THE MYSTIC AND THE PHILOSOPHER
BEFORE summarizing and conveniently arranging Isaac Hecker's reasons
for becoming a Catholic and narrating the accompanying incidents, we
give the following profession of faith in the authority of the Spirit
speaking within. It was written in the diary in the midst of his
preparations for his baptism, and is an early witness of a permanent
characteristic of Father Hecker's life. It is, besides, a fitting
introduction to the description of his state of mind when he entered
the Church, showing better than anything we have found what kind of
man became a Catholic in Isaac Hecker.
"Man is a mystic fact.
"What is most interior is ever mystical, and we should ever be in the
centre of the circle of the mystic life.
"We must unfold the mystical in all our expressions, actions,
thoughts, and motions.
"It is the mystic life only which can fully interest man. This is
deeper than all conditions, behind all organs, faculties, and
functions.
"We must listen to those who speak to us in the interior world, and
hear the mystic man speak through us.
"The mystic man is ever youthful, fresh, and new.
"The mystic sphere is the kingdom of heaven within.
"I can neither study nor sit down and read for any length of time.
The inner man will not permit me. Ever he calls me from it to
meditate and enjoy his presence.
"He says: I am all. Ask of me and I will give you more than has been
written--more than you can ever find or dig out by study.
"Be my spokesman--this is your office. Submit to me--this is your
glory. I have taken up my abode in you on condition that you will be
faithful and submissive.
"You have no business to ask of me what I am going to set you about.
I am, and you know it--and this is enough for you to know.
"This is my condition of remaining with you--that you entertain me,
and me alone, and no other on any pretext whatsoever. I am all, and
this suffices. You have nothing to say, to do, or to be troubled
about. Do only as I bid you, follow what I tell you, and be still.
"If you neglect me in any way, or forget me for any other object, now
that you have enjoyed my confidence, love, and blessing, I will not
abide with you any longer.
"I want all your time and to speak all that is to be said. You have
no right to speak a word--not a word--of your own. You are not your
own. You have given yourself up to me, and I am all. I will not leave
you unless you leave me first, and even then I shall ever be the
nearest to you, but you will not know it.
"I am your Friend; the One who loves you. I have discovered myself to
you and will do so yet more. But the condition of so doing requires
from you even more faith, tenderness, and submissiveness.
"Nothing is so real, so near, so full of enjoyment as I am to you,
and you cannot leave me without giving up the greater for the less.
"I talk to you at all times and am near you at all seasons, and my
joy is to be in your presence, to love you and to take delight in
this love I bestow upon you. I direct your pen, speech, thought, and
affections, though you know it not sensibly. But you shall know more
clearly who I am, and all respecting me, if you but comply with my
requirements. You need not fear: you cannot make any mistakes if you
submit to be guided by me."
Isaac Hecker had now tried every form of philosophy. Whoever sailed
with Brownson on that voyage which ended on the shores of Catholic
truth, had explored the deep seas and sounded the shoal waters of all
human reason; and young Hecker had been Brownson's friend and
sympathizer since the years of his own earliest mental activity.
Pantheism, subjectivism, idealism, and all the other systems were
tried, and when at last he was convinced that _Life is Real_ it was
only after such an agony as must attend the imminent danger of fatal
shipwreck.
He had, meantime, given a fair trial to philanthropy. Theoretically
and practically, Isaac Hecker loved humanity; to make men happy was
his ever-renewed endeavor; was, in truth, the condition on which his
own happiness depended. For years this view of his life-task
alternated with his search for exact answers to the questions his
soul asked about man's destiny hereafter; or, one might rather say,
social questions and philosophical ones borrowed strength from each
other to assail him till his heart throbbed and his brain whirled
with the agony of the conflict.
