Chapter XI: Catherine’s Less Ultimate This-World Doctrines (3)

And we get corresponding, increasingly spiritual interpretations with regard to man’s action and man’s merit. First, all ostentation in the doing of the deed cancels all reward in the Beyond; so, in the case of each of the three branches of “Justice.”[151] And then the worker is to be satisfied, day by day, with that day’s pay and sustenance: “Give us this day our daily bread,” every soul is to pray; the divine Householder will say, “Didst thou not agree with me for a penny a day? Take thine own and go thy way.” And even “when ye have done all that has been commanded you, say ‘we are unprofitable servants, we have but done what we were bound to do.’” They are invited to look away from self, to “seek first the Kingdom and His Justice,” and then “all these things,” their very necessaries for earthly life, “shall be added unto you.” Indeed it is the boundlessly generous self-communicativeness of God Himself which is to be His disciples’ deliberate ideal, “be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; and the production of this likeness within themselves is to be the ultimate end and crown of their most heroic, most costly acts: “love your enemies, and pray for those that persecute you: that you may become the sons of your Father who is in Heaven, who maketh His sun to rise upon the evil and the good, and who raineth upon the just and the unjust.” And the more there is of such self-oblivious love, the more will even the gravest sins be entirely blotted out, and the more rapid will be the full sanctification of the soul, as Our Lord solemnly declares concerning the sinful woman in St. Luke, “her many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much.”[152]

In all this matter it is St. Luke’s Gospel which is specially interesting as showing, so to speak, side by side, an increased Rabbinical-like preciseness of balance between work and reward, and yet the adoption, doubtlessly under Pauline influence, of St. Paul’s central term in lieu of the old Jewish terminology. For, in one of its curious so-called “Ebjonite” passages, this Gospel works up the Parable of the Talents, with its only approximate relation between the deeds and their rewards (Matt. xxv, 14-30), into the Parable of the Pounds (Luke xix, 12-27), with its mathematically symmetrical interdependence between the quantities of the merit and those of this merit’s reward: the man who makes ten pounds is placed over ten cities, and he who makes five, over five. And, on the other hand, in a Lukan equivalent for part of the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew’s “reward” is replaced by “grace”: “If ye love them that love you, what grace (χάρις) have you? and if ye do good to those that do you good, what grace have you?”[153]

(2) St. Paul indeed it is who, in the specially characteristic portions of his teaching, unfolds, by means of a partly original terminology, the deepest motives and implications of Our Lord’s own divinely deep sayings and doings, and never wearies of insisting upon the Grace-character of the soul’s call and salvation,--the Free Mercy, the Pure Love which God shows to us, and the sheer dependence and complete self-donation, the pure love which we owe to Him, and which, at the soul’s best, it can and does give Him.

It is true that in the contrasting, the traditional layer of his teaching, we find the old Jewish terminology still intact: “God will render unto every man according to his works”; “it behoves us to appear before the Judgment-seat of Christ, that everyone … may receive according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad.”[154] Indeed it is precisely in St. Paul’s pages that we find the two most difficult and, at first sight, least spiritual sayings concerning this matter to be discovered in the whole New Testament: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most miserable.” And: “If the dead do not rise … let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”[155] But these two passages must doubtless be taken partly as arguments adapted to the dispositions of his hearers,--the “Let us eat and drink” conclusion is given in the words of a current Heathen Greek proverb,--and, still more, as expressions not so much of a formal doctrine as of a mood, of one out of the many intense, mutually supplementary and corrective moods of that rich nature.

According to his own deepest, most deliberate, and most systematic teaching, it is the life of Christ, the living Christ, energizing even now within the faithful soul, that constitutes both the primary source and the ultimate motive of Christian sanctity. “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” And through this divine-human life within us “we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” Indeed the Lord Himself said to him: “My grace is sufficient for thee; for power is made perfect in infirmity”; and hence he, Paul, could declare: “Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” And thus, with Christ living within him, he can exclaim: “If God be for us, who shall be against us?… Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or peril, or the sword?… In all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor things present nor things to come … shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” “Whether we live, or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”[156] We thus get here a reinsistence upon, and a further deepening of, perhaps the profoundest utterance of the whole Old Testament: “What have I in Heaven besides Thee? and besides Thee I seek nothing upon earth. Even though my flesh and my heart faint, Thou art my rock and my portion for ever.”[157]

And then that deathless hymn to Pure Love, the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, not only culminates with the proclamation that, of all man can hope and wish and will and do, of all his doings and his graces, “there remain these three, Faith, Hope, Love, (Charity): but the greatest of these is Love (Charity).” But the Love that has this primacy is Pure Love, for “it seeketh not its own.” And though of this Love alone it is said that “it never passeth away,” ever persists in the Beyond: yet even here already it can and does get exercised,--and this, not only without any suppression of parallel acts of the other virtues, but with these other virtues and their specific motives now taken over and deepened, each in its special characteristic, by the supreme virtue and motive of Pure Love: “Love believeth all things, hopeth all things, beareth all things.”[158] Thus Faith, Hope, Patience, and all the other virtues, they all remain, but it is Love that is now the ultimate motive of all their specific motives. These, his culminating teachings, indicate clearly enough that virtue’s rewards are regarded by him, ultimately and substantially, as “the wages of going on and not to die”; or rather that they are, in their essence, manifestations of that Eternal Life which is already energizing, within souls that earnestly seek God, even here and now. This Life, then, however great may be its further expansion and the soul’s consciousness of possessing it, already holds within itself sufficient, indeed abundant motives, (in the fulfilment of its own deepest nature and of its now awakened requirements of harmony, strength, and peace through self-donation), for giving itself ever more and more to God.

