really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the
ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger,
thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See
if you are glad to wear a worn‐out habit full of patches. See if
you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are
passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to
you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these
things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is
proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of
spirit.” Rodriguez then goes on to describe the practice of
poverty in more detail. “The first point is that which Saint
Ignatius proposes in his constitutions, when he says, ‘Let no one
use anything as if it were his private possession.’ ‘A religious
person,’ he says, ‘ought in respect to all the things that he
uses, to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but
which feels no grief and makes no resistance when one strips it
again. It is in this way that you should feel towards your
clothes, your books, your cell, and everything else that you make
use of; if ordered to quit them, or to exchange them for others,
have no more sorrow than if you were a statue being uncovered. In
this way you will avoid using them as if they were your private
possession. But if, when you give up your cell, or yield
possession of this or that object or exchange it for another, you
feel repugnance and are not like a statue, that shows that you
view these things as if they were your private property.’
“And this is why our holy founder wished the superiors to test
their monks somewhat as God tested Abraham, and to put their
poverty and their obedience to trial, that by this means they may
become acquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain a
chance to make ever farther progress in perfection, ... making the
one move out of his room when he finds it comfortable and is
attached to it; taking away from another a book of which he is
fond; or obliging a third to exchange his garment for a worse one.
Otherwise we should end by acquiring a species of property in all
these several objects, and little by little the wall of poverty
that surrounds us and constitutes our principal defense would be
thrown down. The ancient fathers of the desert used often thus to
treat their companions.... Saint Dositheus, being sick‐nurse,
desired a certain knife, and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, not for
his private use, but for employment in the infirmary of which he
had charge. Whereupon Saint Dorotheus answered him: ‘Ha!
Dositheus, so that knife pleases you so much! Will you be the
slave of a knife or the slave of Jesus Christ? Do you not blush
with shame at wishing that a knife should be your master? I will
not let you touch it.’ Which reproach and refusal had such an
effect upon the holy disciple that since that time he never
touched the knife again.” ...
“Therefore, in our rooms,” Father Rodriguez continues, “there must
be no other furniture than a bed, a table, a bench, and a
candlestick, things purely necessary, and nothing more. It is not
allowed among us that our cells should be ornamented with pictures
or aught else, neither armchairs, carpets, curtains, nor any sort
of cabinet or bureau of any elegance. Neither is it allowed us to
keep anything to eat, either for ourselves or for those who may
come to visit us. We must ask permission to go to the refectory
even for a glass of water; and finally we may not keep a book in
which we can write a line, or which we may take away with us. One
cannot deny that thus we are in great poverty. But this poverty is
at the same time a great repose and a great perfection. For it
would be inevitable, in case a religious person were allowed to
own superfluous possessions, that these things would greatly
occupy his mind, be it to acquire them, to preserve them, or to
increase them; so that in not permitting us at all to own them,
all these inconveniences are remedied. Among the various good
reasons why the company forbids secular persons to enter our
cells, the principal one is that thus we may the easier be kept in
poverty. After all, we are all men, and if we were to receive
people of the world into our rooms, we should not have the
strength to remain within the bounds prescribed, but should at
least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a
better opinion of our scholarship.”(191)
Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unite with
Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual
state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds for such a
seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie closest to
common human nature.
The opposition between the men who _have_ and the men who _are_ is
immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old‐fashioned sense of the man
who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled
in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these
possessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, the courage,
generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To certain
huckstering kinds of consideration he thanked God he was forever
inaccessible, and if in life’s vicissitudes he should become destitute
through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was
all the freer to work out his salvation. “Wer nur selbst was hätte,” says
Lessing’s Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, “mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe
nichts!” This ideal of the well‐born man without possessions was embodied
in knight‐errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has
always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the
military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the man
absolutely unencumbered. Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing to
toss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, he is the
representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who
pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future,
offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make
his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and
athletic attitude of observation, the property‐owner seems buried and
smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, “wading in straw and
rubbish to his knees.” The claims which _things_ make are corrupters of
manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards
the empyrean.
