Chapter XV (2)

(2) Again, the souls of this type seem, for the most part, to realize more fully and continuously than those of the ordinary, simply active and ascetical kind, that the “blind obedience” towards such leaders, so often praised in their disciples and penitents, is, where wholesome and strengthening, essentially a simple, tenacious adherence, during the inevitable times of darkness and perplexity, to the encouragements given by the guide to persevere along the course and towards the truths which this soul itself saw clearly, often through the instrumentality of this leader, when it was in light and capable of a peaceful, deliberate decision. For however much the light may have been given it through this human mediation, (and the most numerous, and generally the most important, of our lights, have been acquired thus through the spoken, written, or acted instrumentality of fellow-souls),--yet the light was seen, and had (in the first instance), to be seen, by the disciple’s own spiritual eye; and it is but to help it in keeping faithful to this light (which, in the first and last instance, is God’s light and its own) that the leader stands by and helps. But, given this important condition, there remains the simple, experimental fact that, not only can and do others often see our spiritual whereabouts and God’s _attrait_ for us more clearly than we do ourselves, but such unselfseeking transmission and such humbly simple reception of light between man and man adds a moral and spiritual security and beauty to the illumination, (all other conditions being equal and appropriate), not to be found otherwise. It is interesting to note the courageous, balanced, and certainly quite unprejudiced, testimony borne to these important points, by so widely read, and yet upon the whole strongly Protestant, a pair of scholars, as Miss Alice Gardner and her very distinguished brother, Professor Percy Gardner.[450]

(3) And finally, the souls of this type have, (at least for the two purposes of the suscitation of actual insight, and for bearing witness to this, now past, experience during the soul’s periods of gloom), often tended,--in Western Christendom and during Medieval and still more in Modern times,--to exalt the office and power of the Director, in the life of the soul of the Mystical type, very markedly beyond the functions, rights and duties of the ordinary Confessor in the spiritual life of the ordinary Catholic.

Indeed they and their interpreters have, in those times and places, often insisted upon the guarantee of safety thus afforded, and upon the necessity of such formal and systematic mediation, with an absoluteness and vehemence impossible to conciliate with any full and balanced, especially with any at all orthodox, reading of Church History. For this feature is as marked in the condemned book of Molinos and of most of the other Quietists, as it is in such thoroughly approved Partial Mysticism as that of Père Lallemant and Père Grou: hence it alone cannot, surely, render a soul completely safe against excesses and delusions. And this feature was markedly in abeyance, often indeed, for aught we know, completely wanting, at least in any frequent and methodic form, in the numerous cases of the Egyptian and other Fathers of the Desert: hence it cannot be strictly essential to all genuine Contemplation in all times and places.

(4) The dominant and quite certain fact here seems to be that, in proportion as the Abstractive movement of the soul is taken as self-sufficient, and a Contemplative life is attempted as something substantially independent of any concrete, social, and devotional helps and duties, the soul gets into a state of danger, which no amount of predominance of the Director can really render safe; whereas, in proportion as the soul takes care to practise, in its own special degree and manner, the outgoing movement towards Multiplicity and Contingency, (particular attention to particular religious facts and particular service of particular persons), does such right, quite ordinary-seeming, active subordination to, and incorporation within, the great sacred organisms of the Family, Society, and the Church, or of any wise and helpful subdivision of these, furnish material, purgation and check for the other movement, and render superfluous any great or universal predominance of Direction. St. Teresa is, here also, wonderfully many-sided and balanced. Just as she comes to regret having ever turned aside from Christ’s Sacred Humanity, so too she possesses, indeed she never loses, the sense of the profoundly social character of Christianity: she dies as she had lived, full of an explicit and deep love for the Kingdom of God and the Church.

6. _Mysticism predominantly Individualistic._

Yet it is clear that the strong point of the Mystics, as such, does not lie in the direction of the great social spirituality which finds God in our neighbour and in the great human organizations, through and in which, after all, man in great part becomes and is truly man. They are, as such, Individualistic; the relation between God and the individual soul here ever tends to appear as constituted by these two forces alone. A fresh proof, if one were still wanting, that Mysticism is but one of the elements of Religion,--for Religion requires both the Social and the Individual, the Corporate and the Lonely movement and life.

It is truly inspiring to note how emphatic is the concurrence of all the deepest and most circumspect contemporary Psychology, Epistemology, Ethics, and History and Philosophy of the Sciences and of Religion, in these general conclusions, which find, within the slow and many-sided growth and upbuilding of the spiritual personality, a true and necessary place and function for all the great and permanent capabilities, aspirations and energizings of the human soul. Thus no system of religion can be complete and deeply fruitful which does not embrace, (in every possible kind of healthy development, proportion and combination), the several souls and the several types of souls who, between them, will afford a maximum of clear apprehension and precise reasoning, _and_ of dim experience and intuitive reason; of particular attention to the Contingent (Historical Events and Persons, and Institutional Acts and Means) _and_ of General Recollection and Contemplation and Hungering after the Infinite; and of reproductive Admiration and Loving Intellection, _and_ of quasi-creative, truly productive Action upon and within Nature and other souls, attaining, by such Action, most nearly to the supreme attribute, the Pure Energizing of God.

Thus Pseudo-Dionysius and St. John of the Cross will, even in their most Negative doctrines, remain right and necessary in all stages of the Church’s life,--on condition, however, of being taken as but one of two great movements, of which the other, the Positive movement, must also ever receive careful attention: since only between them is attained that all-important oscillation of the religious pendulum, that interaction between the soul’s meal and the soul’s yeast, that furnishing of friction for force to overcome, and of force to overcome the friction, that material for the soul to mould, and in moulding which to develop itself, that alternate expiration and inspiration, upon which the soul’s mysterious death-in-life and life-in-death so continuously depends.

III. THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM.

_Introductory. Difficulty yet Necessity of finding a True Place and Function for Science in the Spiritual Life._

Now it is certain that such an oscillatory movement, such a give-and-take, such a larger Asceticism, built up out of the alternate engrossment in and abstraction from variously, yet in each case really, attractive levels, functions and objects of human life and experience, is still comparatively easy, as long as we restrict it to two out of the three great groups of energizings which are ever, at least potentially, present in the soul, and which ever inevitably help to make or mar, to develop or to stunt, the totality of the soul’s life, and hence also of the strictly spiritual life. The Historical-Institutional, and the Mystical-Volitional groups and forces, the High-Church and the Low-Church trend, the Memory- and the Will-energies, do indeed coalesce, in times of peace, with the Reason-energy, though, even then, with some difficulty. But in times of war,--on occasion of any special or excessive action on the part of this third group, the Critical-Speculative, the Broad-Church trend, and the energizing of the Understanding,--they readily combine against every degree of the latter. It is as though the fundamental vowels A and U could not but combine to oust the fundamental vowel I; or as if the primary colours Red and Blue _must_ join to crush out the primary colour Yellow.

Indeed, it is undoubtedly just this matter of the full and continuous recognition of, and allocation of a special function to, this third element within the same great spiritual organism which englobes the other two, which is now the great central difficulty and pressing problem of more or less every degree and kind of religious life. For the admission of this third element appears frequently to be ruinous to the other two; yet the other two, when kept away from it, seem to lose their vigour and persuasive power.--And yet it is, I think, exactly at this crucial point that the conception of the spiritual life as essentially a Dynamism, a slow constitution of an ever fuller, deeper, more close-knit unity in, and by means of, the soul’s ineradicable trinity of forces, shows all its fruitfulness, if we but work down to a sufficiently large apprehension of the capacities and requirements of human nature, moved and aided by divine grace, and to a very precise delimitation of the special object and function of Mysticism.

1. _Science and Religion: each autonomous at its own level; and, thus, each helpful to the other._

Erwin Rhode has well described Plato’s attitude towards Science and Mysticism respectively, and towards the question of their inter-relation. “The flight from the things of this World is, for Plato, already in itself an acquisition of those of the Beyond, and an assimilation to the Divine. For this poor world, that solicits our senses, the philosopher has, at bottom, nothing but negation. Incapable as it is of furnishing a material that can be truly known, the whole domain of the Transitory and Becoming has no intrinsic significance for Science as understood by him. The perception of things which are ever merely relative, and which simultaneously manifest contradictory qualities, has its sole use in stimulating and inviting the soul to press on to the Absolute.”[451]

Here we should frankly admit that the soul’s hunger for the Infinite is, as the great Athenian so deeply realized, the very mainspring of Religion; and yet we must maintain that it is precisely this single bound away, instead of the ever-repeated double movement of a coming and a going, which not only helped to suppress, or at least gravely to stunt, the growth of the sciences of external observation and experiment, but (and this is the special point,--the demonstrable other side of the medal,) also, in its degree, prevented religion from attaining to its true depth, by thus cutting off, as far as Plato’s conviction prevailed, the very material, stimulation, and in part the instruments, for the soul’s outgoing, spiritualizing work, together with this work’s profound reflex effect upon the worker, as a unique occasion for the growth and self-detachment of the soul.

Now the necessity for such a first stage and movement, which, as far as possible both immanental and phenomenalist, shall be applied and restricted to the special methods, direct objects, and precise range of each particular Science, and the importance of the safeguarding of this scientific liberty, are now clearly perceived, by the leading men of Religion, Philosophy, Psychology and Physics, in connection with the maintenance and acquisition of sincere and fruitful Science.--It is also increasingly seen that, even short of Religion, a second, an interpretative, an at least Philosophical stage and movement is necessary for the full explicitation of Science’s own assumptions and affinities. And the keeping of these two movements clearly distinct or even strongly contrasted, is felt, by some far-sighted Theologians, to be a help towards securing, not only a candid attitude of Science towards its own subject matters, but also a right independence of Philosophy and Theology towards the other Sciences. Thus Cardinal Newman has brought out, with startling force, the necessarily non-moral, non-religious character of Physico-Mathematical Science, taken simply within its direct subject-matter and method. “Physical science never travels beyond the examination of cause and effect. Its object is to resolve the complexity of phenomena into simple elements and principles; but when it has reached those first elements, principles and laws, its mission is at an end; it keeps within that material system with which it began, and never ventures beyond the ‘flammantia moenia mundi.’ The physicist as such will never ask himself by what influence, external to the universe, the universe is sustained; simply because he is a physicist. If, indeed, he be a religious man, he will, of course, have a very different view of the subject; … and this, not because physical science says anything different, but simply because it says nothing at all on the subject, nor can do by the very undertaking with which it set out.” Or, as he elsewhere sympathetically sums up Bacon’s method of proceeding: “The inquiry into physical causes passes over for the moment the existence of God. In other words, physical science is, in a certain sense, atheistic, for the very reason that it is not theology.”[452]

2. _Science builds up a preliminary world that has to be corrected by Philosophy and Religion, at and for their deeper levels._