(3) And with regard to the Joannine teaching, it will be enough for us to refer back to the texts discussed in the preceding chapter, and to note how large and specially characteristic is here the current which insists upon the reward being already, at least inchoatively, enclosed in the deed itself, and upon this deed being the result and expression of Eternal Life operating within the faithful soul, even already, Here and Now. Only the declaration that “perfect love casteth out fear,” that it does not tolerate fear alongside of itself, 1 John iv, 18, appears to be contrary to the Pauline doctrine that Perfect Love, “Love” itself “beareth all things, believeth, hopeth, endureth all things,” 1 Cor. xiii, 7. Love then can animate other virtues: why not then a holy fear? But this Joannine saying seems in fact modelled upon St. Paul’s quotation and use of a passage from the Septuagint: “Cast out the bondwoman (the slave-servant) and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir together with the son of the free,” Gal. iv, 30; and hence this saying will not exclude “children of the free-woman,”--a holy fear as well as faith, hope, patience,--but only “children of the slave-woman,” superstition, presumption, weakmindedness, and slavish fear.

2. _The “Pure Love” controversy._

In turning now to the controversy as to, Pure Love (1694-1699) and its assured results, we shall have again to distinguish carefully between the lives and intentions of the writers who were censured, and the doctrines, analytic or systematic, taught or implied by them, which were condemned. This distinction is easier in this case than in that of Quietism, for the chief writer concerned here is Fénelon, as to whose pure and spiritual character and deeply Catholic intentions there never has been any serious doubt.

But in this instance we have to make a further distinction--viz. between the objective drift of at least part of his _Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure_, published in 1697, and especially the twenty-three propositions extracted from it which were condemned by Pope Innocent XII in 1699; and the teaching which he increasingly clarified and improved in his numerous apologetic writings against Bossuet and other opponents in this memorable controversy--especially in his Latin writings, intended for transmission to the Pope, and written as late as 1710 and 1712.[159] It is certain that Bishops and theologians who opposed his _Maximes_ were found warmly endorsing such pieces as his wonderfully clear and sober _Première Réponse aux Difficultés de M. l’Evêque de Chartres_. It is these pieces, comprising also his remarkably rich _Instruction Pastorale_, his admirably penetrating _Lettre sur l’Oraison Passive_ and _Lettre sur la Charité_, and his extraordinarily compact and balanced Second Epistle to Pope Clement XI, 1712 (where all the censured ambiguities and expressions are carefully avoided), and which alone among Fénelon’s writings shall be accepted in what follows.[160] Indeed even the earlier of these writings fail in but one thing--in justifying the actual text of the condemned book, as distinguished from the intentions of its writer. Bishop Hedley sums up the real position with the treble authority of a spiritually trained Monk, of a practised theological writer, and of a Catholic Bishop of long experience: “The doctrine intended by Fénelon, in his _Maximes des Saints_, and as explained by him during his controversy with Bossuet, has never been censured, although the opposite party laboured hard for its condemnation. Fifteen years after the condemnation of his book, we find him re-stating to Pope Clement XI (who, as Cardinal, had drawn up the Brief of his condemnations), in careful scholastic language the doctrine intended by himself, but which he himself had misstated in his popular treatise. As there were errors, the other side, whatever the crudity or novelty of some of its contentions, whatever its motives or methods--and some of them were far from creditable--was sure in the end to succeed. And it is well that it should have succeeded as far as it did succeed.”[161]

In any case, we shall have to beware of considering Bossuet’s contentions as to the specific character of Charity, Love, and as to the possibility, for man here below, of single acts of pure love, to be representative of the ordinary Catholic teaching either before or since the condemnation. On both these fundamental points Fénelon’s positions are demonstrably, and indeed have been generally admitted to be, a mere restatement of that teaching, as is shown, for instance, in the Jesuit Father Deharbe’s solid and sober, thoroughly traditional and highly authorized essay: _Die vollkommene Liebe Gottes … dargestellt nach der Lehre des h. Thomas von Aquin_, Regensburg, 1856. It is this most useful treatise and the admirable _Analyse Raisonnée de la Controverse du Quiétisme_ of the Abbé Gosselin,[162] (which has already much helped me in the preceding section), that have been my chief aids in my careful study, back through Bossuet and Fénelon, to St. Thomas and his chief commentators, Sylvius, who died in 1649, and Cardinal Cajetan, who died in 1534, and to the other chief authorities beyond them.--I group the main points, which alone need concern us here, under three heads: the specific Nature of Pure Love; single Acts of Pure Love; a State of Pure Love.

