an affective tone conducive to new
and deeper apprehensions. The pure in heart see God, because they bring
with them that radiant and undemanding purity: because the storehouse of
ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings to that encounter,
is free from conflicting desires and images, perfectly controlled by
this feeling-tone.
It is now clear that all which we have so far considered supports, from
the side of psychology, the demand of every religion for a drastic
overhaul of the elements of character, a real repentance and moral
purgation, as the beginning of all personal spiritual life. Man does
not, as a rule, reach without much effort and suffering the higher
levels of his psychic being. His old attachments are hard; complexes of
which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces
which they enchain. He must, then, examine without flinching his
impulsive life, and know what is in his heart, before he is in a
position to change it. "The light which shows us our sins," says George
Fox, "is the light that heals us." All those repressed cravings, those
quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust
into the hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the
surface and, in the language of psychology, "abreacted"; in the language
of religion, confessed. The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges
on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of
repressing it. The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the
hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and their
elements brought up into consciousness and faced: and only the self
which has endured this, can hope to be established in the free Spirit.
It is a process of spiritual hygiene.
Psycho-analysis has taught us the danger of keeping skeletons in the
cupboards of the soul, the importance of tracking down our real motives,
of facing reality, of being candid and fearless in self-knowledge. But
the emotional colour of this process when it is undertaken in the full
conviction of the power and holiness of that life-force which we have
not used as well as we might, and with a humble and loving consciousness
of our deficiency, our falling short, will be totally different from the
feeling state of those who conceive themselves to be searching for the
merely animal sources of their mental and spiritual life. "Meekness in
itself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing," "is naught else but a true
knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is. For surely whoso might
verily see and feel himself as he is, he should verily be meek.
Therefore swink and sweat all that thou canst and mayst for to get thee
a true knowing and feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I trow that
soon after that thou shalt have a true knowing and feeling of God as he
is."[84]
The essence, then, of repentance and purification of character consists
first in the identification, and next in the sublimation of our
instinctive powers and tendencies; their detachment from egoistic
desires and dedication to new purposes. We should not starve or repress
the abounding life within us; but, relieving it of its concentration on
the here-and-now, give its attention and its passion a wider circle of
interest over which to range, a greater love to which it can consecrate
its growing powers. We do not yet know what the limit of such
sublimation may be. But we do know that it is the true path of life's
advancement, that already we owe to it our purest loves, our loveliest
visions, and our noblest deeds. When such feeling, such vision and such
act are united and transfigured in God, and find in contact with His
living Spirit the veritable sources of their power; then, man will have
resolved his inner conflict, developed his true potentialities, and live
a harmonious because a spiritual life.
We end, therefore, upon this conception of the psyche as the living
force within us; a storehouse of ancient memories and animal tendencies,
yet plastic, adaptable, ever pressing on and ever craving for more life
and more love. Only the life of reality, the life rooted in communion
with God, will ever satisfy that hungry spirit, or provide an adequate
objective for its persistent onward push.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 62: Ennead IV. 8. 5.]
[Footnote 63: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 53.]
[Footnote 64: Boehme, "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]
[Footnote 65: Unamuno has not hesitated to base the whole of religion on
the instinct of self-preservation: but this must I think be regarded as
an exaggerated view. See "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in
Peoples," Caps. 3 and 4.]
[Footnote 66: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 98.]
[Footnote 67: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 36.]
[Footnote 68: E. Gardner: "St. Catherine of Siena," p. 20.]
[Footnote 69: "Life of St. Teresa," by Herself, Cap. 30.]
[Footnote 70: "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law" p. 59.]
[Footnote 71: Jacopone da Todi, Lauda 90.]
[Footnote 72: "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p. 123.]
[Footnote 73:
"Amor tu se'quel ama
donde lo cor te ama."
--Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 81.]
[Footnote 74: Cf. Watts: "Echo Personalities," for several illustrations
of this law.]
[Footnote 75: Livingstone: "Mary Slessor of Calabar," p. 131.]
[Footnote 76: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap, 40.]
[Footnote 77: "And very often did He say unto me, 'Bride and daughter,
sweet art thou unto Me, I love thee better than any other who is in the
valley of Spoleto.'" ("The Divine Consolations of Blessed Angela of
Foligno," p. 160.)]
[Footnote 78: "The Spirit," edited by B.H. Streeter, p. 93.]
[Footnote 79: Cf. B. Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," Cap. 2.]
[Footnote 80: Op. cit., Cap. 6.]
[Footnote 81: "Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 37.]
[Footnote 82: Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 9.]
[Footnote 83: Lauda 91.]
[Footnote 84: Op. cit., Cap. 13.]