all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be
a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue
which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors,
_auctores_, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of development in
human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened
have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways that
amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we
never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of
love is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa‐
constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities
of personality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the
character‐polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region. St. Paul
long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is
virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul
said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness
of every one expresses itself to‐day in all sorts of humane customs and
reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty
and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of
human tenderness, are the great torch‐bearers of this belief, the tip of
the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which
sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a
wave‐crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world
is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world’s
affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world,
vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them
would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we
naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another;
and without that over‐trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us
would lie in spiritual stagnancy.
Momentarily considered, then, the saint may waste his tenderness and be
the dupe and victim of his charitable fever, but the general function of
his charity in social evolution is vital and essential. If things are ever
to move upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume
the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non‐
resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods
will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more
powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys
enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what
we already have in safety. But non‐resistance, when successful, turns
enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly
methods are, as I said, creative energies; and genuine saints find in the
elevated excitement with which their faith endows them an authority and
impressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men of
shallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly prudence.
This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the
saint’s magic gift to mankind.(213) Not only does his vision of a better
world console us for the generally prevailing prose and barrenness; but
even when on the whole we have to confess him ill adapted, he makes some
converts, and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is an
effective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a
more heavenly order.
In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many
contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their
impracticability and non‐adaptation to present environmental conditions,
analogous to the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They
help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness, and are slow
leavens of a better order.
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The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready to
consider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The
optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has, as I have already
said elsewhere, changed the attitude of the church towards corporeal
mortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara(214) appear to us
to‐day rather in the light of tragic mountebanks than of sane men
inspiring us with respect. If the inner dispositions are right, we ask,
what need of all this torment, this violation of the outer nature? It
keeps the outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinely emancipated
from the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation,
as alike irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions and
experience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement. As the
Bhagavad‐Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions who are still
inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to the fruits of
action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted in a former
lecture Saint Augustine’s antinomian saying: If you only love God enough,
you may safely follow all your inclinations. “He needs no devotional
practices,” is one of Ramakrishna’s maxims, “whose heart is moved to tears
at the mere mention of the name of Hari.”(215) And the Buddha, in pointing
out what he called “the middle way” to his disciples, told them to abstain
from both extremes, excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy
as mere desire and pleasure. The only perfect life, he said, is that of
inner wisdom, which makes one thing as indifferent to us as another, and
thus leads to rest, to peace, and to Nirvâna.(216)
We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, and directors
of conscience more experienced, they usually have shown a tendency to lay
less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic teachers have
always professed the rule that, since health is needed for efficiency in
God’s service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification. The general
optimism and healthy‐mindedness of liberal Protestant circles to‐day makes
mortification for mortification’s sake repugnant to us. We can no longer
sympathize with cruel deities, and the notion that God can take delight in
the spectacle of sufferings self‐inflicted in his honor is abhorrent. In
consequence of all these motives you probably are disposed, unless some
special utility can be shown in some individual’s discipline, to treat the
general tendency to asceticism as pathological.
Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter,
distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the
uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty,
ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritual meaning
asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice‐born
philosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the
belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is
neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and
overcome by an appeal to the soul’s heroic resources, and neutralized and
cleansed away by suffering. As against this view, the ultra‐optimistic
form of the once‐born philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method of
ignoring. Let a man who, by fortunate health and circumstances, escapes
the suffering of any great amount of evil in his own person, also close
his eyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside his private
experience, and he will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through
life happily on a healthy‐minded basis. But we saw in our lectures on
melancholy how precarious this attempt necessarily is. Moreover it is but
for the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and
unprovided for in his philosophy.
No such attempt can be a _general_ solution of the problem; and to minds
of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such
optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a real
deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape
by. It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan.
The real deliverance, the twice‐born folk insist, must be of universal
application. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in
higher excitement, or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If
one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this
world’s history fairly into his mind,—freezing, drowning, entombment
alive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases,—he can with
difficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of worldly prosperity
without suspecting that he may all the while not be really inside the
game, that he may lack the great initiation.
Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes the
initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but
something we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste
will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted
parts of it that healthy‐mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental
optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious
solution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an
answer to the sphinx’s riddle.
In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind’s common instinct for
reality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be
essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme
mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it
in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties
otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he
suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates
him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to
life, and he is able “to fling it away like a flower” as caring nothing
for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in
his own person feels that a high‐hearted indifference to life would
expiate all his shortcomings.
The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who
feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and
excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the
truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the
cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital
meaning.
Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries into
which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander,
asceticism must, I believe, be acknowledged to go with the profounder way
of handling the gift of existence. Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub
and flattery and sponge‐cake in comparison. The practical course of action
for us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply
to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us to‐day turn
them, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the
way of privation and hardship might be objectively useful. The older
monastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic futilities, or
terminated in the mere egotism of the individual, increasing his own
perfection.(217) But is it not possible for us to discard most of these
older forms of mortification, and yet find saner channels for the heroism
which inspired them?
Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which
constitutes so large a portion of the “spirit” of our age, make somewhat
for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and
facetious way in which most children are brought up to‐day—so different
from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical
circles—in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a
certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of
application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?
Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics,
militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the
remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy
with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary
religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them.(218) War and
adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves
too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of
exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of
motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and
cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever.
Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our
action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges
of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of
power.
The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary
human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so
the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field,
is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person
he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of
insensibility.
But when we compare the military type of self‐severity with that of the
ascetic saint, we find a world‐wide difference in all their spiritual
concomitants.
“ ‘Live and let live,’ ” writes a clear‐headed Austrian officer, “is no
device for an army. Contempt for one’s own comrades, for the troops of the
enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one’s own person, are what war
demands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too
cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human
reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he
must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure
of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace,
require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The
recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek
immediately to get rid. For him victory, success, must be _everything_.
The most barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in war, and for
war’s uses they are incommensurably good.”(219)
These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the
soldier’s life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but
destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non‐
military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too
feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for
persons or for things, that make for conservation. Yet the fact remains
that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line
of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally
available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale
organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against
effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of
ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we
now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war:
something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and
yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved
itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish
poverty‐worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might
be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May
not voluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuous life,” without the need
of crushing weaker peoples?
Poverty indeed _is_ the strenuous life,—without brass bands or uniforms or
hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees
the way in which wealth‐getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and
marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that
poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “the transformation of
military courage,” and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in
need of.
Among us English‐speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty
need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be
poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and
save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant
with the money‐making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in
ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient
idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material
attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our
way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away
our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short,
the moral fighting shape. When we of the so‐called better classes are
scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and
hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and
quake at the thought of having a child without a bank‐account and doomed
to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly
and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to
ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But
wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the
desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of
cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of
conjunctures in which a wealth‐bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for
whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which
personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to
unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the
revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of
promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces;
yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit,
and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would
need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we
personally were contented with our poverty.
I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that
the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst
moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of
religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief
review and pass to my more general conclusions.
Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion stands approved
by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character.
Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental
endowments, found in non‐religious individuals. But the whole group of
them forms a combination which, as such, is religious, for it seems to
flow from the sense of the divine as from its psychological centre.
Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to think that the
smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their
relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields him a
superior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which
no other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is exemplary;
he abounds in impulses to help. His help is inward as well as outward, for
his sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected
faculties therein. Instead of placing happiness where common men place it,
in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement, which
converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he
turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of
assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more
certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble‐
mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal
pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his
purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity,
charity, patience, self‐severity,—these are splendid excellencies, and the
saint of all men shows them in the completest possible measure.
But, as we saw, all these things together do not make saints infallible.
When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of
holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self‐torment, prudery,
scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the
very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior
intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and
damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We
must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our
own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment, and estimating
his total function.
Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind that it
is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a vice
to the individual, for in religious and theological matters he probably
absorbs his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we must not confound
the essentials of saintliness, which are those general passions of which I
have spoken, with its accidents, which are the special determinations of
these passions at any historical moment. In these determinations the
saints will usually be loyal to the temporary idols of their tribe. Taking
refuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the tribe in the middle ages,
as bearing a hand in the world’s work is to‐day. Saint Francis or Saint
Bernard, were they living to‐day, would undoubtedly be leading consecrated
lives of some sort, but quite as undoubtedly they would not lead them in
retirement. Our animosity to special historic manifestations must not lead
us to give away the saintly impulses in their essential nature to the
tender mercies of inimical critics.
The most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom I know is Nietzsche.
He contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these embodied in
the predaceous military character, altogether to the advantage of the
latter. Your born saint, it must be confessed, has something about him
which often makes the gorge of a carnal man rise, so it will be worth
while to consider the contrast in question more fully.
Dislike of the saintly nature seems to be a negative result of the
biologically useful instinct of welcoming leadership, and glorifying the
chief of the tribe. The chief is the potential, if not the actual tyrant,
the masterful, overpowering man of prey. We confess our inferiority and
grovel before him. We quail under his glance, and are at the same time
proud of owning so dangerous a lord. Such instinctive and submissive hero‐
worship must have been indispensable in primeval tribal life. In the
endless wars of those times, leaders were absolutely needed for the
tribe’s survival. If there were any tribes who owned no leaders, they can
have left no issue to narrate their doom. The leaders always had good
consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who
looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom
from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward
performances.
Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are
herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barn‐yard poultry. There are saints
whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity. Such a man
excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full of
scruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his
outward power; and unless he found within us an altogether different
faculty of admiration to appeal to, we should pass him by with contempt.
In point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Reënacted in
human nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. The
sexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the more admiringly
the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more
for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates the
man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always
charmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and
suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is
unsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursue their feud in
literature as much as in real life.
For Nietzsche the saint represents little but sneakingness and
slavishness. He is the sophisticated invalid, the degenerate _par
excellence_, the man of insufficient vitality. His prevalence would put
the human type in danger.