(1) Now as to the specific Nature of Charity, or Pure, Perfect Love, St. Thomas tells us: “One Kind of Love is perfect, the other kind is imperfect. Perfect Love is that wherewith a man is loved for his own sake: as, for instance, when some one wishes well to another person, for that other person’s sake, in the manner in which a man loves his friend. Imperfect love is the love wherewith a man loves something, not for its own sake, but in order that this good thing may accrue to himself,--in the manner in which a man loves a thing that he covets. Now the former kind of love pertains to Charity, which clings to God for His own sake, whereas it is Hope that pertains to the second kind of love, since he who hopes aims at obtaining something for himself.”[163] And Cardinal Cajetan explains that this wishing well to God, “this good that we can will God to have, is double. The good that is in Him, that (strictly speaking) is God Himself,--we can, by Love, will Him to have it, when we find our delight in God being what He is. And the good that is but referred to God,--His honour and Kingdom and the Obedience we owe him,--this we can will, not only by finding our pleasure in it, but by labouring at its maintenance and increase with all our might.”[164]

And, says St. Thomas, such Perfect Love alone is Love in its strict sense and “the most excellent of all the virtues”: for “ever that which exists for its own sake is greater than that which exists in view of something else. Now Faith and Hope attain indeed to God, yet as the source from which there accrue to us the knowledge of the Truth and the acquisition of the Good; whilst Love attains to God Himself, with a view to abide in Him, and not that some advantage may accrue to us from Him.” And perhaps still more clearly: “ When a man loves something so as to covet it, he apprehends it as something pertaining to his own well-being. The lover here stands towards the object beloved, as towards something which is his property.”[165] And note how, although he teaches that whereas “the beatitude of man, as regards its cause and its object, is something increate,” _i.e._ God Himself, “the essence of the beatitude itself is something created,” for “men are rendered blessed by participation, and this participation in beatitude is something created”: yet he is careful to explain some of his more incidental passages, in which he speaks of this essence of beatitude as itself man’s end, by the _ex professo_ declaration: “God” alone “is man’s ultimate end, and beatitude is only as it were an end before the very end, an end in immediate proximity to the ultimate end.”[166]

(2) And next, as to the possibility, actual occurrence and desirableness of single Acts of such Pure Love, even here below: all this is assumed as a matter of course throughout St. Thomas’s _ex professo_ teaching on the matter. For throughout the passages concerning the Nature of Pure Love he is not exclusively, indeed not even primarily, busy with man’s acts in the future life, but with the respective characteristics of man’s various acts as executed and as analyzable, more or less perfectly, already here below. And nowhere does he warn us against concluding, from his reiterated insistence upon the essential characteristics of Pure Love, that such love cannot, as a matter of fact, be practised, at least in single acts, here below at all. Hence it is clear that, according to him, the soul as it advances in perfection will--alongside of acts of supernatural Faith, Hope, Fear, etc. (and the production of such acts will never cease), produce more and more acts of Pure Love: not necessarily more, as compared with the other kinds of contemporary acts, but certainly more as compared with its former acts of the same character.

But there is a further, profoundly and delicately experienced doctrine. Not only can Pure Love be exercised in single and simple acts, alongside of single and simple acts of other kinds of virtues, supernatural or otherwise: but Pure Love can itself come to command or to inform acts which in themselves bear, and will now bear in increased degree, the characteristics of the other kinds of acts. St. Thomas tells us, with admirable clearness: “An act can be derived from Charity in one of two ways. In the first way, the act is elicited by Charity itself, and such a virtuous act requires no other virtue beside Charity,--as in the case of loving the Good, rejoicing in it, and mourning over its opposite. In the second way, an act proceeds from Charity in the sense of being commanded by it: and in this manner,--since Charity” has the full range of and “commands all the virtues, as ordering them (each and all) to their (ultimate) end,--an act can proceed from Charity whilst nevertheless belonging to any other special virtue.” And he assures us that: “The merit of eternal life,” “the fountain-head of meriting,” “pertains primarily to, consists in Charity, and pertains to and consists in other kinds of supernatural acts in only a secondary manner,--that is, only in so far as these acts are commanded or informed by Charity” or Pure Love.[167]

Let us take some instances of such two-fold manifestations of identical motives and virtues, according as these motives and virtues operate in simple co-ordination, or within a compound and organic system. In the scholar’s life, Greek and Latin and Hebrew may be acquired, each simply for its own sake and each alongside of the other; or they can be acquired, from the immediate motive indeed of knowing each in its own specific nature as thoroughly as possible, yet with the ultimate, ever more and more conscious and all-penetrating, motive of thus acquiring means and materials for the science of language, or for the study of philosophy, or for research into early phases of the Jewish-Christian religion. In the family life, a man, woman, or child can live for himself or herself, and then for his or her other immediate relatives, each taken as separate alongside of the other, or he or she may get more and more dominated by the conception and claims of the family as an organic whole, and may end by working largely, even with respect to himself, as but for so many constituents of that larger organism in which alone each part can attain its fullest significance. And especially a young mother can live for her own health and joys, and then, alongside of these, for those of her child, or she can get to the point of sustaining her own physical health and her mental hopes and will to live as so many means and conditions for feeding and fostering the claimful body and soul of her child.

