Chapter XV (1)

SUMMING UP OF THE WHOLE BOOK. BACK THROUGH ASCETICISM, SOCIAL RELIGION, AND THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT OF MIND, TO THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION.

I now propose to conclude, by getting, through three successively easier matters, back to the starting-point of this whole book, and, in doing so, to sum up and delimitate, more and more clearly, the practical lessons learnt during its long course. These three last matters and points of observation shall be Asceticism, Institutionalism, and Mental Activity and Discipline, or the Scientific Habit--all three in their relation to the Mystical Element of Religion.

I. ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISM.

Now in the matter of Asceticism, we can again conveniently consider three points.

1. _Ordinary Asceticism practised by Mystics._

There is, first, the (generally severe) Asceticism which is ever connected with at least some one phase, an early one, of every genuine Mystic’s history, yet which does not differ essentially from the direct training in self-conquest to which practically all pre-Protestant, and most of the old Protestant earnest Christians considered themselves obliged.

(1) Now it is deeply interesting to note how marked has been, off and on throughout the last century and now again quite recently, the renewal of comprehension and respect for the general principle of Asceticism, in quarters certainly free from all preliminary bias in favour of Medieval Christianity. Schopenhauer wrote in 1843: “Not only the religions of the East but also genuine Christianity shows, throughout its systems, that fundamental characteristic of Asceticism which my philosophy elucidates.… Precisely in its doctrines of renunciation, self-denial, complete chastity, in a word, of general mortification of the will, lie the deepest truth, the high value, the sublime character of Christianity. It thus belongs to the old, true, and lofty ideal of mankind, in opposition to the false, shallow, and ruinous optimism of Greek Paganism, Judaism and Islam.” “Protestantism, by eliminating Asceticism and its central point, the meritoriousness of celibacy, has, by this alone, already abandoned the innermost kernel of Christianity.… For Christianity is the doctrine of the deep guilt of the human race … and of the heart’s thirst after redemption from it, a redemption which can be acquired only through the abnegation of self,--that is, through a complete conversion of human nature.”[432]--And the optimistically tempered American Unitarian, the deeply versed Psychologist, Prof. William James, tells us in 1902: “In its spiritual meaning, Asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy.” “The Metaphysical mystery, that he who feeds on death, that feeds on men, possesses life supereminently, 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.… Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and sponge-cake in comparison.”[433]

(2) Indeed, the only thing at all special to Mysticism, in its attitude towards this general principle and practice of Asceticism, is that it ever practises Asceticism as a means towards, or at least as the make-weight and safeguard of, Contemplation, which latter is as essentially Synthetic, and, in so far, peaceful and delightful, as the former is Analytic, polemical and painful; whereas non-Mystical souls will practise Asceticism directly with a view to greater aloofness from sin, and greater readiness and strength to perform the various calls of duty. And hence, if we but grant the legitimacy of the general principle of ordinary Asceticism, we shall find the Mystical form of this Asceticism to be the more easily comprehensible variety of that principle. For the Mystic’s practice, as concerns this point, is more varied and inclusive than that of others, since he does not even tend to make the whole of his inner life into a system of checks and of tension. The expansive, reconciling movement operates in him most strongly also, and, where of the right kind, this expansive movement helps, even more than the restrictive one, to purify, humble, and deepen his heart and soul.

2. _God’s Transcendence a source of suffering._

There is, however, a second, essentially different source and kind of suffering in some sorts and degrees of Mysticism, and indeed in other _attraits_ of the spiritual life, which is deeply interesting, because based upon a profound Metaphysical apprehension. Although, at bottom, the opposite extreme to Pantheism, it readily expresses itself, for reasons that will presently appear, in terms that have a curiously Pantheistic colour.

(1) St. John of the Cross writes in 1578: “It is a principle of philosophy, that all means must … have a certain resemblance to the end, such as shall be sufficient for the object in view. If therefore the understanding is to be united to God, … it must make use of those means which can effect that union, that is, means which are most like unto God.… But there is no essential likeness or communion between creatures and Him, the distance between His divine nature and their nature is infinite. No creature therefore … nothing that the imagination may conceive or the understanding comprehend … in this life … can be a proximate means of union with God,” for “it is all most unlike God, and most disproportionate to Him.” “The understanding … must be pure and empty of all sensible objects, all clear intellectual perceptions, resting on faith: for faith is the sole proximate and proportionate means of the soul’s union with God.”[434]

Now it is certain, as we have already found, that the awakened human soul ever possesses a dim but real experience of the Infinite, and that, in proportion as it is called to the Mystical way, this sense will be deepened into various degrees of the Prayer of Quiet and of Union, and that here, more plainly than elsewhere, will appear the universal necessity of the soul’s own response, by acts and the habit of Faith, to all and every experience which otherwise remains but so much unused material for the soul’s advance. And it is equally certain that St. John of the Cross is one of the greatest of such contemplatives, and that neither his intuition and actual practice, nor even his sayings, (so long as any one saying belonging to one trend is set off against another belonging to the other trend), contravenes the Christian and Catholic positions.--Yet it cannot be denied that, were we to press his “negative way” into becoming the only one; and especially were we to take, without discount, such a virtual repudiation, as is furnished by any insistence upon the above words, of any essential, objective difference in value between our various apprehensions of Him and approaches to Him: the whole system and _rationale_ of External, Sacramental and Historical Religion, indeed of the Incarnation, in any degree and form, would have to go, as so many stumbling-blocks to the soul’s advance. For the whole principle of all such Religion implies the profound importance of the Here and the Now, the Contingent and the Finite, and of the Immanence of God, in various degrees and ways, within them.

