Chapter XIII (3)

(ii) There is, next, a strong insistence upon the soul having to transcend all particular lights and impressions, in precise proportion to their apparently extraordinary character, if it would become strong and truly spiritual. “He that will rely on the letter of the divine locution, or on the intellectual form of the vision, will necessarily fall into delusion. ‘The letter killeth, the spirit quickeneth’; we must therefore reject the literal sense, and abide in the obscurity of faith.” “One desire only doth God allow in His presence, that of perfectly observing His law and carrying the Cross of Christ.… That soul, which has no other aim, will be a true ark containing the true Manna, which is God.” “One act of the will, wrought in charity, is more precious in the eyes of God, than that which all the visions and revelations of heaven might effect.” “Let men cease to regard these supernatural apprehensions … that they may be free.”[366] Here the essence of the doctrine lies in the importance attached to this transcendence, and not in the particular views of the Saint concerning the character of this or that miraculous-seeming phenomenon to be transcended.

(iii) And this essential doctrine retains all its cogency, even though we hold the strict necessity of a contrary, alternating movement of definite occupation with the Concrete, Contingent, Historical, Institutional, in thought and action. For this occupation will be with the normal, typical means, duties, and facts of human and religious life; and, whilst fully conscious of the Supernatural working in and with these seemingly but natural materials, will, with St. Augustine, pray God to “grant men to perceive in little things the common-seeming indications of things both small and great,” and, with him, will see a greater miracle in the yearly transformation of the vine’s watery sap into wine, and in the germination of any single seed, than even in that of Cana.[367]

(iv) And then there is, upon the whole, a tendency to concentrate, at these recollective stages, the soul’s attention upon Christ and God alone. “I believe I understand,” says Mother Juliana, “the ministration of holy Angels, as Clerks tell; but it was not shewed to me. For Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all. God alone took our nature, and none but He; Christ alone worked our salvation, and none but He.”[368] And thus we get a wholesome check upon the Neo-Platonist countless mediations, of which the reflex is still to be found in the Areopagite. God indeed is alone held, with all Catholic theologians, to be capable of penetrating to the soul’s centre, and the fight against Evil is simplified to a watch and war against Self, in the form of an ever-increasing engrossment in the thought of God, and in the interests of His Kingdom. “Only a soul in union with God,” says St. John of the Cross, “is capable of this profound loving knowledge: for this knowledge is itself that union.… The Devil has no power to simulate anything so great.” “Self-love,” says Père Grou, “is the sole source of all the illusions of the spiritual life.… Jesus Christ on one occasion said to St. Catherine of Siena: ‘My daughter, think of Me, and I will think of thee’: a short epitome of all perfection. ‘Wheresoever thou findest self,’ says the _Imitation_, ‘drop that self’: the soul’s degree of fidelity to this precept is the true measure of its advancement.”[369] The highly authorized _Manuel de Théologie Mystique_ of the Abbé Lejeune, 1897, gives but one-sixth of its three-hundred pages to the discussion of all quasi-miraculous phenomena, puts them all apart from the substance of Contemplation and of the Mystical Life, and dwells much upon the manifold dangers of such, never essential, things. The French Oratorian, Abbé L. Laberthonnière, represents, in the _Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne_, a spirituality as full of a delicate Mysticism as it is free from any attachment to extraordinary phenomena. The same can be said of the Rev. George Tyrrell’s _Hard Sayings_ and _External Religion_. And the Abbé Sandreau has furnished us with two books of the most solid tradition and discrimination in all these matters.[370]

(5) And we should, in justice, remember that the Phenomenalist Mysticism, objected to by Prof. Münsterberg and so sternly transcended by St. John of the Cross, is precisely what is still hankered after, and treated as of spiritual worth, by present-day Spiritualism. Indeed, even Prof. James’s in many respects valuable _Varieties of Religious Experience_ is seriously damaged by a cognate tendency to treat Religion, or at least Mysticism, as an abnormal faculty for perceiving phenomena inexplicable by physical and psychical science.

(6) And finally, with respect to the personality of Evil, we must not forget that “there are drawings to evil as to good, which are not mere self-temptations, … but which derive from other wills than our own; strictly, it is only persons that can tempt us.”[371]