So again, in the creatively artistic life, we can have a Dante writing prose and poetry and painting a picture, and a Rafael painting pictures and writing sonnets; or we can have Wagner bringing all his activities of scholar, poet, painter, musician, stage-manager,--each retaining, and indeed indefinitely increasing, its specific character and capabilities,--to contribute, by endless mutual stimulation and interaction, to something other and greater than any one of them individually or even than the simple addition of them all,--to a great Music-Drama and multiform yet intensely unified image of life itself. And an organist can draw out, as he plays, the _Vox Humana_ stop, and then another and another limitedly efficacious organ-stop, whilst each new-comer takes the place of its predecessor or a place beside it; or he can draw out the _Grand Jeu_ stop, which sets all the other stops to work in endless interaction, with itself permeating and organizing the whole. We thus, in these and countless other cases, and in every variety of degree within each case, get two kinds of variety, what we may call the simple and the compound diversification. And everywhere we can find that the richest variety not only can co-exist with, but that it requires and is required by, indeed that it is a necessary constituent and occasion of, the deepest and most delicate unity.[168]

(3) And finally, as to a State of Pure Love. Only here do we reach the class of questions to which the condemnations of Fénelon really apply.

We shall do well to begin by bearing in mind the very ancient, practically unbroken, very orthodox Christian discrimination of faithful souls,--sometimes into the two classes of Mercenaries (or Slaves) and Friends or Children, the latter of whom the great Clement of Alexandria, who died about A.D. 215, called “Gnostics,” “Gnosis” being his term for perfection (this scheme is the one to which Catherine’s life and teaching conform); or into the three classes of Servants (Slaves); Mercenaries; and Friends (or Children), as is already worked out with full explicitness by Saints Basil, Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa, who died in the years 379, 389, and 395 (?) respectively. Now Clement places the Mercenary on the left of the Sanctuary, but the “Gnostic” on the right; and, whilst declaring that the former “are those who, by means of renouncing things perishable, hope to receive the goods of incorruption in exchange,” he demands of the “Gnostic” that “he approach the saving word neither from the fear of punishment, nor from the motive of reward, but simply because He is good.”[169] And St. Basil, echoed in this by his two contemporaries, teaches that, “We obey God and avoid vices, from the fear of punishment, and in that case we take on the resemblance of Slaves. Or we keep the precepts, because of the utility that we derive from the recompense, thus resembling Mercenaries. Or finally, from love of Him who has given us the law, we obey with joy at having been judged worthy of serving so great and good a God, and thus we imitate the affection of Children towards their parents.”[170] And, in the case of all these Fathers, it is clear that, not only single acts, but whole states of soul and life are meant.

But the increased fineness in the analysis of interior experiences and dispositions has since then required, and the Church formulations have most wisely demanded, that these three classes be not so sharply distinguished as to make any one soul seem exclusively and unchangeably to pertain to any one of them; and, still more, that these three divisions be taken to represent, even where and whilst they are most completely realized, only the predominant character of the majority of the acts constituting the respective state of soul. For it is clear that not only is there, and can there be, no such thing, on earth at least, as a state composed of one unrepeated act; but there is no such thing as a condition of soul made up solely of acts of “simple” Pure Love, or even of supernatural acts of all sorts commanded throughout by Charity, or indeed solely of supernatural acts, both simple and commanded. The “One-act” state is a chimera; the state of “simple” acts of Pure Love alone would, if possible, involve the neglect of numberless other virtues and duties; and the last two states indeed highly desirable, but it would be fanaticism to think we could completely attain to them here below.

Yet there is nothing in any Church-censure to prevent, and there is much in the teaching and life of countless saints to invite, our holding the possibility, hence the working ideal and standard, for even here below, of a state in which two kinds of acts, which are still good in their degree, would be in a considerable minority: acts of merely natural, unspiritualized hope, fear, desire, etc.; and acts of supernatural hope, fear, desire, etc., in so far as not commanded by Charity. For even in this state not fully deliberate venial sins would occasionally be committed, far more would a certain number of acts of an unspiritualized, unsupernatural kind occur. And the necessary variety among the supernatural acts would in nowise be impaired,--it would indeed be greatly stimulated, by Pure Love being now, for the most part, the ultimate motive of their exercise.

Sylvius, in his highly authoritative commentary on St. Thomas, puts the matter admirably: “We may not love God in view of reward in suchwise as to make eternal life the true and ultimate end of our love, or to love God because of it, so that without the reward we would not love Him … We must love God with reference to the eternal reward in suchwise that we put forth indeed both love and good works in view of such beatitude,--in so far as the latter is the end proposed to these works by God Himself; yet that we subordinate this our beatitude to the love of God as the true and ultimate end,” so that “if we had no beatitude to expect at all, we should nevertheless still love Him and execute good works for His own sake alone. In this manner we shall first love God above all things and for His own sake; and we shall next keep the eternal reward before us, for the sake of God and of His honour.”[171] A man in these dispositions would still hope, and desire, and fear, and regret, and strive for, and aspire to conditions, things, persons both of earth and of the beyond, both for himself and for others, both for time and for eternity: but all this, for the most part, from the ultimate motive, penetrating, deepening, unifying all the other motives,--of the love of Love, Christ, Spirit, God.