Indications of this incompatibility, as little systematically realized here as in the Areopagite, are afforded by various remarks of his, belonging in reality to another trend. Thus, immediately before his denial of any essential likeness or communion between any creature and God, he says: “It is true that all creatures bear a certain relation to God and are tokens of His being, some more, some less, according to the greater perfection of their nature.” And of Our Lord’s sacred Humanity he says: “What a perfect living image was Our Saviour upon earth: yet those who had no faith, though they were constantly about Him, and saw His wonderful works, were not benefited by His presence.”[435] But even here the immense importance, indeed downright necessity for Faith, of such external and historical stimuli, objects and materials,--in the latter instance all this at its very deepest,--remains unemphasized, through his engrossment in the necessity of Faith for the fructification of all these things.

In other places this Faith appears as though working so outside of all things imageable, as to have to turn rapidly away from all picturings, as, at best, only momentary starting-points for the advanced soul. “Let the faithful soul take care that, whilst contemplating an image, the senses be not absorbed in it, whether it be material or in the imagination, and whether the devotion it excites be spiritual or sensible. Let him … venerate the image as the Church commands and lift up his mind at once from the material image to those whom it represents. He who shall do this, will never be deluded.”[436] Here, again, along the line of argument absorbing the saint in this book, there is no fully logical ground left for the Incarnational, Historical, Sacramental scheme of the Infinite immanent in the finite, and of spirit stimulated in contact with matter, with everywhere the need of the condescensions of God and of our ascensions by means of careful attention to them.

Sören Kierkegaard, that deep solitary Dane, with so much about him like to Pascal the Frenchman, and Hurrell Froude the Englishman, and who, though Lutheran in all his bringing up, was so deeply attracted by Catholic Asceticism, has, in recent times (he died in 1855), pushed the doctrine of the qualitative, absolute difference between God and all that we ourselves can think, feel, will or be, to lengths beyond even the transcendental element,--we must admit this to be the greatly preponderant one,--in the great Spaniard’s formal teaching. And it is especially in this non-Mystical Ascetic that we get an impressive picture of the peculiar kind of suffering and asceticism, which results from such a conviction to a profoundly sensitive, absorbedly religious soul; and here too we can, I think, discover the precise excess and one-sidedness involved in this whole tendency. Professor Höffding, in his most interesting monograph on his friend, tells us how “for Kierkegaard, … the will gets monopolized by religious Ethics from the very first; there is no time for Contemplation or Mysticism.” “To tear the will away,” Kierkegaard himself says, “from all finite aims and conditions … requires a painful effort and this effort’s ceaseless repetition. And if, in addition to this, the soul has, in spite of all its striving, to be as though it simply were not, it becomes clear that the religious life signifies a dedication to suffering and to self-destruction. What wonder, then, that, for the Jew, death was the price of seeing God; or that, for the Gentile, the soul’s entering into closer relations with the Deity meant the beginning of madness?” For “the soul’s relation to God is a relation to a Being absolutely different from Man, who cannot confront him as his Superlative or Ideal, and who, nevertheless, is to rule in his inmost soul. Hence a necessary division, ever productive of new pains, is operative within man, as long as he perseveres in this spiritual endeavour.… A finite being, he is to live in the Infinite and Absolute: he is there like a fish upon dry land.”[437]

Now Prof. Höffding applies a double, most cogent criticism to this position.--The one is religious, and has already been quoted. “A God Who is not Ideal and Pattern is no God. Hence the contention that the Nature of the Godhead is, of necessity, qualitatively different from that of Man, has ever occasioned ethical and religious misgivings.”--And the other is psychological. “Tension can indeed be necessary for the truth and the force of life. But tension, taken by itself, cannot furnish the true measure of life. For the general nature of consciousness is a synthesis, a comprehensive unity: not only contrast, but also concentration, must make itself felt, as long as the life of consciousness endures.”[438]

It is deeply interesting to note how Catherine, and at bottom St. John of the Cross and the Exclusive Mystics generally, escape, through their practice and in some of their most emphatic teachings, from Kierkegaard’s excess, no doubt in part precisely because they _are_ Mystics, since the exclusive Mystic’s contemplative habit is, at bottom, a Synthetic one. Yet we should realize the deep truth which underlies the very exaggerations of this one-sidedly Analytic and Ascetical view. For if God is the deepest ideal, the ultimate driving force and the true congenital element and environment of Man, such as Man cannot but secretly wish to will deliberately, and which, at his best, Man truly wills to hold and serve: yet God remains ever simply incompatible with that part of each man’s condition and volition which does not correspond to the best and deepest which that Man himself sees or could see to be the better, _hic et nunc_; and, again, He is ever, even as compared with any man’s potential best, infinitely more and nobler, and, though here not in simple contradiction, yet at a degree of perfection which enables Him, the Supreme Spirit, to penetrate, as Immanent Sustainer or Stimulator, and to confront, as Transcendent Ideal and End, the little human spirit, so great in precisely this its keen sense of experienced contrast.