“Everything I meet with,” writes Whitefield, “seems to carry this
voice with it,—‘Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on
earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.’ My heart echoes
back, ‘Lord Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou
seest me in danger of _nestling_,—in pity—in tender pity,—put a
_thorn_ in my nest to prevent me from it.’ ”(192)
The loathing of “capital” with which our laboring classes to‐day are
growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound
sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist
poet writes:—
“Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you
have,
“Shall you become beautiful;
“You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones;
“Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and
healthy, but rather by discarding them ...
“For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh
furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave
behind;
“Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely
use and handle is an impediment.”(193)
In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either on
doing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to
spiritual excitement throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those
who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and
cowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard. When a
brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: “Father, it would be a great
consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general
should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like also to have
your consent,” Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne,
Roland, and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally
dying on the field of battle. “So care not,” he said, “for owning books
and knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.” And when some weeks
later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter,
Francis said: “After you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary;
and after you have got your breviary you will sit in your stall like a
grand prelate, and will say to your brother: ‘Hand me my breviary.’ ...
And thenceforward he denied all such requests, saying: ‘A man possesses of
learning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is a good
preacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is
known by its fruits.’ ”(194)
But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involved in doing and
being, there is, in the desire of not having, something profounder still,
something related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience, the
satisfaction found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So long as
any secular safeguard is retained, so long as any residual prudential
guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete, the vital
crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the
divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after
a fashion, but also holding by our proper machinations. In certain medical
experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A drunkard, or a
morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the
doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence.
The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of
it among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in in case of
need. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his own
expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which the chronically
wakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himself on God, but _if_
he should need the other help, there it will be also. Every one knows
cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire for reform,—drunkards
whom, with all their self‐reproaches and resolves, one perceives to be
quite unwilling seriously to contemplate _never_ being drunk again! Really
to give up anything on which we have relied, to give it up definitively,
“for good and all” and forever, signifies one of those radical alterations
of character which came under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In
it the inner man rolls over into an entirely different position of
equilibrium, lives in a new centre of energy from this time on, and the
turning‐point and hinge of all such operations seems usually to involve
the sincere acceptance of certain nakednesses and destitutions.
Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find this ever‐
recurring note: Fling yourself upon God’s providence without making any
reserve whatever,—take no thought for the morrow,—sell all you have and
give it to the poor,—only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will
the higher safety really arrive. As a concrete example let me read a page
from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman, much persecuted
in her day by both Protestants and Catholics, because she would not take
her religion at second hand. When a young girl, in her father’s house,—
“She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: _Lord, what wilt
thou have me to do?_ And being one night in a most profound
penitence, she said from the bottom of her heart: ‘O my Lord! What
must I do to please thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to
my soul and it will hear thee.’ At that instant she heard, as if
another had spoke within her: _Forsake all earthly things.
Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself._
She was quite astonished, not understanding this language, and
mused long on these three points, thinking how she could fulfill
them. She thought she could not live without earthly things, nor
without loving the creatures, nor without loving herself. Yet she
said, ‘By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!’ But when she would
perform her promise, she knew not where to begin. Having thought
on the religious in monasteries, that they forsook all earthly
things by being shut up in a cloister, and the love of themselves
by subjecting of their wills, she asked leave of her father to
enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he would not
permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave. This
seemed to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the
cloister the true Christians she had been seeking, but she found
afterwards that he knew the cloisters better than she; for after
he had forbidden her, and told her he would never permit her to be
a religious, nor give her any money to enter there, yet she went
to Father Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve in the
monastery and work hard for her bread, and be content with little,
if he would receive her. At which he smiled and said: _That cannot
be. We must have money to build; we take no maids without money;
you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here._
“This astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to
the cloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone
till it should please God to show her what she ought to do and
whither to go. She asked always earnestly, ‘When shall I be
perfectly thine, O my God?’ And she thought he still answered her,
_When thou shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to
thyself_. ‘And where shall I do that, Lord?’ He answered her, _In
the desert_. This made so strong an impression on her soul that
she aspired after this; but being a maid of eighteen years only,
she was afraid of unlucky chances, and was never used to travel,
and knew no way. She laid aside all these doubts and said, ‘Lord,
thou wilt guide me how and where it shall please thee. It is for
thee that I do it. I will lay aside my habit of a maid, and will
take that of a hermit that I may pass unknown.’ Having then
secretly made ready this habit, while her parents thought to have
married her, her father having promised her to a rich French
merchant, she prevented the time, and on Easter evening, having
cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she went out
of her chamber about four in the morning, taking nothing but one
penny to buy bread for that day. And it being said to her in the
going out, _Where is thy faith? in a penny?_ she threw it away,
begging pardon of God for her fault, and saying, ‘No, Lord, my
faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone.’ Thus she went away
wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the cares and good
things of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no
longer wished for anything upon earth, resting entirely upon God,
with this only fear lest she should be discovered and be obliged