Any hesitation to accept the reality or possibility of such a state cannot, then, be based upon such acceptance involving any kind of Quietism, but simply on the admittedly great elevation of such a condition. Yet this latter objection seems to be sufficiently met if we continuously insist that even such a state neither exempts souls from the commission of (more or less deliberate) venial sin; nor is ever entirely equable; nor is incapable of being completely lost; nor, as we have just contended, is ever without more or less numerous acts of an unsupernaturalized kind, and still less without acts of the supernatural virtues other than Love and unprompted by Love.

And all fear of fanaticism will be finally removed by a further most necessary and grandly enlarging insistence upon the Mercenaries and even the Servants having passing moments, and producing varyingly numerous single acts of, Pure Love and of the other supernatural virtues prompted by Pure Love. All souls in a state of Grace throughout God’s wide wide world,--every constituent, however slight and recent, of the great soul of the Church throughout every sex, age, race, clime, and external organization, would thus have some touches, some at least incidental beginnings of Pure Love, and of the other supernatural virtues prompted by Pure Love. All souls would thus, in proportion to their degree of grace and of fidelity, have some of those touches; and the progress of all would consist in the degree to which that variety of acts would become informed and commanded by the supreme motive of all motives, Pure and Perfect Love.[172]

And with such an Ideal, required by fundamental Catholic positions, ever increasingly actuating the soul and binding it to all souls beneath, around, above it, what there is of truth in the savage attacks of Spinoza and of Kant and of such recent writers as A. E. Taylor,[173] upon the supposed hypocritical self-seeking in the practice and temper of average Christians, would lose all its force.

3. _Cognate Problems._

Three much-discussed cognate matters require some elucidation here. They answer to the questions: Does reference to the self, as for instance in acts of gratitude and thanksgiving, prevent an act from being one of Pure Love? Is the pleasurableness, normally ever attached and subsequent to all virtuous acts, to be regarded as part of the reward from which Pure Love abstracts? And finally are, I will not say any technically ecstatic or other in part psycho-physical peculiarities and manifestations, but even active Contemplation or the simple Prayer of Quiet, necessary conditions or expressions of a state of Pure Love,--understood in the sense explained above?

(1) As to reference to the self, it is highly important to distinguish between acts of Pure Love, and attempts, by means of the maximum possible degree of abstraction, to apprehend the absolute character and being of God. For these two things have no necessary connection, and yet they have been frequently confounded. St. Teresa’s noble confession of past error, and consequent doubly valuable, amended teaching is perhaps the most classical pronouncement extant upon this profoundly important point.[174] The contingent, spacial and temporal, manifestations and communications of God, above all as we have them in the life of Our Lord and in those who have come nearest to Him, but also, in their several degrees and forms, in the lives of each one of us: all these, in their sacred, awakening and healing, particularity and closeness of contact, can and should be occasions and materials for the most perfect, for the purest Love.

Indeed it is well never to forget that nothing, and least of all God, the deepest of all the realities, is known to us at all, except in and by means of its relation to our own self or to our fellow-creatures. Hence if Love were Pure only in proportion as it could be based upon our apprehension of God as independent of all relation to ourselves, Pure Love would be simply impossible for us.--But, in truth, such a conception would, in addition, be false in itself: it would imply that the whole great Incarnation-fact and -doctrine,--the whole of that great root of all religion, the certainty that it is because God has first loved us that we can love Him, that He is a self-revealing God, and One whom we can know and reach because “in Him we live and move and have our being”--was taking us, not towards, but away from, our true goal. There are, surely, few sadder and, at bottom, more deeply uncreaturely, unchristian attitudes, than that which would seek or measure perfection in and by the greatest possible abstraction from all those touching contingencies which God Himself has vouchsafed to our nature,--a nature formed by Himself to require such plentiful contact with the historical and visible.--And if God’s pure love for us can and does manifest itself in such contingent acts, then our love can and should become and manifest itself purer and purer by means, not only of the prayer of formless abstraction and expectation, but also by the contemplation of these contingencies and by the production of analogously contingent acts. And if so, then certainly gratitude, in so far as it truly deserves the name, can and does belong to Pure Love, for the very characteristic of such gratitude consists in a desire to give and not to receive.[175]

Not, then, the degree of disoccupation with the Contingent, even of the contingent of our own life, but the degree of freedom from self-seeking, and of the harmonization and subordination of all these contingencies in and under the supreme motive of the Pure Love and service of God in man and of man in God, is the standard and test of Christian perfection.

(2) As to the pleasurableness which, in normal psychic conditions, more or less immediately accompanies or follows the virtuous acts of the soul, the realizations of its own deeper and deepest ideals, we should note that, in its earthly degree and form, it is not included in what theologians mean by the “rewards” of virtuous action. And in this they are thoroughly self-consistent, for they adhere, I think with practical unanimity, to Catherine’s doctrine that these immediate consequences of virtuous acts are not to be considered a matter of positive and, as it were, separate divine institution,--as something which, given the fundamental character of man’s spiritual nature, might have been otherwise; but as what,--given the immutable nature of God and of the image at nature in His creature, man,--follows from an intrinsic, quite spontaneous necessity.--Hence, at this point especially, would it be foolish and fanatical, because contrary to the immanental nature of things, and to the right interplay of the elemental forces of all life, to attempt the suppression even of the several actual irruptions of such pleasure, and still more of the source and recurrence of this delectation. Fortunately success is here as impossible as it would be undesirable,--as much so as, on a lower plane, would be the suppression of the pleasure concomitant with the necessary kinds and degrees of eating. Indeed, it is clear, upon reflection that unless a man (at least implicitly) accepts and (indirectly) wills that spiritual or physical pleasure, he cannot profitably eat his food or love his God.

