deity’s honor. How can the devotee show his loyalty better than by
sensitiveness in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be
resented, the deity’s enemies must be put to shame. In exceedingly narrow
minds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing
preoccupation; and crusades have been preached and massacres instigated
for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon the God.
Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches
with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a glow,
so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by
some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its
besetting sins. The saintly temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper
has often to be cruel. It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel. Between
his own and Jehovah’s enemies a David knows no difference; a Catherine of
Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was the scandal
of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them than a
crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or regret
over the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put to
death; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his
hands for “execution.” Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds
the partnership not quite unnatural. So, when “freethinkers” tell us that
religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of
the charge.
Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion’s account,
so long as the religious person’s intellect is on the stage which the
despotic kind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is represented as
less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger.
Fanaticism is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive.
In gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect
feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the
exclusion of all practical human interests, which, though innocent enough,
is too one‐sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room but for one
kind of affection. When the love of God takes possession of such a mind,
it expels all human loves and human uses. There is no English name for
such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a _theopathic_
condition.
The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example.
“To be loved here upon the earth,” her recent biographer exclaims:
“to be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be
loved with fidelity, with devotion,—what enchantment! But to be
loved by God! and loved by him to distraction [aimé jusqù’à la
folie]!—Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a
thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint
Francis Xavier, she said to God: ‘Hold back, O my God, these
torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their
reception.’ ”(201)
The most signal proofs of God’s love which Margaret Mary received
were her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most
signal in turn of these were the revelations of Christ’s sacred
heart, “surrounded with rays more brilliant than the Sun, and
transparent like a crystal. The wound which he received on the
cross visibly appeared upon it. There was a crown of thorns round
about this divine Heart, and a cross above it.” At the same time
Christ’s voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames
of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread
the knowledge of them. He thereupon took out her mortal heart,
placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and then replaced it
in her breast, adding: “Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my
slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well‐beloved disciple of
my Sacred Heart.”
In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the “great
design” which he wished to establish through her instrumentality.
“I ask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after the
week of holy Sacrament shall be made into a special holy day for
honoring my Heart by a general communion and by services intended
to make honorable amends for the indignities which it has
received. And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed
with abundance the influences of its love upon all those who pay
to it these honors, or who bring it about that others do the
same.”
“This revelation,” says Mgr. Bougaud, “is unquestionably the most
important of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since
that of the Incarnation and of the Lord’s Supper.... After the Eucharist,
the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart.”(202) Well, what were its good
fruits for Margaret Mary’s life? Apparently little else but sufferings and
prayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became
increasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ’s love,—
“which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable
of attending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary,
but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and
devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such
a heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them.
They tried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as
hopeless—everything dropped out of her hands. The admirable
humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness could not
prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity
which must always reign in a community. They put her in the
school, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out
of her clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but
where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary
attention. Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than
before them was she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her
in her heaven.”(203)
Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual
outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and
modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of
saintship which she embodies. A lower example still of theopathic
saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth
century, whose “Revelations,” a well‐known mystical authority, consist
mainly of proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeserving person.
Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of the
most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an
individual, form the tissue of this paltry‐minded recital.(204) In reading
such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the
twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield
almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior
intellectual sympathies. What with science, idealism, and democracy, our
own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different
temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal
favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented. Smitten as we are with
the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but
adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an
essential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood
of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us
curiously shallow and unedifying.
Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects,
of whose life we have the record. She had a powerful intellect of the
practical order. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a
will equal to any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a
buoyant disposition, and a first‐rate literary style. She was tenaciously
aspiring, and put her whole life at the service of her religious ideals.
Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that
(although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that
my only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul
should have found such poor employment.
In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor of
superficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan,
has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls “shrews” and
“non‐shrews” respectively.(205) The shrew‐type is defined as possessing an
“active unimpassioned temperament.” In other words, shrews are the
“motors,” rather than the “sensories,”(206) and their expressions are as a
rule more energetic than the feelings which appear to prompt them. Saint
Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in
this sense of the term. The bustle of her style, as well as of her life,
proves it. Not only must she receive unheard‐of personal favors and
spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about
them and _exploiter_ them professionally, and use her expertness to give
instruction to those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not
of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her “faults”
and “imperfections” in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return
upon herself, as covered with “confusion” at each new manifestation of
God’s singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of
shrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in
gratitude, and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true; she
hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church’s triumph over them; but in
the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless
amatory flirtation—if one may say so without irreverence—between the
devotee and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this
direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is
absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet
the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.
We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based
on merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically
minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such
partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of
favor, is too small‐minded a God for our credence. When Luther, in his
immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a
debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he
stretched the soul’s imagination and saved theology from puerility.
So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions
which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic
characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must
not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers,
and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sensitiveness and
narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all
things a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much
for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your aggressive
pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and
divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving
disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he
dwells himself and from which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside
of the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition
methods, we have the church _fugient_, as one might call it, with its
hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches
pursuing the same object—to unify the life,(207) and simplify the
spectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner
discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering
with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things. Amusements must
go first, then conventional “society,” then business, then family duties,
until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for
stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne. The lives of
saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form
of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the
purity of inner tone.(208) “Is it not better,” a young sister asks her
Superior, “that I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation,
so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which
I might not be conscious?”(209) If the life remains a social one at all,
those who take part in it must follow one identical rule. Embosomed in
this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The
minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities,
whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man of the
world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped,
and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this
stability an incomparable kind of mental rest.