Catherine exhibits well this double relation, of true contradiction, and of contrast, both based upon a certain genuine affinity between the human soul and God. On one side of herself she is indeed a veritable fish out of water; but, on the other side of her, she is a fish happily disporting itself in its very element, in the boundless ocean of God. On the one side, snapping after air, in that seemingly over-rarified atmosphere in which the animal man, the mere selfish individual, cannot live; on the other side, expanding her soul’s lungs and drinking in light, life, and love, in that same truly rich atmosphere, which, Itself Spirit, feeds and sustains her growing spiritual personality. And the _Dialogo_, in spite of its frequently painful abstractness and empty unity, has, upon the whole, a profound hold upon this great doctrine.

Yet it is in Catherine’s own culminating intuition,--of the soul’s free choice of Purgatory, as a joyful relief from the piercing pain of what otherwise would last for ever,--the vividly perceived contrast between God’s purity and her soul’s impurity, that we get, in the closest combination, indeed mutual causation, this double sense of Man’s nearness to and distance from, of his likeness and unlikeness to God. For only if man is, in the deepest instincts of his soul, truly related to God, and is capable of feeling, (indeed he ever actually, though mostly dimly, experiences,) God’s presence and this, man’s own, in great part but potential, affinity to Him: can suffering be conceived to arise from the keen realization of the contrast between God and man’s own actual condition at any one moment; and can any expectation, indeed a swift vivid instinct, arise within man’s soul that the painful, directly contradictory, discrepancy can and will, gradually though never simply automatically, be removed. And though, even eventually, the creature cannot, doubtless, ever become simply God, yet it can attain, in an indefinitely higher degree, to that affinity and union of will with God, which, in its highest reaches and moments, it already now substantially possesses; and hence to that full creaturely self-constitution and joy in which, utterly trusting, giving itself to, and willing God, it will, through and in Him, form an abidingly specific, unique constituent and link of His invisible kingdom of souls, on and on.

3. _Discipline of fleeing and of facing the Multiple and Contingent._

But there is a third attitude, peculiar (because of its preponderance) to the Mystics as such, an attitude in a manner intermediate between that of ordinary Asceticism, and that of the Suffering just described. The implications and effects of, and the correctives for, this third attitude will occupy us up to the end of this book. I refer to the careful turning-away from all Multiplicity and Contingency, from the Visible and Successive, from all that does or can distract and dissipate, which is so essential and prevailing a feature in all Mysticism, which indeed, in Exclusive Mysticism, is frankly made into the one sole movement towards, and measure of, the soul’s perfection.

(1) It is true that to this tendency, when and in so far as it has come so deeply to permeate the habits of a soul as to form a kind of second nature, the name Asceticism cannot, in strictness, be any more applied; since now the pain will lie, not in this turning away from all that dust and friction, but, on the contrary, in any forcing of the soul back into that turmoil. And doubtless many, perhaps most, souls with a pronouncedly mystical _attrait_, are particularly sensitive to all, even partial and momentary, conflict. Yet we can nevertheless appropriately discuss the matter under the general heading of Asceticism, since, as a rule, much practice and sacrifice go to build up this habit; since, in every case, this Abstractive Habit shares with Ordinary Asceticism a pronounced hostility to many influences and forces ever actually operative within and around the undisciplined natural man; and since, above all, the very complements and correctives for this Abstractiveness will have to come from a further, deeper and wider Asceticism, to be described presently.

(2) As to Ordinary Asceticism and this Abstractiveness, the former fights the world and the self directly, and then only in so far as they are discovered to be positively evil or definitely to hinder positive good; it is directly attracted by the clash and friction involved in such fighting; and it has no special desire for even a transitory intense unification of the soul’s life: whereas the Abstractiveness turns away from, and rises above, the world and the phenomenal self; their very existence, their contingency, the struggles alive within them, and their (as it seems) inevitably disturbing effect upon the soul,--are all felt as purely dissatisfying; and an innermost longing for a perfect and continuous unification and overflowing harmony of its inner life here possess the spirit.

(3) Now we have just seen how a movement of integration, of synthesizing all the soul’s piecemeal, inter-jostling acquisitions, of restful healing of its wounds and rents, of sinking back, (from the glare and glitter of clear, and then ever fragmentary perception, and from the hurry, strain and rapidly ensuing distraction involved in all lengthy external action), into a peaceful, dim rumination and unification, is absolutely necessary, though in very various degrees and forms, for all in any way complete and mature souls.--And we have, further back, realized that a certain, obscure but profoundly powerful, direct instinct and impression of God in the soul is doubtless at work here, and, indeed, throughout all the deeper and nobler movements of our wondrously various inner life. But what concerns us here, is the question whether the _complete_ action of the soul, (if man would grow in accordance with his ineradicable nature, environment, and specific grace and call), does not as truly involve a corresponding counter-movement to this intensely unitive and intuitive movement which, with most men, and in most moments of even the minority of men, forms but an indirectly willed condition and spontaneous background of the soul.

(4) We have been finding, further, that all the Contingencies, Multiplicities and Mediations which, one and all, tend to appear to the Mystic as so many resistances and distractions, can roughly be grouped under two ultimate heads. These intruders are fellow-souls, or groups of fellow-souls,--some social organism, the Family, Society, the State, the Church, who provoke, in numberless degrees and ways, individual affection, devotion, distraction, jealousy, as from person towards person. Or else the intruders are Things and Mechanical Laws, and these usually leave the Mystic indifferent or irritate or distract him; but they can become for him great opportunities of rest, and occasions for self-discipline.