The additional experience and analysis of the last half-century apparently forces us, however, to maintain not only that Physico-Mathematical Science, and all knowledge brought strictly to the type of that Science, does not itself pronounce on the Ultimate Questions; but that this Science, as such, actually presents us with a picture of reality which, at the deeper level even of Epistemology and of the more ultimate Psychology, and still more at that of Religion, requires to be taken as more or less artificial, and as demanding, not simply completion, but, except for its own special purposes, correction as well. Thus we have seen how M. Bergson finds Clock-Time to be an artificial, compound concept, which seriously travesties Duration, the reality actually experienced by us; and Space appears as in even a worse predicament. M. Emil Boutroux in France, Dottore Igino Petrone in Italy, Profs. Eucken and Troeltsch in Germany, Profs. James Ward and Pringle Pattison in Great Britain, and Profs. William James, Hugo Münsterberg and Josiah Royce in America are, in spite of differences on other points, united in insistence upon, or have even worked out in much detail, such a distinction between the first stage and level of Determinist, Atomistic, Inorganic Nature and our concepts of it, and the second stage and level of Libertarian, Synthetic, and Organic Spiritual Reality, and our experience of it. And the penetrating labours of Profs. Windelband, Rickert, and others, towards building up a veritable _Organon_ of the Historical Sciences, are bringing into the clearest relief these two several degrees of Reality and types of Knowledge, the Historical being the indefinitely deeper and more adequate, and the one which ultimately englobes the other.[453]

A profoundly significant current in modern philosophy will thus be brought, in part at least, to articulate expression and application. This current is well described by Prof. Volkelt. “German philosophy since Kant reveals, in manifold forms and under various disguises, the attempt to recognize, in Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics, such kinds of Certainty, such domains of Being, such human Volitions and Values, as lie beyond reason, constitute a something that it cannot grasp, and are rooted in some other kind of foundation. In variously struggling, indeed stammering utterances, expression is given to the assurance that not everything in the world is resolvable into Logic and Thought, but that mighty resisting remainders are extant, which perhaps even constitute the most important thing in the world.… Such a longing after such a Reality can be traced in Hamann, Jacobi, Herder, in Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the youthful Schleiermacher, and Jean Paul. Indeed, even in Hegel, the adorer of Reason, the movement of Negation, which is the very soul of his philosophy, is, at bottom, nothing but the Irrational,” the Super-Rational, “element violently pressed into the form of Reason; and again the single Thing, the This, the Here and the Now, are felt by him as … a something beyond Reason. And has not the Irrational found expression in Kant, in his doctrines of the unconditional Liberty of the Will and of Radical Evil? In the later Schelling and his spiritual relatives the Irrational has found far more explicit recognition; whilst Schopenhauer brings the point to its fullest expression. Yet even Nietzsche still possesses such an element, in his doctrine of the ‘Over-Man.’”[454] And in England we find this same element, in various degrees and in two chief divergent forms, in the Cambridge Platonists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Hill Green on the one hand; and in Bishop Butler and Cardinal Newman on the other hand.

We can thus point to much clear recognition, or at least to a considerable influence, of the profound truth that Science and Wisdom can each prosper and help and supplement the other, only if each possesses a certain real autonomy, a power fully to become and to remain itself, and, in various degrees and ways, to stimulate, check and thwart the other. And this truth ever presupposes, what human experience, in the long run, proves to be a fact,--that the different kinds, spheres, and levels of man’s apprehension, and of the total reality thus apprehended by him, are already immanently planned each for the other, within a great, largely dormant system of the world. Thus Man can and should call this congenital inter-relatedness into ever more vigorous and more fruitful play; whereas, if it were not already present deep within the very nature of things, no amount of human effort or ingenuity could ever evoke or insert it. Prof. Volkelt has, as we have seen, illustrated this great fact very strikingly, with regard to the relation extant between the apparently sheer contingencies of human History and the requirements of Philosophy, of normative thought and ideal truth. Yet a similar inter-connection can be traced elsewhere, between any other two or more levels and spheres of wholesome and permanent human apprehension and action, in their relation to various degrees and kinds of reality, as this environs man or inheres in him.

3. _Necessity of the “Thing-element” in Religion._

But let us note that the recognition, of an at all emphatic, systematic kind, of such inter-relatedness is, so far, almost limited to the moods and persons preoccupied with the right claims of Science or of Philosophy upon each other or upon the remainder of Life; and is, as yet, all but wanting, when Life is approached from the side of the specifically Religious requirements and of the Spiritual consolidation of man’s soul. Yet here especially, at by far the most important point of the whole matter, the unique place and significance of Science can now be very clearly grasped.

Indeed it is deeply interesting to note how largely the fundamental characteristics of Catholicism really meet, or rather how they strictly require, some such vivid conception and vigorous use of the Determinist Thing and of its level for the full constitution of our true depth, our Spiritual Personality itself. If we take, _e.g._, the criticisms addressed, by so earnest and acute a mind as the intensely Protestant Emile Sulze, to the whole Thing-Element and -Concept, as these are at work in the Catholic practice and position, we shall find his sense of the difference between Thing and Spirit to be as enviably keen, and his idea of the end and ultimate measure of Religion to be as sound and deep, as his conception of the means towards developing Religion and the Spirit is curiously inadequate.

(1) “Personality,” says Sulze, “is, for Religion and Morality, the supreme Good, of which the source is in God, and the end, the fruit, and the manifestation is in Man.”[455] This I take to be profoundly true, especially if we insist upon Perfect Personality being Supreme and Perfect Spirit; and, again, upon our imperfect personality and spirit as possessed of certain profound affinities to, and as penetrable and actually moved by, that Perfect Spirit.