In a series of articles in _The Catholic World_ published in 1887,
and before referred to, Father Hecker called Dr. Brownson's road to
the Church the philosophical road. Finding that doctrines which his
philosophical mind perceived to answer the deepest questions of the
soul were taught only in one society, and there taught with
authority, he argued validly that that society could lay claim to the
right to teach. From the doctrine to the teacher, from the truth to
the external authority that teaches it, is an inference of sound
reason. This applies to Father Hecker's case also, for he was of a
bent of mind truly philosophical, and he has placed on record the
similarity of his philosophical difficulties with those of Brownson.
But in addition to philosophical questions, and far more pressing,
were to Isaac Hecker the problems arising from the mystical
occurrences of which his soul was the theatre. Were these real? that
is, were they more than the vagaries of a sensitive temperament, the
wanderings of a sentimental imagination, or, to use Father Hecker's
own words, "the mere projections into activity of feelings entirely
subjective; mystical impulses towards no corresponding objective
realities, or, at any rate, with objects which it is not possible to
bring into the field of the really knowable? Some will admit that
religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human
consciousness, affirming, however, the subjectivity of all purely
spiritual life; and no more can be said, they insist, for the
principles, metaphysical and logical, with which they are associated
in the spiritual life of man. Now, such a theory never leaves the
soul that is governed by reason at rest. The problem ever and again
demands solution: are these yearnings, aspirations, unappeased
desires, or religious feelings--the ruling traits of the noblest men
and women--are they genuine, real, corresponding to and arising from
the reality of certain objects external to the soul? I think that in
the solution of this problem Dr. Brownson fought and won his greatest
victory; at any rate, it was to me the most interesting period of his
life. No wonder, since I had the same battle to fight myself, and it
was just at this epoch that I came into closest contact with him. We
fought this battle shoulder-to-shoulder."--_Catholic World,_
October, 1887, pp. 5-6.
Brownson's heavy heart was due to philosophical difficulties, and
Isaac Hecker's to the same; but in addition the latter had a mystical
experience to which Brownson was at that time, certainly, a stranger,
and, as far as we know, he remained so; and these mystical
difficulties demanded settlement far more imperatively than did the
philosophical ones. Isaac Hecker's inner life must have an external
adjunct of divine authority. Such aspirations of the soul for present
union with God in love as he had, are more peremptory in demanding
satisfaction than those of the logical faculty in demanding the
ascertainment of the certain truth. Philosophy outside the Church is
to the searcher after truth what St. Paul said the Law was to the
Jews, a schoolmaster; but, to a soul in the condition of Isaac
Hecker, the Holy Spirit is a spouse demanding union. Both Brownson
and himself were men true to their convictions, courageous and
unselfish. They were both firmly determined to have the truth and to
have the whole of it, whether spoken _ex cathedra_ in the divine
court of the innermost soul, or _ex cathedra_ by the supreme
authority of God in the organism of the Christian Church. "Brownson
was firmly persuaded," says Father Hecker, "and so am I, that the
great fault of men generally is that they deem the life of their
souls, thoughts, judgments, and convictions, yearnings, aspirations,
and longings to be too subject to illusion to be worthy their
attentive study and manly fidelity; that even multitudes of Catholics
greatly undervalue the divine reality of their inner life, whether in
the natural or supernatural order."
The philosophical difficulty was far less serious than the spiritual
one. To the philosopher the fundamental truths of human reason are
established as objective realities by processes common to every sane
mind, and are backed by the common consent of men; and this is true
also of the prime verities of ethics. But when a man finds himself
subject to secret influences of the utmost power over him, able to
cast him off or to hold him, to sicken his body and distress his
soul, extending his views of the truth by flashes of light into
vistas that seem infinite, making his love of right an ecstasy, his
sympathy for human misery a passion, controlling his diet and his
clothing, ordering him here and there at will and knowing how to be
obeyed--when, in a word, a man finds himself treated by God in a
manner totally different from any one else he knows or ever heard of,
it is plain that he must agonize for the possession of a divine
sanction to which he can appeal in common with all men, and which
must therefore exist in the external order. He longs, above all
things, to test his secret in the light of day.