Yet this distinction between Persons and Things, (although vital for the true apprehension of all deeper, above all of the deepest Reality, and for the delicate discrimination between what are but the means and what are the ends in a truly spiritual life), does not prevent various gradations within, and continuous interaction between, each of these two great groups. For in proportion as, in the Personal group, the Individual appears as but parcel and expression of one of the social organisms, does the impression of determinist Law, of an impersonal Thing or blind Force, begin to mix with, and gradually to prevail over, that of Personality. And in proportion as, in the Impersonal group, Science comes to include all careful and methodical study, according to the most appropriate methods, of any and every kind of truth and reality; and as it moves away from the conceptions of purely quantitative matter, and of the merely numerically different, entirely interchangeable, physical happenings, (all so many mere automatic illustrations of mechanical Law), on, through the lowly organisms of plant-life, and the ever higher interiority and richer consciousness of animal life, up to Man, with his ever qualitative Mind, and his ever non-interchangeable, ever “effortful,” achievements and elaborations of types of beauty, truth and goodness in Human History,--does Science itself come back, in its very method and subject-matter, ever more nearly, to the great personal starting-point, standard and ultimate motive of all our specifically human activity and worth.

(5) Indeed, the two great continuous facts of man’s life, first that he thinks, feels, wills, and acts, in and with the help or hindrance of that profoundly material Thing, his physical body, and on occasion of, and with regard to, the materials furnished by the stimulations and impressions of his senses; and again, that these latter awaken within him those, in themselves, highly abstract and Thing-like categories of his mind which penetrate and give form to these materials; are enough to show how close is the pressure, and how continuous the effect, of Things upon the slow upbuilding of Personality.

(6) Fair approximations to these two kinds of Things, with their quite irreplaceable specific functions within the economy of the human mental life,--the intensely concrete and particular Sense-Impressions, and the intensely abstract and general Mental Categories,--reappear within the economy of Characteristic Religion, in its Sacraments and its Doctrine. And conversely, there exists, _in rerum natura_, no Science worth having which is not, ultimately, the resultant of, and which does not require and call forth, on and on, certain special qualities, and combinations of qualities, of the truly ethical, spiritual Personality. Courage, patience, perseverance, candour, simplicity, self-oblivion, continuous generosity towards others and willing correction of even one’s own most cherished views,--these things and their like are not the quantitative determinations of Matter, but the qualitative characteristics of Mind.

(7) I shall now, therefore, successively take Mysticism in its attitude towards these two great groups of claimants upon its attention, the Personal and the Impersonal, even though any strictly separate discussion of elements which, in practice, ever appear together, cannot but have some artificiality. And an apparent further complication will be caused by our having, in each case, to contrast what Mysticism would do, if it became Exclusive, with what it must be restricted to doing, if it is to remain Inclusive, _i.e._ if it is to be but one element in the constitution of that multiplicity in unity, the deep spiritual Personality. The larger Asceticism will thus turn out to be a wider and deeper means towards perfection than even genuine Mysticism itself, since this Asceticism will have to include both this Mysticism and the counter movement within the one single, disciplined and purified life of the soul.

II. SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM.

_Introductory: the ruinousness of Exclusive Mysticism._

Prof. Harnack says in his _Dogmengeschichte_: “An old fairy tale tells of a man who lived in ignorance, dirt and wretchedness; and whom God invited, on a certain day, to wish whatsoever he might fancy, and it should be given him. And the man began to wish things, and ever more things, and ever higher things, and all these things were given him. At last he became presumptuous, and desired to become as the great God Himself: when lo, instantly he was sitting there again, in his dirt and misery. Now the history of Religion,--especially amongst the Greeks and Orientals,--closely resembles this fairy tale. For they began by wishing for themselves certain sensible goods, and then political, aesthetic, moral and intellectual goods: and they were given them all. And then they became Christians and desired perfect knowledge and a super-moral life: they even wished to become, already here below, as God Himself, in insight, beatitude and life. And behold, they fell, not at once indeed, but with a fall that could not be arrested, down to the lowest level, back into ignorance, dirt and barbarism.… Like unto their near spiritual relations, the Neo-Platonists, they were at first over-stimulated, and soon became jaded, and hence required ever stronger stimulants. And in the end, all these exquisite aspirations and enjoyments turned into their opposite extreme.”[439]

However much may want discounting or supplementing here, there is, surely, a formidable amount of truth in this picture. And, if so, is Mysticism, at least in its Dionysian type, not deeply to blame? And where is the safeguard against such terrible abuses?