to return home; for she felt already more content in this poverty
than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the
world.”(195)
The penny was a small financial safeguard, but an effective spiritual
obstacle. Not till it was thrown away could the character settle into the
new equilibrium completely.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Over and above the mystery of self‐surrender, there are in the cult of
poverty other religious mysteries. There is the mystery of veracity:
“Naked came I into the world,” etc.,—whoever first said that, possessed
this mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle—shams cannot save
me. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality
before God of all his creatures. This sentiment (which seems in general to
have been more widespread in Mohammedan than in Christian lands) tends to
nullify man’s usual acquisitiveness. Those who have it spurn dignities and
honors, privileges and advantages, preferring, as I said in a former
lecture, to grovel on the common level before the face of God. It is not
exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in
practice. It is _humanity_, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others
do not share. A profound moralist, writing of Christ’s saying, “Sell all
thou hast and follow me,” proceeds as follows:—
“Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as
a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a
very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a
proposition is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a
fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his
conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your
goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while
literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ’s love for
mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every
generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined
intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into the
vortex by their interest in helping mankind, and by the
understanding that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment
of their old mode of life is like dust in the balance. It is done
gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus the whole question of
the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere
incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we
abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for
others.”(196)
But in all these matters of sentiment one must have “been there” one’s
self in order to understand them. No American can ever attain to
understanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German
towards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand the peace
of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious
nonsense, between him and the common God of all. If sentiments as simple
as these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth, how much
more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we
have been considering! One can never fathom an emotion or divine its
dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement,
however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical
from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of
its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and
charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and
form another centre of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser
vexations may become a consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor
sacrifices into gain; so a supreme trust may render common safeguards
odious, and in certain glows of generous excitement it may appear
unspeakably mean to retain one’s hold of personal possessions. The only
sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to
observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record
faithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what I have
striven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope
will have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs.
LECTURES XIV AND XV. THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS.
We have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are
regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are
devout. To‐day we have to change our attitude from that of description to
that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can
help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life.
Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a “Critique of pure Saintliness”
must be our theme.
If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from above
like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man’s
perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time
of it. Man’s perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end
would be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued by him along
three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively; and
progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the
application of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and
definitions. The absolute significance and value of any bit of religious
experience we might hear of would thus be given almost mathematically into
our hands.
If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding
ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we
did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you
remember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method; and it
must be confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never hope
for clean‐cut and scholastic results. _We_ cannot divide man sharply into
an animal and a rational part. _We_ cannot distinguish natural from
supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God,
and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. We have merely to
collect things together without any special _a priori_ theological system,
and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and
that experience—judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our
instincts, and our common sense are our only guides—decide that _on the
whole_ one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type
condemned. “On the whole,”—I fear we shall never escape complicity with
that qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your
systematizer!
I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of
you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot.
Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of
such a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecation of
such an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist principles
which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a
religion’s fruits in merely human terms of value. How _can_ you measure
their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is
supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct
instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit
of his religion,—it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist.
If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal
sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a
deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a
theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non‐
existent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you
were a scholastic philosopher.
To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain
types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If
disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices,
instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological
partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.
But such common‐sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of
an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular
alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their
insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop.
After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves
unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were
perfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common
secular level, and can no longer be believed in. To‐day a deity who should
require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be
taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward
in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel
appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him
to men’s imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were
respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were
worshiped because such fruits were relished.