(2) “The value of Personality nowhere finds a full recognition in Catholicism; Catholicism indeed is Pantheism.” Now this harsh judgment is based upon two sets of allegations, which, though treated by Sulze as of the same nature, are, I would submit, essentially different, and this because of their definitely different places and functions in the Catholic system.

“The Impersonal Godhead, the bond which unites the three Persons, stands above the Persons. Hence those who took religion seriously had to lose themselves, pantheistically, in the abyss of the Divinity. And in Christ the Person was even looked upon as the product of two Natures, the Divine and the Human, hence of two Impersonal Forces.”[456] Here two peculiarities in the early Conciliar Definitions are emphasized, which were doubtless as helpful, indeed necessary, for the apprehension of the great abiding truths thus conveyed to the Graeco-Roman mind, as they are now in need of reinterpretation in the light of our greater sensitiveness to the difference, in character and in value, which obtains between the concept of Spirit and Personality and that of Substances and Things.

But Sulze continues, without any change in the kind or degree of his criticism: “Impersonal miraculous means, created by the Hierarchy, are put by it in the place of the sanctifying mutual intercourse of the children of God.” “Christianity, torn away from the religious and moral life, became thus a special, technical apparatus, without any religious or spiritual worth. Ecclesiastical Christianity has become a Pantheism, Materialism, indeed Atheism.”[457] We have so continuously ourselves insisted upon the profound danger, and frequently operative abuse, of any and all complete apartness between any one means, function, or _attrait_ of the spiritual life and the others, that we can, without any unfairness, restrict ourselves here to the attack upon the general acceptation of Impersonal means as helps towards the constitution of Personality. Now Sulze’s principle here,--that only directly personal means can help to achieve the end of Personality,--is most undoubtedly false, unless Mathematico-Physical Science is also to be ruled out of life, as necessarily destructive of, or at least as necessarily non-conductive to, Personality.

(3) Indeed Sulze himself tells us, most truly, that, “for Religion also, Science is a bath of purification”; and that “Doctrine and the Sacraments are aids, in the hands of Christ and of the Community, towards representing the riches of their interior life and offering these to believing hearts.”[458] This latter pronouncement is, however, still clearly insufficient. For if there is a double truth which, at the end of well-nigh five centuries, ought to have burnt itself indelibly into the mind and conscience of us all, it is, surely, the following. On the one hand, Man, unless he develops a vigorous alternating counter-movement, ever grows like to the instruments of his labour and self-development, and hence, whilst busy with Things, (whether these be Natural Happenings and their Sciences, or Religious Institutions and Doctrines), he inclines to become, quite unawares, limited and assimilated to them,--himself thus a Thing among Things, instead of, through such various Things, winning an ever fuller apprehension of and growth in Spiritual Personality. Yet, on the other hand, without such a movement of close contact with the Thing, (both the intensely concrete, the Here and Now Contingency, and the profoundly Abstract, the stringent Universal Law) and without the pleasure and pain derived from the accompanying sense of contraction and of expansion, of contrast, conflict, supplementation and renovation,--there is no fullest discipline or most solid growth of the true spiritual Personality.

(4) Thus Science, as Sulze himself clearly sees, not merely aids us to represent and to communicate our personality acquired elsewhere, but the shock, friction, contrast, the slow, continuous discipline, far more, beyond doubt, than any positive content furnished by such science, can and should constitute an essential part of the soul’s spiritual fertilization. And similarly, if we move on into the directly religious life, the Sacramental contacts and Doctrinal systems (the former so intensely concrete, the latter often so abstract,) are not simply means towards representing and transmitting spirituality acquired elsewhere: but they are amongst the means, and, in some form and degree, the necessary, indeed actually universal means, towards the awakening and developing and fulfilling of this our spiritual personality.

4. _Three possible relations between Thing and Thought, Determinism and Spirit._

It remains no doubt profoundly true that, with the awakening of the Mystical sense, will come a more or less acute consciousness of an at least superficial and preliminary, difference between this sense, with its specific habits and informations, and those means and forms, in part so contingent and external, in part so intensely abstract and yet so precise. But it is equally certain that such a soul, and at such a stage, even as it continues to require, in some respects more than ever, for its general balanced development, some of the irreplaceable discipline and manly, bracing humiliation of the close external observation and severe abstract generalization of Science: so also does it continue to require, for the deepening of the spirit and for the growth of creatureliness, the contact with religious Things,--the profoundly concrete Sacraments and the intensely abstract Doctrines of the religious community.

(1) In one of Trendelenburg’s most penetrating essays, he shows us how, between blind Force and conscious Thought,--if we presuppose any tendency towards unity to exist between them,--there can be but three possible relations. “Either Force stands before Thought, so that Thought is not the primitive reality, but the result and accident of blind Force; or Thought stands before Force, so that blind Force is not itself the primitive reality, but the effluence of Thought; or finally, Thought and Force are, at bottom, only one and the same thing, and differ only in our mind’s conception of them.” And only one of these three positions can, by any possibility, be the true one: hence their internecine conflict.[459]

(2) Now Religion, in its normal, central stream, stands most undoubtedly for Thought before Force, the second, the Theistic view. And yet it would be profoundly impoverishing for our outlook and practice, and would but prepare a dangerous reaction in ourselves or others, were we ever to ignore the immense influence, in the history, not only of philosophical speculation, but even of religious feeling and aspiration, not indeed of the first, the Materialist, view, (which owes all its strength to non-religious causes or to a rebound against religious excesses), but of the third, the Pantheistic, Monistic, view, whose classical exponent Spinoza will probably remain unto all time.