The problem that Isaac Hecker had to solve, as he described it
himself, was whether his life was real--using the word "life" to
denote its truest meaning, the interior life. We have been careful to
make the reader aware of how deep and continuous were the inner
touches of the Holy Spirit which led him on. Before applying for
admission to the Church, there was no truth that he could believe
more firmly than that he was the temple of the Holy Ghost. Of that he
had the certitude which is called personal and the teaching of God
which is most direct. Yet something was lacking, and therein lay his
agony, for he knew that his fellow-men were entitled to all that he
had of truth and virtue. The more distinct the Voice which spoke
within, the more perplexing it became to hear no echo from without.
He felt sure that what was true and holy for him must be so for all,
and yet he could not so much as make himself understood if he told
his secret to others. To the born Catholic there is no such
difficulty. He is so fully accustomed to the verification of the
inner action of God, enlightening his mind and stinging his
conscience, by God's external action in the Church, that he often
confounds the two. He knows the Voice better by its echo than by its
own tones. There are many good Catholics, but few enlightened
mystics. This is not for lack of guidance, so far as doctrine is
concerned, for accredited authors on such subjects are numerous and
their teaching is uniform and explicit, besides being of the most
intense interest to those for whose instruction it is adapted. These
masters of spiritual doctrine not only dwell upon the interior life
itself, but also on the external order of God in His Church which
brings His interior teaching into proper relation with the exterior.
The interior life thus made integral is alone worthy of the term
_real;_ is alone worthy of the description of St. Paul when he calls
it "the witness of the Spirit." Now, as a witness who cannot be
brought into open court to give his testimony might as well be dumb,
and is as good as no witness, so the inner life, lacking the true
external order of God, is cramped and helpless; and cramped and
helpless Isaac Hecker was. Whatever he did, therefore, toward
investigating religious evidences was done primarily as a search for
the external criterion which should guarantee the validity of the
inspirations of God within him, and at the same time provide a medium
of union with his fellow-men.
Those whose advertence is not particularly aroused to the facts of
their interior life, have for their main task either the study of the
Church as a visible society, claiming continuity with one established
by Christ; or, preceding that, the question whether such a society
was ever founded by God. Now, although such questions must be settled
by all, they are not the main task of men like Isaac Hecker. In their
case the problem transcending all others is where to find that divine
external order demanded for the completion of their inner experience.
Such men must say: If there is no external order of God in this
world, then my whole interior life is fatally awry.
The captain whose voyage is on the track of the trade winds
nevertheless needs more than dead reckoning for his course; he needs
to take the sun at noon, to study the heavens at night, and to con
his chart. To follow one's interior drift only is to sail the ocean
without chart or compass. The sail that is wafted by the impulses of
the divine Spirit in the interior life must have, besides, the
guarantee of divine veracity in the external order to justify him.
This he needs, in order to safeguard him in the interior life itself,
and to provide a common court of appeal between himself and his
fellows, or otherwise he is in danger of fanaticism, and is certain
of the mistrust of his fellow-men. No man, unsupported by external
miracles, can claim to teach what is vouched for only by his own
testimony; and this especially applies to purely subjective
experiences. Isaac Hecker was a born teacher of men, and to be shut
off from them by an isolated experience was to be robbed of his
vocation. A soul like his, led to the truth along the path of social
reform, will hail with delight a religion which organizes all
humanity on a basis of equality, and at the same time verifies and
explains the facts of each one's particular experience. Such a
religion is to be longed for, not only because of its universal
brotherhood, but also because it can decide between the inspirations
of the Holy Spirit and the criminal conceits of passion or the dreams
of an imaginative temperament.