But from this in nowise follows what Bossuet tried so hard to prove,--that what is thus necessarily present in man, as a psychical or physical prompting and satisfaction, must also of necessity be willed by him, directly and as his determining reason and justification. In turning to eat, man cannot help feeling a psychic pleasure of an all but purely physical kind; and, if he is wise, he will make no attempt to meddle with this feeling. But he can either deliberately will, as his action’s object, that pleasure which is thus inevitably incident to the act, and the more he does so, the more simply greedy and sensual he will become; or he can directly will, as his determining end, that sustenance of life and strength for his work and spiritual growth, which is the justification and ultimate reason of eating (the _rationale_ of that very pleasure so wisely attached by nature, as a stimulus, to a process so necessary to the very highest objects), and the more he does so, the more manly and spiritual he will grow.

And so with every one of man’s wondrously manifold and different physical, psychical, spiritual requirements and actions, within the wide range of his right nature and ideals. There is not one of them,--not the most purely physical-seeming of these acts,--which he cannot ennoble and spiritualize by, as it were, meeting it,--by willing it, more and more, because of its rational end and justification. And there is not one of them,--not an act which, judged simply by its direct subject-matter and by the soul’s faculties immediately engaged, would be the most purely mental and religious of acts,--which man cannot degrade and de-spiritualize, by, as it were, following it, by willing it more and more because of its psychical attraction and pleasurable concomitance alone. For, in the former case, the act, however gross may seem its material, is made the occasion and instrument of spiritual character-building and of the constitution of liberty; in the latter case, the act, however ethereal its body, is but the occasion and means of the soul’s dispersion in the mere phenomenal flux of the surface of existence, and of its subjection to the determinism which obtains here.[176]

Catherine’s whole convert life is one long series of the most striking examples of an heroic delicacy in self-knowledge and self-fighting in this matter: a delicacy which, as to the degree of its possibility and desirableness in any particular soul, is, however, peculiarly dependent upon that soul’s special circumstances, temperament, _attrait_, and degree of perfection reached and to be reached.

(3) And, finally, as to the relations between the Contemplative forms of Prayer, and Acts and variously complete States of Pure Love; and, again, of such Prayer and Love, and Abnormal or Miraculous conditions: it is clear that, if there is no true Contemplation without much Pure Love, there can be much Pure Love without Contemplation.

Abbé Gosselin well sums up the ordinary Catholic teaching. “Meditation consists of discursive acts which are easily distinguished from each other, both because of the kind of strain and shock with which they are produced, and because of the diversity of their objects. It is the ordinary foundation of the interior life and the ordinary prayer of beginners, whose imperfect love requires to be thus excited and sustained by distinct and reflective acts. Contemplation consists, strictly speaking, in direct ‘non-reflex’ acts,--acts so simple and peaceful as to have nothing salient by which the soul could distinguish one from the other. It is called by the Mystical Saints ‘a simple and loving look,’ as discriminating it from meditation and the latter’s many methodic and discursive acts, and as limiting it to a simple and loving consideration and view of God and of divine things, certified and rendered present to the soul by faith. It is the ordinary prayer of perfect souls, or at least of those that have already made much progress in the divine love. For the more purely a soul loves God, the less it requires to be sustained by distinct, reflective acts; reasoning becomes a fatigue and an embarrassment to it in its prayer--it longs but to love and to contemplate the object of its love.”

Or as Fénelon puts it: “‘Passivity,’ ‘Action,’ is not precisely itself Pure Love, but is the mode in which Pure Love operates.… ‘Passivity,’ ‘Action,’ is not precisely the purity of Love, but is the effect of that purity.”[177] Yet, as M. Gosselin adds, “It must be admitted that without Contemplation the soul can arrive at a very high perfection; and that the most discursive meditation, and hence still more all prayer as it becomes effective, often includes certain direct acts which form an admixture and beginning of contemplation.”[178]