Now Prof. Harnack has himself shown us elsewhere that there is a sense in which Monasticism should be considered eternal, even among and for Protestants. “Monasticism,” he says plaintively, in his account of the first three centuries of Protestantism, “even as it is conceivable and necessary among Evangelical Christians, disappeared altogether. And yet every community requires persons, who live _exclusively_ for its purposes; hence the Church too requires volunteers who shall renounce ‘the world’ and shall dedicate themselves entirely to the service of their neighbour.”[440]--And again, scholars of such breadth of knowledge and independence of judgement as Professor Tiele and his school, insist strongly upon the necessity of Ecclesiastical Institutions and Doctrines. The day of belief in the normality, indeed in the possibility for mankind in general, of a would-be quite individual, entirely spiritual, quite “pure” religion, is certainly over and gone, presumably for good and all, amongst all competent workers.--Nor, once more, can the general Mystical sense of the unsatisfying character of all things finite, and of the Immanence of the Infinite in our poor lives, be, in itself, to blame: for we have found these experiences to mingle with, and to characterize, all the noblest, most fully human acts and personalities.--But, if so, what are the peculiarities in the religion of those times and races, which helped to produce the result pictured in the _Dogmengeschichte?_

Now here, to get a fairly final answer, we must throw together the question of the ordinary Christian Asceticism and that of the Abstraction peculiar to the Mystics; and we must ask whether the general emotive-volitional attitude towards Man and Life,--the theory and practice as to Transcendence and Immanence, Detachment and Attachment, which, from about 500 A.D. to, say, 1450 _A.D._, predominantly preceded, accompanied, and both expanded and deflected the specific ally Christian and normally human experience in Eastern Christendom, were not (however natural, indeed inevitable, and in part useful for those times and races), the chief of the causes which turned so much of the good of Mysticism into downright harm. At bottom this is once more the question as to the one-sided character of Neo-Platonism,--its incapacity to find any descending movement of the Divine into Human life.

1. _True relation of the soul to its fellows. God’s “jealousy.”_

Let us take first the relation of the single human soul to its fellow-souls.

(1) Now Kierkegaard tells us: “the Absolute is cruel, for it demands _all_, whilst the Relative ever continues to demand _some_ attention from us.”[441] And the Reverend George Tyrrell, in his stimulating paper, _Poet and Mystic_, shows us that, as regards the relations between man’s love for man and man’s love for God, there are two conceptions and answers in reply to the question as to the precise sense in which God is “a jealous God,” and demands to be loved alone. In the first, easier, more popular conception, He is practically thought of as the First of Creatures, competing with the rest for Man’s love, and is here placed alongside of them. Hence the inference that whatever love they win from us by reason of their inherent goodness, is taken from Him: He is not loved perfectly, till He is loved alone. But in the second, more difficult and rarer conception, God is placed, not alongside of creatures but behind them, as the light which shines through a crystal and lends it whatever lustre it may have. He is loved here, not apart from, but through and in them. Hence if only the affection be of the right kind as to mode and object, the more the better. The love of Him is the “form,” the principle of order and harmony; our natural affections are the “matter” harmonized and set in order; it is the soul, they are the body, of that one Divine Love whose adequate object is God in, and not apart from, His creatures.[442] Thus we have already found that even the immensely abstractive and austere St. John of the Cross tells us: “No one desires to be loved except for his goodness; and when we love in this way, our love is pleasing unto God and in great liberty; and if there be attachment in it, there is greater attachment to God.” And this doctrine he continuously, deliberately practises, half-a-century after his Profession, for he writes to his penitent, Donna Juana de Pedrazas in 1589: “All that is wanting now, is that I should forget you; but consider how that is to be forgotten which is ever present to the soul.”[443]

But Father Tyrrell rightly observes: “To square this view with the general ascetic tradition of the faithful at large is exceedingly difficult.”[444] Yet I cannot help thinking that a somewhat different reconciliation, than the one attempted by him,[445] really meets all the substantial requirements of the case.

(2) I take it, then, that an all-important double law or twin fact, or rather a single law and fact whose unity is composed of two elements, is, to some extent, present throughout all characteristically human life, although its full and balanced realization, even in theory and still more in practice, is ever, necessarily, a more or less unfulfilled ideal: viz. that not only there exist certain objects, acts, and affections that are simply wrong, and others that are simply right or perfect, either for all men or for some men: but that there exist simply no acts and affections which, however right, however obligatory, however essential to the perfection of us all or of some of us, that do not require, on our own part, a certain alternation of interior reserve and detachment away from, and of familiarity and attachment to, them and their objects. This general law applies as truly to Contemplation as it does to Marriage.

And next, the element of detachment which has to penetrate and purify simply all attachments,--even the attachment to detachment itself,--is the more difficult, the less obvious, the more profoundly spiritual and human element and movement, although only on condition that ever some amount of the other, of the outgoing element and movement, and of attachment, remains. For here, as everywhere, there is no good and operative yeast except with and in flour; there can be no purification and unity without a material and a multiplicity to purify and to unite.

And again, given the very limited power of attention and articulation possessed by individual man, and the importance to the human community of having impressive embodiments and examples of this, in various degrees and ways, universally ever all-but-forgotten, universally difficult, universally necessary, universally ennobling renunciation: we get the reason and justification for the setting apart of men specially drawn and devoted to a maximum, or to the most difficult kinds, of this renunciation. As the practically universal instinct, or rudimentary capacity, for Art, Science, and Philanthropy finds its full expression in artists, scientists, philanthropists, whose specific glory and ever necessary corrective it is that they but articulate clearly, embody massively and, as it were, precipitate what is dimly and intermittingly present, as it were in solution, throughout the consciousness and requirements of Mankind; and neither the inarticulate instinct, diffused among all, would completely suffice for any one of the majority, without the full articulation by a few, nor the full articulation by this minority could thrive, even for this minority itself, were it not environed by, and did it not voice, that dumb yearning of the race at large: so, and far more, does the general religiosity and sense of the Infinite, and even its ever-present element and requirement of Transcendence and Detachment, seek and call forth some typical, wholesomely provocative incorporation,--yet, here, with an even subtler and stronger interdependence, between the general demand and the particular supply.