Many years afterwards Father Hecker thus stated the harmony between
the inner and outer action of God in the soul's life:
"In case of obscurity or doubt concerning what is the divinely
revealed truth, or whether what prompts the soul is or is not an
inspiration of the Holy Spirit, recourse must be had to the divine
teacher or criterion--the authority of the Church. For it must be
borne in mind that to the Church, as represented in the first
instance by St. Peter and subsequently by his successors, was made
the promise of her divine Founder that 'the gates of hell should
never prevail against her.' No such promise was ever made by Christ
to each individual believer. 'The Church of the living God is the
pillar and ground of truth.' The test, therefore, of a truly
enlightened and sincere Christian will be, in case of uncertainty,
the promptitude of his obedience to the voice of the Church.
"From the above plain truths the following practical rule of conduct
may be drawn: The Holy Spirit is the immediate guide of the soul in
the way of salvation and sanctification; and the criterion or test,
that the soul is guided by the Holy Spirit, is its ready obedience to
the authority of the Church. This rule removes all danger whatever,
and with it the soul can walk, run, or fly, if it chooses, in the
greatest safety and with perfect liberty, in the ways of
sanctity."--_The Church and the Age,_ p. 35.
In transcribing the above we are reminded that St. Ignatius, who was
the divine instrument in establishing and perfecting God's authority
in the external order, yet left on record that so clearly had the
Holy Spirit shown him by secret teaching the truths of religion,
that, if all the Scriptures had been destroyed, his private
revelations at Manresa would have sufficed him in their stead.
All that we have just been saying helps to answer the question why
Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker did not set up systems of their
own, and become Carlyles and Emersons or, especially in Father
Hecker's case, Emanuel Swedenborgs or Edward Irvings. We find the
following among the memoranda of conversations:
"June 30, 1886.--Why didn't I switch off from Christianity as Carlyle
did? Because I hope that I was truer to natural reason; but chiefly
because God had given me such an amount of infused lights and graces
that I was forced to seek a guide or go off into extravagant
fanaticism. They were ready to encourage me in the latter. George
Ripley said to me, 'Hecker, what have you got to tell? Tell us what
it is and we will accept it.'"
The impression a perfectly "independent thinker" made on him, as
typified in Emerson, is told in an entry in his diary, dated April 24,
1844:
"I have had a few words with Emerson. He stands on the extreme ground
where he did several years ago. He and his followers seem to me to
live almost a purely intellectual existence. His wife I have
understood to be a very religious woman. They are heathens in
thought, and profess to be so. They have no conception of the Church:
out of Protestantism they are almost perfectly ignorant. They are the
narrowest of men, yet they think they are extremely 'many-sided';
and, forsooth, do not comprehend Christendom, and reject it. The
Catholic accepts all the good they offer him and finds it
comparatively little compared to that which he has."
That he recognized that the test of the character of his inner
experiences, for good or ill, was to be finally found in what they
led him to, is shown by the following passage, already quoted, from
the diary: "What I do I must do, for it is not I that do it; it is
the Spirit. What that Spirit may be is a question I cannot answer.
What it leads me to do will be the only evidence of its character. I
feel as impersonal as a stranger to it."
The aid which fidelity to the light of reason and the cherishing and
obeying the inspirations of the Holy Spirit lends to the discovery of
the fulness of truth is shown by the following extract from an
article by Father Hecker in _The Catholic World_ of October, 1887:
"The man who establishes the historical identity of the Church of
to-day with the Apostolic college says the doctrines now taught must
be true; the man who perceives the identity of the Church's doctrines
with his own highest aspirations also proves them true. The man who
has become responsive to the primitive action of his reason says that
the Church, which is its only authoritative exponent, must be a
divinely appointed teacher. The infallible authority of the Church in
her past, present, and future teaching is established by the
necessity of the truths which she teaches for the welfare of the
human race, by thus completing the outlines of natural truth drawn by
the divine hand in human consciousness."