(3) If we examine into what constitutes the religious plausibility and power of this view, we shall find, I think, that it proceeds, above all, from the fact that, only too often, the second, the Theistic view and practice, leaves almost or quite out of sight the purification and slow constitution of the Individual into a Person, by means of the Thing-element, the apparently blind Determinism of Natural Law and Natural Happenings. Yet nothing can be more certain than that we must admit and place this undeniable, increasingly obtrusive, element and power _somewhere_ in our lives: if we will not own it as a means, it will grip us as our end. The unpurified, all but merely natural, animal, lustful and selfish individual man, is far too like to the brutes and plants, indeed even to the inorganic substances that so palpably surround him, for it not to be a fantastic thought to such thinkers as Spinoza, (and indeed it would be an excessive effort to himself,) to believe that he is likely, taken simply in this condition, to outlast, and is capable of dominating, the huge framework of the visible world, into which his whole bodily and psychical mechanism is placed, and to which it is bound by a thousand ties and closest similarities: his little selfish thinkings cannot but seem mere bubbles on a boundless expanse of mere matter; all creation cannot, surely, originate in, depend from, and move up to, a Mind and Spirit in any way like unto this trivial ingenuity.

(4) It is true, of course, that Spinoza ended,--as far as the logic of his system went,--by “purifying” away not only this animal Individualism, but Spiritual Personality as well, and this because he takes Mathematico-Physical concepts to be as directly applicable and as adequate to Ultimate Reality as are the Ethico-Spiritual categories. We have then to admit that even so rich and rare, so deeply religious a spirit as Spinoza could insist upon purification by the “preliminary Pantheism,” and yet could remain, in theory, the eager exponent of an ultimate Pantheism. Like the Greeks, he not only passes through a middle distance, a range of experience which appears dominated by austere Fate and blind Fortune, but finds Fate even in ultimate Reality. Whilst, however, the Greeks often thought of Fate as superior even to the Gods, Spinoza finds Ultimate Reality to be neither Nature nor Spirit, but simply Being in General, with a Law which is neither Natural nor Spiritual Law, but Law in general. This General Being and General Law then bifurcate, with the most rigorous determinism and complete impartiality, step by step, into parallel and ever co-present manifestations of Nature and of Spirit, and of their respective laws, which, though different, are also each strictly determined within their own series.[460]

(5) But Spinoza’s error here undoubtedly lies in his _de facto_ violent bending (in spite of this theoretical Parallelism) of all Knowledge, Reality, and Life, under the sole Mathematico-Physical categories and method; and in the insistence upon attaining to ultimate Truth by one single bound and with complete adequacy and clearness. And the greatness here consists in the keen and massive sense of three profound truths. He never forgets that Mathematico-Physical Science is rigidly determinist, and that it stands for a certain important truth and penetrates to a certain depth of reality. He never ceases to feel how impure, selfish, petty is the natural man, and how pure, disinterested, noble, can and should be the spiritual personality. And he never lets go the sense that, somehow, that science must be able to help towards this purification.

(6) Now these three truths must be preserved, whilst the Mathematico-Physical one-sidedness and the “one-step” error must be carefully eliminated. And indeed it is plain that only by such elimination can those truths operate within a fully congenial system. For only thus, with a dissimilarity between the Ultimate, Libertarian, Spiritual Reality, and the Intermediate, Determinist, Physico-Mathematical Range, can we explain and maintain the pain, not only of the selfish but also of the true self, in face the Mere Thing; and only thus is all such pain and trouble worth having, since only thus it leads to the fuller development and the solid constitution of an abiding, interior, mental and volitional Personality.

5. _Purification of the Personality by the impersonal._

Prof. H. J. Holtzmann has got an eloquent page concerning the kind of Dualism which is more than ever desirable for souls, if they would achieve a full and virile personality in this our day. “It would appear to be the wiser course for us to recognize the incompatibility between merely natural existence and truly personal life, just as it is, in its whole acute non-reconciliation; to insert this conflict into our complete outlook on to Life in its full breadth and depth, and to find the harmonization in God the Infinite, in whom alone such parallels can meet, and not deliberately to blind our right eye or our left, in order to force that outlook into one single aspect,--a degree of unification which, when achieved in this violent manner, would mean for us, at the same time, a point of absolute inertia, of eternal stagnation.” And he then shows how it is precisely the interaction within our minds, feelings, and volitions, of, on the one hand, the boundless world of nature, with its majestic impersonality, and on the other hand, the inexhaustible, indefinitely deeper realm of personal life, as it appears within the stream of human history, which is best adapted to give us some fuller glimpses of the greatness of God and of the specific character of religion.[461]

The religious imagination, mind, heart, and will,--that is to say, the complete, fully normal human being at his deepest,--has thus been more and more forced, by an increasingly articulated experience of the forces and requirements of actual life, to hold and to practise, with ever-renewed attempts at their most perfect inter-stimulation and mutual supplementation, a profoundly costing, yet immensely fruitful, trinity in unity of convictions on this point.

In every time, place, and race, man will continue to be or to become religious, in proportion to his efficacious faith in, and love of, the overflowing reality and worth of the great direct objects of religion,--God and the soul, and their inter-relation in and through the Kingdom of God, the Church, and its Divine-Human Head,--the whole constituting God’s condescension towards and immanence in man, and man’s response and orientation towards the transcendent God.

