Chapter XI: Catherine’s Less Ultimate This-World Doctrines (2)

(5) Now if such “Passivity,” or Action, is in reality the condition in which the soul attains to its fullest energizing, we can argue back, from this universal principle, to the nature of the various stages and kinds of the Prayer and States of Quiet. In each case, that is, we shall combat the still very common conception that,--though orthodoxy, it is admitted, requires _some_ human action to remain throughout,--such Prayer and States consist (not only as to the immediate feeling of their subjects, but in reality and in their ultimate analysis) in an ever-increasing preponderance of divine action within the soul, and an ever-decreasing remnant of acts of the soul itself. For such a view assumes that God supplants man, and that, so to speak, His Hand appears unclothed alongside of the tissue woven by man’s own mind; whereas God everywhere but stimulates and supports man whom He has made, and His Hand moves ever underneath and behind the tissue,--a tissue which, at best, can become as it were a glove, and suggest the latent hand. The Divine Action will thus stimulate and inform the human action somewhat like the force that drives the blood within the stag’s young antlers, or like the energy that pushes the tender sap-full fern-buds up through the hard, heavy ground.

Thus a special intensity of divine help and presence, and an unusual degree of holiness and of union, have nothing to do with the fewness of the soul’s own acts at such times, but with their quality,--with the preponderance amongst them of divinely informed acts as against merely natural, or wrongly self-seeking, or downrightly sinful acts. And since it is certain that living simplicity is but the harmony and unification, the synthesis, of an organism, and hence is great in precise proportion to the greater perfection of that synthesis, it follows that the living, utterly one-seeming Action or State will, at such times, contain a maximum number of interpenetrating acts and energies, all worked up into this harmonious whole.

2. _Four causes of inadequate analysis._

It is plain, I think, that one thoroughly normal, one accidental, and two mischievous, causes have all conspired to arrest or to deflect the analysis of most of the Mystics themselves concerning Simplicity.

For one thing, the soul, as has just been shown, at such moments of harmonious concentration and of willing and thinking in union with God’s Light and Will, necessarily ceases, more or less, to be conscious of its own operations, and, in looking back, braced and rested as it now is, it cannot but think that it either did not act at all, or that its action was reduced to a minimum. For how otherwise could it now feel so rested, when, after its ordinary activity, it feels so tired and dissatisfied? and how otherwise could it be so unable to give any clear account of what happened in those minutes of union? Yet it is, on the contrary, the very fulness of the action which has rested, by expanding, the soul; and which has made the soul, returned to its ordinary distractedness, incapable of clearly explaining that, now past, concentration.

The accidental cause has been the fairly frequent, though not necessary, connection of the more pronounced instances of such habits of mind with more or less of the psycho-physical phenomena of ecstasy, in the technical sense of the word. For, in such trances, the breathing and circulation are retarded, and the operation of the senses is in part suspended. And it was easy to reason, from such visible, literal simplification of the physical life, to a similar modification of the soul’s action at such times; and, from the assumed desirableness of that psycho-physical condition, to the advantage of the supposed corresponding state of the soul itself. Any tendency to an extreme dualism, as to the relations between body and soul, would thus directly help on an inclination to downright Quietism.--Here it is, on the contrary, certain that only in so far as those psycho-physical simplifications are the results of, or conditions for, a deepening multiplicity in unity, a fuller synthetic action of the soul, or, at least, of a fuller penetration by the soul of even one limited experience or idea--an operation which entails not less, but more, energizing of the soul,--are such psycho-physical simplifications of any spiritual advantage or significance. And in such cases they could not be indications of the cessation or diminution of the deepest and most docile energizing of the soul.

And the mischievous causes were a mistake in Psychology and a mistake in Theology. For, as to Psychology, not only was simplicity assumed, (through a mistaken acceptance of the soul’s own feeling, as furnishing the ultimate analysis of its state), to consist, at any one moment, of an act materially and literally one, instead of a great organism of various simultaneous energizings; but this one act was often held to require no kind of repetition. Since the act was one as against any simultaneous multiplicity, so was it one as against any successive multiplicity, even if this latter were taken as a repetition differentiated by number alone. And yet here again energizing _is_ energizing; and though the soul’s acts overlap and interpenetrate each other, and though when, by their number and harmony, they completely fill and pacify the soul, many of them are simultaneously or successively present to the soul in their effects alone: it is nevertheless the renewal, however peaceful and unperceived, of these acts, which keeps the state of soul in existence. For these acts are not simply unowned acts that happen to be present within the soul; they are the soul’s own acts, whether, in addition, the soul is directly conscious of them or not.

And, theologically, the idea was often at work that it was more worthy of God to operate alone and, as it were, _in vacuo_; and more creaturely of man to make, or try to make, such a void for Him. Yet this is in direct conflict with the fundamental Christian doctrine, of the Condescension, the Incarnation of God to and in human nature, and of the persistence, and elevation of this humanity, even in the case of Christ Himself. God’s action does not keep outside of, nor does it replace, man’s action; but it is,--Our Lord Himself has told us,--that of yeast working in meal, which manifests its hidden power in proportion to the mass of meal which it penetrates and transforms.

3. _Four Quietistic aberrations._

Now it is certain that the error of Quietism has, in no doubt many cases, not remained confined to such mistakes in psychological analysis and theological doctrine, but that these have joined hands with, and have furnished a defence to, sloth and love of dreamy ease, or to some impatience of the necessary details of life, or to fanatical attachment to some one mood and form of experience; and that they have, thus reinforced, ravaged not a few wills and souls.