By this we see that, if the divine inner life had need of the divine
outer life for its integrity, it is equally certain that in his case,
and also in that of Dr. Brownson, the intimate action of God within
was a pointer to the true Church of the Divine Word incarnate in the
actual world of humanity: for Dr. Brownson chiefly in the
intellectual order, for Isaac Hecker in both the intellectual and
mystical. We have no fear of wearying the reader with the length of
an extract of such value as the following:
"The one who reaches Catholicity by the philosophical road, as
Brownson did, by no means pretends that the problem of human destiny
can be solved by mere force of reason: Catholicity is not
rationalism. Nor does he pretend that the product of reason's action,
the knowledge of human immortality and liberty and of the being of
God, place man apart from or above the universal action of God upon
all souls by means of a visible society and external ordinances:
Catholicity is well named; it is universal. But he knows that when a
man is persuaded of a truth philosophically he is not called upon by
his intelligence or his conscience to base it upon historical
evidence; it is enough that he has one source of certitude in its
favor. It may be a truth first known by revelation, but if the human
intelligence is capable of receiving it in revelation it must have
some element of kinship to the truths of pure reason. As in the order
of nature men are like unto God, so is there a likeness between the
truth of God naturally known and that known only by revelation.
"As there is an appetite in the human heart which not all the
treasures, honors, joys of nature can satisfy, so there is a void in
the mind which all the truth within reach of the unaided natural
faculties leaves unfilled. When a man without guile is brought face
to face with truth he spontaneously desires union with it. Appetite
proves the existence of food, and the food affirms itself by
satisfying the appetite.
"Where there is question of a principle there is a class of minds
which must study the part a principle has played in history, and is
mainly influenced for or against it from its effect on former
generations of men. This class follows the historical road. Another
class is so profoundly moved by the truths of revelation as soon as
known, assimilates them so readily and perfectly, becomes so absorbed
and lost in them, that the history of revelation is not of primary
importance; it is only necessary in order to establish necessary
facts, such as the divine institution of an external society, and of
other external aids. But with this philosophical class of minds the
truth stands sponsor for itself and is its own best witness. The
impression produced by revelation here and now upon the soul without
guile is one of the best probable proofs to that soul of the
historical claims of the society to which God entrusted it. 'The
Church Accredits Itself' was the title of one of the most powerful
articles Dr. Brownson ever wrote for this magazine.
"Both the historical and the philosophical processes are necessary,
but each is more so to one class of minds than to another. To the
philosophical mind, once scepticism is gone and life is real, the
supreme fact of life is the need of more truth than unaided reason
can know. The more this need is felt, and the more clearly the
deficiencies of natural reason are known, the better capable one is
to appreciate the truths of revelation which can alone supply these
deficiencies. In such a state of mind you are in a condition to
establish revealed truth in a certain sense _a priori,_ and the
method _a posteriori_ is then outranked. The philosopher outranks the
historian. In minds of a speculative turn the historian is never
considered of primary importance. The principles which its facts
illustrate are furnished him by human reason in philosophy, and by
the divine reason in revelation. The historical mind has never been
considered in the world of thought as sovereign. The philosopher is
broad enough to study all ways leading to the full truth and joy of
life, whether logical or traditional; but he knows that the study of
principles is higher than that of facts. . . . No man can
intelligently become a Catholic without examining and deciding the
historical question. But back of this is the consideration that the
truths the Church teaches are necessarily in harmony with my
reason--nay, that they alone solve the problems of reason
satisfactorily and answer fully to the wants of the heart. To some
minds the truths standing alone compel assent; that is to say, the
truths standing alone, and considered in themselves, demand the
submission of my reason. Among these truths, thus imperative, not the
least is the need of the very Church herself, viewed in her action on
men and nations--viewed quite apart from the historical and
Scriptural proof of her establishment by Christ. Once the mind is
lifted above subjectivism and is face-to-face with the truth, union
with the Church is only a question of time and of fidelity to
conscience."--_Catholic World,_ November, 1887, "Dr. Brownson and
Catholicity."
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