We have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of Saint
Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification. I think you
will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external and
discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire. At the age of
ten, his biographer says:—
“The inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of God
his own virginity—that being to her the most agreeable of possible
presents. Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was
in him, joyous of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of
perpetual chastity. Mary accepted the offering of his innocent
heart, and obtained for him from God, as a recompense, the
extraordinary grace of never feeling during his entire life the
slightest touch of temptation against the virtue of purity. This
was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded even to
Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dwelt
always in courts and among great folks, where danger and
opportunity are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis from
his earliest childhood had shown a natural repugnance for whatever
might be impure or unvirginal, and even for relations of any sort
whatever between persons of opposite sex. But this made it all the
more surprising that he should, especially since this vow, feel it
necessary to have recourse to such a number of expedients for
protecting against even the shadow of danger the virginity which
he had thus consecrated. One might suppose that if any one could
have contented himself with the ordinary precautions, prescribed
for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he. But no! In
the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the
most insignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril,
just as in the mortification of his flesh, he went farther than
the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordinary protection of
God’s grace was never tempted, measured all his steps as if he
were threatened on every side by particular dangers. Thenceforward
he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or
when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females
even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all
conversation and every kind of social recreation with them,
although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced
only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of
every kind.”(210)
At the age of twelve, we read of this young man that “if by chance his
mother sent one of her maids of honor to him with a message, he never
allowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened
door, and dismissed her immediately. He did not like to be alone with his
own mother, whether at table or in conversation; and when the rest of the
company withdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring.... Several great
ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight; and
he made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly and readily to
accede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all visits to
ladies.” (Ibid., p. 71.)
When he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order(211) against
his father’s passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house;
and when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a “particular
attention” to himself on God’s part, and wrote letters of stilted good
advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon
became so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of his brothers
and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. A
Father asked him one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his
family, to which, “I never think of them except when praying for them,”
was his only answer. Never was he seen to hold in his hand a flower or
anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, in
the hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and
eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc., from the hands of his
companions. He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every
conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained silent. He
systematically refused to notice his surroundings. Being ordered one day
to bring a book from the rector’s seat in the refectory, he had to ask
where the rector sat, for in the three months he had eaten bread there, so
carefully did he guard his eyes that he had not noticed the place. One
day, during recess, having looked by chance on one of his companions, he
reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty. He cultivated
silence, as preserving from sins of the tongue; and his greatest penance
was the limit which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He sought
after false accusations and unjust reprimands as opportunities of
humility; and such was his obedience that, when a room‐mate, having no
more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free to give it to him
without first obtaining the permission of the superior, who, as such,
stood in the place of God, and transmitted his orders.
I can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis’s saintship. He
died in 1591, in his twenty‐ninth year, and is known in the Church as the
patron of all young people. On his festival, the altar in the chapel
devoted to him in a certain church in Rome “is embosomed in flowers,
arranged with exquisite taste; and a pile of letters may be seen at its
foot, written to the Saint by young men and women, and directed to
‘Paradiso.’ They are supposed to be burnt unread except by San Luigi, who
must find singular petitions in these pretty little missives, tied up now
with a green ribbon, expressive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic of
love,” etc.(212)
Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely
on our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased
with in his creatures. The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid
little heed to social righteousness; and to leave the world to the devil
whilst saving one’s own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme.
To‐day, rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, in
consequence of one of those secular mutations in moral sentiment of which
I spoke, deemed an essential element of worth in character; and to be of
some public or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine
service. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them, the
Xaviers, Brébeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in their way
for the world’s welfare; so their lives to‐day inspire us. But when the
intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin’s head,
and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result,
notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity,
we see in the object‐lesson, is _not_ the one thing needful; and it is
better that a life should contract many a dirt‐mark, than forfeit
usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.
Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come
upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to face the
charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars.
“Resist not evil,” “Love your enemies,” these are saintly maxims of which
men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the men of
this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of
truth?
No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the complexity
of the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way in which facts and
ideals are interwoven.
Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, the objects
for which he acts, and the recipients of the action. In order that conduct
should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and
reception, should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail
if it either work by false means or address itself to the wrong recipient.
Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself to
the actor’s animus alone, apart from the other elements of the
performance. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those
who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and
appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human
crocodiles and boa‐constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe
into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non‐resistance
cut off his own survival.
Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man’s conduct will appear
perfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environment
is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that
saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an
environment where all were saints already; but by adding that in an
environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it
must be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical
common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that
actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non‐resistance may be,
and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have
systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific
organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving
alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on
the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of
smiting back and not turning the other cheek also.
You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of
Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in
shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and
swindlers.
And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these
hard‐headed, hard‐hearted, and hard‐fisted methods exclusively, were there
no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he
were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the
wronger’s person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live
always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and
impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be
an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not
of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the
golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our
imaginations.
The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human
tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved
themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past,
in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to _be_
worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the
challenge of their expectation.