And again, in every age, place, and race, man will be or will become deeply religious, in proportion to the keenness with which he realizes the immense need of spiritual growth and purification for his, at best, but inchoate personality.

But,--and this third point we must admit, in the precise extension and application given to it here, to be characteristically modern,--man will, (if he belongs to our time and to our Western races, and is determined fully to utilize our special circumstances, lights and trials, as so many means towards his own spiritualization), have carefully to keep in living touch with that secondary and preliminary reality, the Thing-world, the Impersonal Element, Physical Science and Determinist Law. He will have to pass and repass beneath these Caudine forks; to plunge and to replunge into and through this fiery torrent; and, almost a merely animal individual at the beginning and on this side of such docile bendings and such courageous plungings, he will, (if he combines them with, and effects them through, those two other, abiding and ultimate, directly religious convictions), straighten himself up again to greater heights, and will come forth from the torrent each time a somewhat purer and more developed spiritual person than he was before such contraction and purgation.

6. _This position new for Science, not for Religion._

Yet even this third point has, if we will but look to its substantial significance and religious function, been equivalently held and practised ever since the Twice-Born life, the deeper religion, has been lived at all.

(1) The Ascetic’s self-thwarting, and the Mystic’s self-oblivion and seeking after Pure Love, what are they but the expressions of the very same necessities and motives which we would wish to see fully operative here? For we are not, of course, here thinking of anything simply intellectual, and fit only for the educated few. Any poor laundry-girl, who carefully studies and carries out the laws of successful washing, who moves, in alternation, away from this concentration on the Thing, to recollection and increasingly affective prayer and rudimentary contemplation, and who seeks the fuller growth of her spirit and of its union with God, in this coming and going, to and from the Visible and Contingent, to and from the Spiritual and Infinite, and in what these several levels have of contrast and of conflict; or any lowly farm-labourer or blacksmith or miner, who would proceed similarly with his external determinist mechanical work, and with his deeply internal requirements and spiritual growth and consolidation: would all be carrying out precisely what is here intended.

(2) As a matter of fact, the source of such novelty, as may be found here, is not on the side of religion, but on that of science. For the conception of Nature of the ancient Greek Physicists, and indeed that of Aristotle, required to be profoundly de-humanized, de-sentimentalized: a rigorous mathematical Determinism and soulless Mechanism became the right and necessary ideal of Physical Science. But, long before the elaboration of this concept of the ruthless Thing, and of its blind Force, Our Lord had, by His Life and Teaching, brought to man, with abidingly unforgettable, divine depth and vividness, the sense of Spirit and Personality, with its liberty and interiority, its far-looking wisdom and its regenerating, creative power of love. And for some thirteen centuries after this supreme spiritual revelation and discovery, that old anthropomorphic and anthropocentric conception of the Physical Universe continued, well-nigh unchanged, even among the earlier and middle schoolmen, and was readily harmonized with that Spiritual world. Yet they were harmonized, upon the whole, by a juxtaposition which, in proportion as the conception of Nature became Determinist and Mechanical, has turned out more and more untenable; and which, like all simple juxtapositions, could not, as such, have any spiritually educative force. But Spiritual Reality has now,--for those who have become thoroughly awake to the great changes operated, for good and all, in man’s conception of the Physical Universe during now three centuries,--to be found under, behind, across these Physical Phenomena and Laws, which both check and beckon on the mind and soul of man, in quest of their ultimate mainstay and motivation.

(3) And let us note how much some such discipline and asceticism is required by the whole Christian temper and tradition, and the weakening of some older forms of it.

During the first three generations Christians were profoundly sobered by the keen expectation of Our Lord’s proximate Second Coming, and of the end of the entire earthly order of things, to which all their natural affections spontaneously clung; and again and again, up to well-nigh the Crusading Age, this poignant and yet exultant expectation seized upon the hearts of Christians. And then, especially from St. Augustine’s teaching onwards, an all-pervading, frequently very severe, conviction as to the profound effects of Original Sin, a pessimistic turning away from the future of this sublunar world, as leading up to the great Apostacy, and a concentration upon Man’s prehistoric beginnings, as incomparably eclipsing all that mankind would ever achieve here below, came and largely took the place, as the sobering, detaching element in Christianity, of the vivid expectation of the Parousia which had characterized the earlier Christian times.

Clearly, the Parousia and the Original Sin conception have ceased to exercise their old, poignantly detaching power upon us. Yet we much require some such special channel and instrument for the preservation and acquisition of the absolutely essential temper of Detachment and Other-Worldiness. I think that this instrument and channel of purification and detachment--if we have that thirst for the More and the Other than all things visible can give to our souls, (a thirst which the religious sense alone can supply and without which we are religiously but half-awake)--is offered to us now by Science, in the sense and for the reasons already described.

7. _Three kinds of occupation with Science._

Let the reader note that thus, and, I submit, thus only, we can and do enlist the religious passion itself on the side of disinterested, rightly autonomous science. For thus the harmony between the different aspects and levels of life is not, (except for our general faith in its already present latent reality, and in its capacity for ultimate full realization and manifestation), the static starting-point or automatically persisting fact in man’s life; but it is, on the contrary, his ever difficult, never completely realized goal,--a goal which can be reached only by an even greater transformation within the worker than within the materials worked upon by him,--a transformation in great part effected by the enlargement and purification, incidental to the inclusion of that large range of Determinist Thing-laws and experiences within the Spirit’s Libertarian, Personal life.