And note that, if the minority will thus represent a maximum of “form,” with a minimum of “matter,” and the majority a maximum of “matter,” with a minimum of “form”: yet some form as well as some matter must be held by each; and the ideal to which, by their mutual supplementations, antagonisms, and corrections, they will have more and more to approximate our corporate humanity will be a maximum of “matter,” permeated and spiritualized by a maximum of “form.” If it is easy for the soul to let itself be invaded and choked by the wrong kind of “matter,” or even simply by an excess of the right kind, so that it will be unable to stamp the “matter” with spiritual “form”; the opposite extreme also, where the spiritual forces have not left to them a sufficiency of material to penetrate or of life-giving friction to overcome, is ever a most real abuse.

2. _Ordinary Ascesis corrected by Social Christianity._

Now it is very certain that Ordinary Asceticism and Social Christianity are, in their conjunction, far less open to this latter danger than is the Mystical and Contemplative Detachment. For the former combination possesses the priceless conception of the soul’s personality being constituted in and through the organism of the religious society,--the visible and invisible Church. This Society is no mere congeries of severally self-sufficing units, each exclusively and directly dependent upon God alone; but, as in St. Paul’s grand figure of the body, an organism, giving their place and dignity to each several organ, each different, each necessary, and each influencing and influenced by all the others. We have here, as it were, a great living Cloth of Gold, with, not only the woof going from God to Man and from Man to God, but also the warp going from Man to Man,--the greatest to the least, and the least back to the greatest. And thus here the primary and full Bride of Christ never is, nor can be, any individual soul, but only this complete organism of all faithful souls throughout time and space; and the single soul is such a Bride only in so far as it forms an operative constituent of this larger whole.--And hence the soul of a Mystical habit will escape the danger of emptiness and inflation if it keeps up some,--as much indeed as it can, without permanent distraction or real violation of its special helps and call,--of that outgoing, social, co-operative action and spirit, which, in the more ordinary Christian life, has to form the all but exclusive occupation of the soul, and which here, indeed, runs the risk of degenerating into mere feverish, distracted “activity.”

I take the right scheme for this complex matter to have been all but completely outlined by Plato, in the first plan of his _Republic_, and indeed to have been largely derived by Christian thinkers from this source; and the excessive and one-sided conception to have been largely determined by his later additions and changes in that great book, especially as these have been all but exclusively enforced, and still further exaggerated, by Plotinus and Proclus. As Erwin Rhode finely says of this later teaching of Plato: “It was at the zenith of his life and thinking that Plato completed his ideal picture of the State, according to the requirements of his wisdom. Over the broad foundation of a population discriminated according to classes, (a foundation which, in its totality and organization, was to embody the virtue of justice in a form visible even from afar, and which formerly had seemed to him to fulfil the whole function of the perfect State), there now soars, pointing up into the super-mundane ether, a highest crown and pinnacle, to which all the lower serves but as a substructure to render possible this life in the highest air. A small handful of citizens, the Philosophers, form this final point of the pyramid of the State. In this State, ordered throughout according to the ends of ethics, these Philosophers will, it is true, take part in the Government, not joyously, but for duty’s sake; as soon, however, as duty permits, they will eagerly return to that super-mundane contemplation, which is the end and true content of their life’s activity. Indeed, in reality, the Ideal State is now built up, step by step, for the ‘one ultimate’ purpose of preparing an abode for these Contemplatives, of training them in their vocation, the highest extant, and of providing a means for the insertion of Dialectic, as a special form of life and the highest aim of human endeavour, into the general organism of the earthly, civilized life. ‘The so-called virtues’ all here sink into the shade before the highest force of the soul, the mystic Contemplation of the Eternal.… To bring his own life to ripeness for its own redemption, _that_ is now the perfect sage’s true, his immediate duty. If, nevertheless, he has still to bethink himself of acting upon and of moulding the world the virtues will spontaneously present themselves to him: for he now possesses Virtue itself; it has become his essential condition.”[446]

It is truly impressive to find here, in its most perfect and most influential form, that ruinously untrue doctrine of the separation of any one set of men from the mass of their fellows, and of Contemplation from interest in other souls, taking the place, (in the same great mind, in the same great book), of the beautifully humble, rich, and true view of a constant, necessary interchange of gifts and duties between the various constituents of a highly articulated organism, a whole which is indefinitely greater than, and is alone the full means, end and measure of, all its several, even its noblest, parts.--Yet the Christian, indeed every at all specifically religious, reader, will have strongly felt that the second scheme possesses, nevertheless, at least one point of advantage over the earlier one. For it alone brings out clearly that element of Transcendence, that sense and thirst of the Infinite, which we have agreed upon as the deepest characteristic of man. And if this point be thus true and important, then another,--the making of Contemplation into a special vocation,--can hardly be altogether incorrect.

But if this is our judgment, how are we to harmonize these two points of Plato’s later scheme with the general positions of the earlier one. Or, rather, how are we to actuate and to synthesize our complex present-day requirements and duties, Christian and yet also Modern, Transcendental and yet Immanental too? For if we have any delicately vivid sense of, and sympathy with, the original, very simple, intensely transcendental, form and emphasis of the Christian teaching, and any substantial share in the present complex sense of obligation to various laws and conceptions immanent in different this-world organizations and systems: we shall readily feel how indefinitely more difficult and deep the question has become since Plato’s, and indeed since the Schoolmen’s time.