And as to any supposed necessary relations between the very highest contemplation and the most complete state of Pure Love on the one hand, and anything abnormal or miraculous on the other hand, Fénelon, in this point remarkably more sober than Bossuet, well sums up the most authoritative and classical Church-teaching on the matter: “‘Passive’ Contemplation is but Pure Contemplation: ‘Active’ Contemplation being one which is still mixed with hurried and discursive acts. When Contemplation has ceased to have any remnant of this hurry, of this ‘activity,’ it is entirely ‘Passive,’ that is, peaceful, in its acts.” “This free and loving look of the soul means acts of the understanding,--for it is a look; and acts of the will, for the look is a loving one; and acts produced by free-will, without any strict necessity, for the look is a free look.” “We should not compare Passive Contemplation,” as did Bossuet, “to prophecy, or to the gift of tongues or of miracles; nor may we say that this mystical state consists principally in something wrought by God within us without our co-operation, and where, consequently, there neither is nor can be any merit. We must, on the contrary, to speak correctly, say that the substance of such Passive Prayer, taken in its specific acts, is free, meritorious, and operated within us by a grace that acts together with us.” “It is the attraction to the acts which the soul now produces which, as by a secondary and counter-effect, occasions a quasi-incapacity for those acts which it does not produce. Now this attraction is not of a kind to deprive the soul of the use of its free-will: we see this from the nature of the acts which this attraction causes the soul to produce. Whence I conclude that this same attraction does not, again, deprive it of its liberty with regard to the acts which it prevents. The attraction but prevents the latter in the way it produces the other,--by an efficacious influence that involves no sheer necessity.” “‘Passivity,’ if it comes from God, ever leaves the soul fully free for the exercise of the distinct virtues demanded by God in the Gospel; the _attrait_ is truly divine only in so far as it draws the soul on to the perfect fulfilment of the evangelical counsels and promises concerning all the virtues.” “The inspiration of the Passive state is but an habitual inspiration for the interior acts of evangelical piety. It renders the Passive soul neither infallible nor impeccable, nor independent of the Church even for its interior direction, nor exempt from the obligation of meriting and growing in virtue.… The inspiration of the passive soul differs from that of actively just souls only in being purer; that is, more exempt from all natural self-seeking, more full, more simple, more continuous, and more developed at each moment. We have, throughout, ever one and the same inspiration, which but grows in perfection and purity in proportion as the soul renounces itself more, and becomes more sensitive to the divine impressions.”[179]

Thus we get an impressive, simple and yet varied, conception of spirituality, in which a real continuity, and a power and obligation of mutual understanding and aid underlies all the changes of degree and form, from first to last. For from first to last there are different degrees, but of the same supernatural grace acting in and upon the same human nature responsive in different degrees and ways. From first to last there is, necessarily and at every step, the Supernatural: at no point is there any necessary presence of, or essential connection with, the Miraculous or the Abnormal.

4. _Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant._

Theology and Philosophy have not ceased to occupy themselves, at least indirectly, with the substance of these great questions, since they furnished the subject-matter to Bossuet and Fénelon in their memorable controversy; somewhat over-subtle although some of it was in its earlier phases, owing to Fénelon’s chivalrous anxiety to defend, as far as possible, the very expressions, often so nebulous and shifting, of his cousin, Madame Guyon.

(1) Indeed about twenty years before that controversy, Spinoza had, in his _Theologico-Political Treatise_, and then, more impressively still, in his _Ethics_, made a brilliant assault upon all, especially all religious, self-seeking. Also on this point these writings showed that strange, pathetic combination of grandly religious intuitions and instincts with a Naturalistic system which, logically, leaves no room for those deepest requirements of that great soul; and here they revealed, in addition, considerable injustice towards the, doubtless very mixed and imperfect, motives of average humanity.

True intuition speaks in his _Treatise_ (published in 1670) in the words: “Since the love of God is man’s supreme beatitude and the final end and scope of all human actions: it follows that only that man conforms to the divine law, who strives to love God, not from fear of punishment, nor from the love of some other thing, such as delights, fame, and so forth, but from this motive alone, that he knows God, or that he knows the knowledge and love of God, to be his supreme end.” But a little further back we learn that “the more we know the things of Nature, the greater and the more perfect knowledge of God do we acquire”; a frank application of the pure Pantheism of his reasoned system.

In his _Ethics_, again, a noble intuition finds voice where he says: “Even if we did not know our Mind,” our individual soul, “to be eternal, we should still put Piety and Religion and, in a word, all those virtues that are to be referred to magnanimity and generosity, first in our esteem.” But he is doubtless excessive in his picturing of the downright, systematic immorality of attitude of ordinary men--the “slaves” and “mercenaries.” “Unless this hope of laying aside the burdens of Piety and Religion after death and of receiving the price of their service, and this fear of being punished by dire punishments after death were in men, and if they, contrariwise, believed that their minds would perish with their bodies: they would let themselves go to their natural inclination and would decide to rule all their actions according to their lust.” And he is doubtlessly, though nobly, excessive in his contrary ideal: “He who loves God cannot strive that God shall love him in return,”--an ideal which is, however, certainly in part determined by his philosophy, which knows no ultimate abiding personality or consciousness either in God or man.

Yet, once again, we have him at his inspiring best when, Catherine-like, he tells us: “The supreme Good of those who pursue virtue is common to them all, and all are equally able to rejoice in it”; and “this love towards God is incapable of being stained by the passions of envy and bitterness, but is increased in proportion as we figure to ourselves a larger number of men joined to God by the same bonds of love”; when he declares: “we do not enjoy beatitude because we master our passions; rather, contrariwise, do we master our passions because we enjoy beatitude”; and when he insists, with no doubt too indiscriminating, too Jacopone-like, a simplification, upon what, in its substance, is a profound truth: “the intellectual,” the pure “love of the soul for God is the very love of God, wherewith God loves Himself.”[180]

(2) It was, however, the astonishingly circumspect and many-sided Leibniz who, indefinitely smaller soul though he was, succeeded, perhaps better than any other modern philosopher, in successfully combining the divers constitutive elements of the act and state of Pure Love, when he wrote in 1714: “Since true Pure Love consists in a state of soul which makes me find pleasure in the perfections and the felicity of the object loved by me, this love cannot but give us the greatest pleasure of which we are capable, when God is that object. And, though this love be disinterested, it already constitutes, even thus simply by itself, our greatest-good and deepest interest.”