It is plain that there are three kinds and degrees of occupation with Things and Science, and with their special level of truth and reality; and that in proportion as their practice within, and in aid of, the spiritual life is difficult, in the same proportion, (given the soul’s adequacy to this particular amount of differentiation and pressure)--is this practice purifying. And though but few souls will be called to any appreciable amount of activity within the third degree, all souls can be proved, I think, to require a considerable amount of the first two kinds, whilst mankind at large most undoubtedly demands careful, thorough work of all three sorts.

The first kind is that of the man with a hobby. His directly religious acts and his toilsome bread-winning will thus get relieved and alternated by, say, a little Botany or a little Numismatics, or by any other “safe” science, taken in a “safe” dose, in an easy, _dilettante_ fashion, for purposes of such recreation. This kind is already in fairly general operation, and is clearly useful in its degree and way, but it has, of course, no purificatory force at all.

The second kind is that of the man whose profession is some kind of science which has, by now, achieved a more or less secure place alongside of, or even within, religious doctrines and feelings,--such as Astronomy or Greek Archaeology. Here the purification will be in proportion to the loyal thoroughness with which he fully maintains, indeed develops, the special characteristics and autonomy both of these Sciences, as the foreground, part-material and stimulation, and of Religion, as the groundwork, background and ultimate interpreter and moulder of his complete and organized life; and with which he makes each contribute to the development of the other and of the entire personality, its apprehensions and its work. This second kind is still comparatively rare, doubtless, in great part, because of the considerable cost and the lifelong practice and training involved in what readily looks like a deliberate complicating and endangering of things, otherwise, each severally, simple and safe.

And the third kind is that of him whose systematic mental activity is devoted to some science or research, which is still in process of winning full and peaceful recognition by official Theology,--say, Biological Evolution or Biblical Criticism. Here the purification will, for a soul capable of such a strain, be at its fullest, provided such a soul is deeply moved by, and keeps devotedly faithful to, the love of God and of man, of humble labour and of self-renouncing purification, and, within this great ideal and determination, maintains and ameliorates with care the methods, categories and tests special both to these sciences and investigations, and to their ultimate interpretation and utilization in the philosophy and life of religion. For here there will, as yet, be no possibility of so shunting the scientific activity on to one side, or of limiting it to a carefully pegged-out region, as to let Religion and Science energize as forces of the same kind and same level, the same clearness and same finality; but the Science will here have to be passed through, as the surface-level, on the way to Religion as underlying all. What would otherwise readily tend to become, as it were, a mental Geography, would thus here give way to what might be pictured as a spiritual Geology.

8. _Historical Science, Religion’s present, but not ultimate, problem._

The reader will have noted that, for each of these three stages, I have taken an Historico-Cultural as well as a Mathematico-Physical Science, though I am well aware of the profound difference between them, both as to their prerequisites and method, and their aim and depth. And, again, I know well that, for the present, the chief intellectual difficulty of Religion, or at least the main conflict or friction between the Sciences and Theology, seems to proceed, not from Physical Science but from Historical Criticism, especially as applied to the New Testament, so that, on this ground also, I ought, apparently, to keep these two types of Science separate.--Yet it is clear, I think, that, however distinct, indeed different, should be the methods of these two sorts of Science, they are in so far alike, if taken as a means of purification for the soul bent upon its own deepening, that both require a slow, orderly, disinterested procedure, capable of fruitfulness only by the recurring sacrifice of endless petty self-seekings and obstinate fancies, and this in face of that natural eagerness and absoluteness of mind which strong religious emotions will, unless they too be disciplined and purified, only tend to increase and stereotype.

The matters brought up by Historical Criticism for the study and readjustment of Theology, and for utilization by Religion, are indeed numerous and in part difficult. Yet the still more general and fundamental alternatives lie not here, but with the questions as to the nature and range of Science taken in its narrower sense,--as concerned with Quantity, Mechanism, and Determinism alone.

If Science of this Thing-type be all that, in any manner or degree, we can apprehend in conformity with reality or can live by fruitfully: then History and Religion of every kind must be capable of a strict assimilation to it, or they must go. But if such Science constitute only one kind, and, though the clearest and most easily transferable, yet the least deep, and the least adequate to the ultimate and spiritual reality, among the chief levels of apprehension and of life which can be truly experienced and fruitfully lived by man; and if the Historical and Spiritual level can be shown to find room for, indeed to require, the Natural and Mechanical level, whilst this latter, taken as ultimate, cannot accommodate, but is forced to crush or to deny, the former: then a refusal to accept more than can be expressed and analyzed by such Physico-Mathematical Science would be an uprooting and a discrowning of the fuller life, and would ignore the complete human personality, from one of whose wants the entire impulse to such Science took its rise.

As a matter of fact, we find the following three alternatives.

Level all down to Mathematico-Physical Science, and you deny the specific constituents of Spirituality, and you render impossible the growth of the Person out of, and at the expense of, the Individual. Proclaim the Person and its Religion, as though they were static substances adequately present from the first, and ignore, evade or thwart that Thing-level and method as far as ever you can, and you will, in so far, keep back the all but simply animal Individual from attaining to his full spiritual Personality. But let grace wake up, in such an Individual, the sense of the specific characteristics of Spirituality and the thirst to become a full and ever fuller Person, and this in contact and conflict with, as well as in recollective abstraction from, the apparently chance contingencies of History and Criticism, and the seemingly fatalistic mechanisms of Physics and Mathematics: and you will be able, by humility, generosity, and an ever-renewed alternation of such outgoing, dispersive efforts and of such incoming recollection and affective prayer, gradually to push out and to fill in the outlines of your better nature, and to reorganize it all according to the Spirit and to Grace, becoming thus a deep man, a true personality.