3. _Preliminary Pessimism and ultimate Optimism of Christianity._

Now I think it is Prof. Ernst Troeltsch who has most fully explicitated the precise centre of this difficulty, which, in its acuteness, is a distinctly modern one, and the direction in which alone the problem’s true solution should be sought.

(1) “The chief problem of Christian Ethics,” he says, “is busy,” not with the relation between certain subjective means and dispositions, but “with the relation between certain objective ends, which have, in some way, to be thought together by the same mind as so many several objects, and to be brought by it and within it to the greatest possible unity. And the difficulty here lies in the fact, that the sublunar among these ends are none the less moral ends, bearing the full specific character of moral values,--that they are ends-in-themselves, and necessary for their own sakes, even at the cost of man’s natural happiness; and yet that they operate in the visible world, and adhere to historical formations which proceed from man’s natural constitution, and dominate his earthly horizon; whilst the Super-worldly End cannot share its rule with any other end. Yet the special characteristic of modern civilization resides precisely in such a simultaneous insistence upon the Inner-worldly Ends, as possessing the nature of ends-in-themselves, and upon the Religious, Super-worldly End: it is indeed from just this combination that this civilization derives its peculiar richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful, interior tension and its difficult problems.”

(2) The true solution of the difficulty surely is that “Ethical life is not, in its beginnings, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amidst a number of moral ends, whose unification is not his starting-point but his problem. And this multiplicity can be still further defined as the polarity of two poles, inherent in man’s nature, of which the two chief types proceed respectively from the religious and from the inner-worldly self-determination of the soul,--the polarity of Religious, and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be dispensed with without moral damage, yet which cannot be brought completely under a common formula. On this polarity depends the richness, but also the difficulty, of our life, since the sublunar ends remain, to a large extent, conditioned by the necessities and prerequisites of their own special subject-matters, and since only on condition of being thus recognized as ends in themselves, can they attain to their morally educative power.”[447]

(3) Or, to put the same matter from the point of view of definitely Christian experience and conviction: “The formula, for the specific nature of Christianity, can only be a complex conception,--the special Christian form,” articulation and correction, “of the fundamental thoughts concerning God, World, Man and Redemption which,” with indefinite variations of fulness and worth, “are found existing together in all the religions. And the tension present in this multiplicity of elements thus brought together is of an importance equal to that of the multiplicity itself; indeed in this tension resides the main driving-force of Religion. Christianity” in particular “embraces a polarity within itself, and its formula must be dualistic; it resembles, not a circle with one centre, but an ellipse with two focuses. For Christianity is,” unchangeably, “an Ethics of Redemption, with a conception of the world both optimistic and pessimistic, both transcendental and immanental, and an apprehension both of a severe antagonism and of a close interior union between the world and God. It is, in principle, a Dualism, and yet a Dualism which is ever in process of abolition by Faith and Action. It is a purely Religious Ethic, which concentrates man’s soul, with abrupt exclusiveness, upon the values of the interior life; and yet, again, it is a Humane Ethic, busy with the moulding and transforming of nature, and through love bringing about an eventual reconciliation with it. At one time the one, at another time the other, of these poles is prominent: but neither of them may be completely absent, if the Christian outlook is to be maintained.--And yet the original germ of the whole vast growth and movement ever remains an intensely, abruptly Transcendent Ethic, and can never simply pass over into a purely Immanental Ethic. The Gospel ever remains, with all possible clearness and keenness, a Promise of Redemption, leading us, away from the world, from nature and from sin, from earthly sorrow and earthly error, on and on to God; and which cannot allow the last word to be spoken in this life. Great as are its incentives to Reconciliation, it is never entirely resolvable into them. And the importance of that classical beginning ever consists in continuously calling back the human heart, away from all Culture and Immanence, to that which lies above both.”[448]

(4) We thus get at last a conception which really covers, I think, all the chief elements of this complex matter. But the reader will have noted that it does so by treating the whole problem as one of Spiritual Dynamics, and not of Intellectual Statics. For the conception holds and requires the existence and cultivation of three kinds of action and movement in the soul. There are, first, the various centres of human energy and duty of a primarily This-world character, each of which possesses its own kind and degree of autonomy, laws, and obligations. There is, next, the attempt at organizing an increasing interaction between, and at harmonizing, (whilst never emasculating or eliminating), these various, severally characteristic, systems of life and production into an ever larger ultimate unity. And, lastly, there is as strong a turning away from all this occupation with the Contingent and Finite, to the sense and apprehension of the Infinite and Abiding. And this dynamic system is so rich, even in the amount of it which can claim the practice of the majority of souls, as to require definite alternations in the occupations of such souls, ranging thus, in more or less rhythmic succession, from earth to Heaven and from Heaven back again to earth.