Or, as he wrote in 1698: “Our love of others cannot be separated from our true good, nor our love of God from our felicity. But it is equally certain that the consideration of our own particular good, as distinguished from the pleasure which we taste in seeing the felicity of another, does not enter into Pure Love.” And earlier still he had defined the act of loving as “the finding one’s pleasure in the felicity of another”; and had concluded thence that Love is for man essentially an enjoyment, although the specific motive of love is not the pleasure or the particular good of him who loves, but the good or the felicity of the beloved object.[181]

(3) Yet it is especially Kant who, with his predominant hostility to all Eudaemonism in Morality and Religion, has, more than all others, renewed the controversy as to the relations between virtue and piety on the one hand, and self-seeking motives on the other, and who is popularly credited with an entirely self-consistent antagonism to even such a wise and necessary attitude as are the amended positions of Fénelon and those of Leibniz. And yet I sincerely doubt whether (if we put aside the question as to the strictly logical consequences of his Critical Idealism, such as that Idealism appears in its greatest purity in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, 1781; and if we neglect the numerous, often grossly unjust, Spinoza-like sallies against the supposed undiluted mercenariness of ordinary piety, which abound in his _Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason_, 1793), we could readily find any explicit pronouncement hopelessly antagonistic to the Catholic Pure-Love doctrine.

Certainly the position taken up towards this point in that very pregnant and curious, largely-overlooked little treatise, _The Canon of Pure Reason_, which (evidently an earlier and complete sketch), has been inserted by him into his later, larger, but materially altered scheme of the _Critique_ of 1781, (where it now forms the _Zweite Hauptstück_ of the _Transcendentale Methodenlehre_, ed. Kehrbach, Reclam, pp. 603-628), appears to be substantially acceptable.[182] “Happiness consists in the satisfaction of all our inclinations, according to their various character, intensity, and duration. The law of practical action, in so far as it is derived from the motive of happiness, I call Pragmatic, a Rule of Good Sense; the same law, in so far as it has for its motive only the becoming worthy of such happiness, I call Moral, the Moral Law. Now Morality already by itself constitutes a system, but Happiness does not do so, except in so far as Happiness is distributed in exact accordance with Morality. But such a distribution is only possible in the intelligible world,”--the world beyond phenomena which can be reached by our reason alone--“and under a wise Originator and Ruler. Such an One, together with life in such a world--a world which we are obliged to consider as a future one--reason finds itself forced to assume, or else to look upon the moral laws as empty phantoms, since the necessary result of these laws,--a result which that same reason connects with their very idea,--would have to fall away, if that assumption were to go. Hence every one looks upon the moral laws as _commandments_, a thing which they could not be, if they did not conjoin with their rule consequences of _a priori_ appropriateness, and hence if they did not carry with them _promises_ and _threats_. But this too they can do only if they lie within the compass of a Single Necessary Being, Itself the Supreme Good, Which alone can render possible such a unity embracing both means and end.--Happiness alone is, for our reason, far from being the Complete Good, for reason does not approve of Happiness unless it be united with the being worthy of Happiness, _i.e._ Moral Rectitude. But Morality alone, and with it the simple being worthy of happiness, is also far from the Complete Good. Even if reason, free from any consideration of any interest of its own, were to put itself in the position of a being that had to distribute all happiness to others alone, it could not judge otherwise: for, in the complete idea of practical action, both points are in essential conjunction, yet in suchwise that it is the moral disposition which, as condition, first renders possible a sharing in happiness, and not the prospect of happiness which first gives an opening to the moral disposition. For, in this latter case, the disposition would not be moral, and, consequently, would not deserve that complete happiness to which reason can assign no other limitation than such as springs from our own immoral attitude of will.”[183]

In his _Foundation of the Metaphysic of Morals_, 1785, the noble apostrophe to the Good Will no doubt appears formally to proclaim as possible and desirable a complete human disposition, in which no considerations of Happiness play any part: “The good will is good, not through what it effects or produces, not through its utility for the attainment of any intention or end, but it is good through the quality of the volition alone; that is, it is good in itself.…” “If, with its greatest efforts, nothing were to be effected by it, and only the good will itself were to remain, this bare will would yet shine in lonely splendour as a jewel,--as something which has its full value in itself.” But further on he shows us how, after all, “this good will cannot, then, be the only and the whole good, but still it is the highest good and the condition for all the rest, even for our desire of happiness.”[184] Certain exaggerations, which are next developed by him here, shall be considered in a later chapter.

5. _Four important points._

Here I will but put together, in conclusion, four positions which I have rejoiced to find in two such utterly, indeed at times recklessly, independent writers as Professor Georg Simmel of Berlin and Professor A. E. Taylor.