Once again: take the intermediate, the Thing-level as final, and you yourself sink down more and more into a casual Thing, a soulless Law; Materialism, or, at best, some kind of Pantheism, must become your practice and your creed.--Take the anterior, the Individual-level as final, and you will remain something all but stationary, and if not merely a Thing yet not fully a Person; and if brought face to face with many an Agnostic or Pantheist of the nobler sort, who is in process of purification from such childish self-centredness by means of the persistently frank and vivid apprehension of the Mechanical, Determinist, Thing-and-Fate level of experience and degree of truth, you will, even if you have acquired certain fragmentary convictions and practices of religion, appear strangely less, instead of more, than your adversary, to any one capable of equitably comparing that Agnostic and yourself--you who, if Faith be right, ought surely to be not less but more of a personality than that non-believing soul.

But take the last, the Spiritual, Personal level as alone ultimate, and yet as necessarily requiring, to be truly reached and maintained, that the little, selfish, predominantly animal-minded, human being should ever pass and repass from this, his Individualistic plane and attitude, through the Thing-and-Fate region, out and on to the “shining table-land, whereof our God Himself is sun and moon”: and you will, in time, gain a depth and an expansion, a persuasive force, an harmoniousness and intelligibleness with which, everything else being equal, the Pantheistic or Agnostic self-renunciation cannot truly compare. For, in these circumstances, the latter type will, at best, but prophesy and prepare the consummation actually reached by the integrational, dynamic religiousness, the Individual transformed more and more into Spirit and Person, by the help of the Thing and of Determinist Law. Freedom, Interiority, Intelligence, Will, Grace, and Love, the profoundest Personality, a reality out of all proportion more worthy and more ultimate than the most utterly unbounded universe of a simply material kind could ever be, thus appear here, in full contradiction of Pantheism, as ultimate and abiding; and yet all that is great and legitimate in Pantheism has been retained, as an intermediate element and stage, of a deeply purifying kind.

9. _Return to Saints John of the Cross and Catherine of Genoa._

And thus we come back to the old, sublime wisdom of St. John of the Cross, in all that it has of continuous thirst after the soul’s purification and expansion, and of a longing to lose itself, its every pettiness and egoistic separateness, in an abstract, universal, quasi-impersonal disposition and reality, such as God here seems to require and to offer as the means to Himself. Only that now we have been furnished, by the ever-clearer self-differentiation of Mathematico-Physical Science, with a zone of pure, sheer Thing, mere soulless Law, a zone capable of absorbing all those elements from out of our thought and feeling which, if left freely to mingle with the deeper level of the growing Spiritual Personality, would give to this an unmistakably Pantheistic tinge and trend. Hence, now the soul will have, in one of its two latter movements, to give a close attention to contingent facts and happenings and to abstract laws, possessed of no direct religious significance or interpretableness which, precisely because of this, will, if practised as part of the larger whole of the purificatory, spiritual upbuilding of the soul, in no way weaken, but stimulate and furnish materials for the other movement, the one specially propounded by the great Spaniard, in which the soul turns away, from all this particularity, to a general recollection and contemplative prayer.

And we are thus, perhaps, in even closer touch with Catherine’s central idea,--the soul’s voluntary plunge into a painful yet joyous purgation, into a state, and as it were an element, which purges away, (since the soul itself freely accepts the process), all that deflects, stunts, or weakens the realization of the soul’s deepest longings,--the hard self-centredness, petty self-mirrorings, and jealous claimfulness, above all. For though, in Catherine’s conception, this at first both painful and joyful, and then more and more, and at last entirely, joyful, ocean of light and fire is directly God and His effects upon the increasingly responsive and unresisting soul: yet the apparent Thing-quality here, the seemingly ruthless Determinism of Law, in which the little individual is lost for good and all, and which only the spiritual personality can survive, are impressively prominent throughout this great scheme. And though we cannot, of course, take the element and zone of the sheer Thing and of Determinist Law as God, or as directly expressive of His nature, yet we can and must hold it, (in what it is in itself, in what it is as a construction of our minds, and in its purificatory function and influence upon our unpurified but purifiable souls), to come from God and to lead to Him. And thus here also we escape any touch of ultimate Pantheism, without falling into any cold Deism or shallow Optimism. For just because we retain, at the shallower level, the ruthlessly impersonal element, can we, by freely willed, repeated passing through such fatalistic-seeming law, become, from individuals, persons; from semi-things, spirits,--spirits more and more penetrated by and apprehensive of the Spirit, God, the source and sustainer of all this growth and reality.

And yet, let us remember once more, the foreground and preliminary stage to even the sublimest of such lives will never, here below at least, be abidingly transcended, or completely harmonized with the groundwork and ultimate stage, by the human personality. Indeed our whole contention has been that, with every conceivable variation of degree, of kind, and of mutual relation, these two stages, and some sort of friction between them, are necessary, throughout this life, for the full development, the self-discipline, and the adequate consolidation, at the expense of the childish, sophistic individual, of the true spiritual Personality.

IV. FINAL SUMMARY AND RETURN TO THE STARTING-POINT OF THE WHOLE INQUIRY: THE NECESSITY, AND YET THE ALMOST INEVITABLE MUTUAL HOSTILITY, OF THE THREE GREAT FORCES OF THE SOUL AND OF THE THREE CORRESPONDING ELEMENTS OF RELIGION.