(5) And so great and so inexhaustible is this living system, even by mankind at large, that it has to be more or less parcelled out amongst various groups of men, each group possessing its own predominant _attrait_,--either to work out one of those immanental interests, say Art, Natural Science, Politics; or to fructify one or more of these relatively independent interests, by crossing it with one or more of the others; or to attempt to embrace the whole of these intra-mundane interests in one preliminary final system; or to turn away from this whole system and its contents to the Transcendent and Infinite; or finally to strive to combine, as far as possible, this latter Fleeing to the Infinite with all that former Seeking of the Finite.--We shall thus get specialists within one single domain; and more many-sided workers who fertilize one Science by another; and philosophers of Science or of History, or of both, who strive to reach the _rationale_ of all knowledge of the Finite and Contingent; and Ascetics and Contemplatives who, respectively, call forth and dwell upon the sense and presence of the Infinite and Abiding, underlying and accompanying all the definite apprehensions of things contingent; and finally, the minds and wills that feel called to attempt as complete a development and organization as possible of all these movements.

4. _Subdivision of spiritual labour: its necessity and its dangers._

And yet all the subdivision of labour we have just required can avoid doing harm, directly or indirectly, (by leading to Materialism, Rationalism, or Fanaticism, to one or other of the frequent but ever mischievous “Atomisms”), only on condition that it is felt and worked _as_ such a subdivision. In other words, every soul must retain and cultivate some sense of, and respect for, the other chief human activities not primarily its own. For, as a matter of fact, even the least rich or developed individual requires and practises a certain amount, in an inchoate form, of each and all of these energizings; and he can, fruitfully for himself and others, exercise a maximum amount of any one of them, only if he does not altogether and deliberately neglect and exclude the others; and, above all, if, in imagination and in actual practice, he habitually turns to his fellow-men, of the other types and centres, to supplement, and to be supplemented by, them.

It will be found, I think, that the quite undeniable abuses that have been special to the Ascetic and Contemplative methods and states, have all primarily sprung from that most plausible error that, if these energizings are, in a sense, the highest in and for man, then they can, at least in man’s ideal action and condition, dispense with other and lower energizings and objects altogether. Yet both for man’s practice here and even for his ideal state in the hereafter, this is not so. There is no such thing,--either in human experience or in the human ideal, when both are adequately analyzed and formulated,--as discursive reasoning, without intuitive reason; or clear analysis and sense of contrast, without dim synthesis and a deep consciousness of similarity or continuity; or detachment of the will from evil, without attachment of the higher feelings to things good; or the apprehension and requirements of Multiplicity, without those of Unity; or the vivid experience of Contingency, Mutation, and the Worthlessly Subjective, without the, if obscure yet most powerful, instinct of the Infinite and Abiding, of the true Objective and Valuable Subjective. Thus, for humanity at large entirely, and for each human individual more or less, each member of these couples requires, and is occasioned by, the other, and _vice versa_.

The maxims that follow from this great fact are as plain in reason, and as immensely fruitful in practice, as they are difficult, though ever freshly interesting, to carry out, at all consistently, even in theory and still more in act. For the object of a wise living will now consist in introducing an ever greater unity into the multiplicity of our lives,--up to the point where this unity’s constituents would, like the opposing metals in an electric battery, become too much alike still to produce a fruitful interaction, and where the unity would, thus and otherwise, become empty and mechanical; and an ever greater multiplicity into the unity,--up to the point where that multiplicity would, seriously and permanently, break up or weaken true recollection; and in more and more expanding this whole individual organism, by its insertion, as a constituent part, into larger groups and systems of interests. The Family, the Nation, Human Society, the Church,--these are the chief of the larger organizations into which the inchoate, largely only potential, organism of the individual man is at first simply passively born, yet which, if he would grow, (not in spite of them, a hopeless task, but by them), he will have deliberately to endorse and will, as though they were his own creations.

5. _Mystics and Spiritual Direction._

It is interesting to note the special characteristics attaching to the one social relation emphasized by the medieval and modern varieties of Western Catholic Mysticism; and the effect which a larger development of the other chief forces and modalities of the Catholic spiritual life necessarily has upon this relation. I am thinking of the part played by the Director, the soul’s leader and adviser, in the lives of these Mystics,--a part which differs, in three respects, from that of the ordinary Confessor in the life of the more active or “mixed” type of Catholic.

(1) For one thing, there is here a striking variety and range, in the ecclesiastical and social position of the persons thus providentially given and deliberately chosen. The early German Franciscan Preacher, Berthold of Regensburg, owes his initiation into the Interior Life to his Franciscan Novice-Master, the Partial Mystic, David of Augsburg, whose writings still give forth for us their steady light and genial warmth; the French widowed noblewoman and Religious Foundress, St. Jane Frances de Chantal, is helped on her course to high contemplation by the Secular Priest and Bishop, St. Francis de Sales; the French Jesuit, Jean Nicolas Grou, is initiated, after twenty-four years’ life and training in his Order, by the Visitation Nun, Soeur Pélagie, into that more Mystical spirituality, which constitutes the special characteristic of his chief spiritual books; the great Spaniard, St. Teresa herself, tells us how “a saintly nobleman … a married layman, who had spent nearly forty years in prayer, seems to me to have been, by the pains he took, the beginning of salvation to my soul”--“his power was great”; and the English Anchorite, Mother Juliana of Norwich, “a simple, unlettered creature,” seems to have found no special leader on to her rarely deep, wide, and tender teachings, but to have been led and stimulated, beyond and after her first general Benedictine training, by God’s Providence alone, working through the few and quite ordinary surroundings and influences of her Anchorage at Norwich.[449] It would be difficult to find anything to improve in this noble liberty of these great children of God; nor would a larger influence of the other modalities necessarily restrict this ample range.