Four chief Quietistic aberrations can be studied in history.

(1) The neglect or even contempt of vocal prayer, and of the historical and institutional elements of religion, at least in the case of more advanced souls, is one of these abuses.--Now it is true, and Catherine has been a striking instance, that the proportion of all these different elements towards one another vary, and should vary, considerably between soul and soul, according to the _attrait_ and degree of advance of each; that the soul’s most solid advance is in the direction of an ever-deepened spiritual devotedness, and not in that of a multiplication of particular devotions; that the use of even the more central of those elements and means may, for souls called to the prayer of Quiet, become remarkably elastic and largely unmethodized; and that, for such souls (and, in various degrees and ways, sooner or latter, for perhaps most other souls), a prayer of peacefully humble expectation and of all but inarticulate, practically indescribable, brooding of love, and of dim, expansive trust and conformity is possible, sometimes alone possible, and is proved right and useful, if it leaves them strengthened to act and to suffer, to help and to devote themselves to their fellows, to Christ, and to God.

But it remains equally true, even for these as for all other souls, that the historical and institutional elements must ever remain represented, and sufficiently represented; indeed the persistence in these elements of religion will be one of the chief means for avoiding delusion. We have St. Teresa’s experience and teaching here, as a truly classical instance. And if the prayer of Quiet will give a special colour, depth, and unity to those more contingent-seeming practices, these practices will, in return, give a particular definiteness, content, and creaturely quality to that prayer. And thus too the universally and profoundly important union and interchange with souls of other, equally legitimate, kinds and degrees of spirituality will be kept up. Only the sum-total of all these souls, only the complete invisible Church, is the full Bride of Christ; and though the souls composing her may and should each contribute a varying predominance of different elements, no soul should be entirely without a certain amount of each of these constituents.

(2) Another abuse is the neglect, contempt, or misapplied fear of not directly religious occupations and labours which, however otherwise appropriate or even necessary to this soul’s growth and destination, tend to disturb its quiet and to absorb a part of its time and attention. Here it is doubtless true that the other elements of religion are also all more or less apprehensive and jealous with regard to actual, or even only possible, non-religious rival interests. And it is certain that they are all right in so far as that a certain interior leisureliness and recollection, a certain ultimate preference for the spiritualizing religious force of the soul as against the materials, non-religious and other, which that force is to penetrate, are necessary to the soul that would advance.

But the fear that characterizes the Historical and Institutional elements is rather a fear, respectively, of error and of disobedience and singularity, whereas on the part of the Mystical element it is a fear of distraction and absorption away from the _Unum Necessarium_ of the soul. Perhaps even among the Canonized Mystics there is none that has more impressively warned us, both by word and example, against this insidious danger, than the distinguished Platonist scholar and deep spiritual writer, Père Jean Nicolas Grou, who, right through the long mystical period of his life, alternated his prayer of Quiet with extensive and vigorous critical work on the Graeco-Latin classics, and whose practice only wants further expansion and application, (according to the largely increased or changed conditions of such not directly religious work), in order to bear much fruit, not only for criticism and science, but, (by the return-effect of such occupations upon the soul’s general temper and particular devotional habits), for spirituality itself. But we must return to this point more fully in our last chapter.

(3) The third abuse is the neglect or contempt of morality, especially on its social, visible, and physical sides. Particular Mystics, and even whole Mystical schools and movements, have undoubtedly in some instances, and have, possibly, in many more cases, been maligned on this point, since even such a spotless life as Fénelon’s, and that of such a profoundly well-intentioned woman as Madame Guyon, did not, for a time, escape the most unjust suspicions. It is also true that, as a man advances in spirituality, he lays increasing stress upon the intention and general attitude of the agent, and increasingly requires to be judged by the same interior standard, if he is to be rightly understood at all. God may and does, to humble and purify him, allow painful temptations and trials from within to combine, apparently, against him, with persecutions and much isolation from without. And the difference, rather than the similarity, between Religion and Morality,--the sense of pure grace, of free pardon, of the strange profound “givenness” of even our fullest willings and of our most emphatically personal achievements,--can and should grow in him more and more.

And yet it is clear that there must have been some fire to account for all that smoke of accusation; that the material and the effect outwards, the _body_ of an action, do matter, as well as does that action’s _spirit_; that this body does not only act thus outwards, but also inwards, back upon the spirit of the act and of the agent; and that temptations and trials are purifying, not by their simple presence but in proportion as they are resisted, or, if they have been yielded to, in proportion as such defeats are sincerely deplored and renounced. Thus everywhere the full development of any one part of life, and the true unity of the whole, have to be achieved through the gradual assimilation of at first largely recalcitrant other elements, and within an ever-abiding multiplicity--a maximum number of parts and functions interacting within one great organism. And hence not the outrage, neglect, or supersession of morality, but, on the contrary, its deeper development, by more precise differentiation from, and more organic integration into, religion proper, must, here again and here above all, be the final aim. Once more again it is the Incarnational type which is the only fully true, the only genuinely Christian one.

(4) And, finally, there are certain hardly classifiable fanaticisms, which are nevertheless a strictly logical consequence from a wrongly understood Quiet and Passivity,--from Quietism in its unfavourable, condemned sense. I am thinking of such a case as that of Margarethe Peters, a young Quietist, who caused herself to be crucified by her girl-companions, at Wildenspuch, near Schaffhausen, in 1823,--in order to carry out, in full literalness and separateness, the utmost and most painful passivity and dependence and resistless self-donation, in direct imitation of the culminating act of Christ’s life on earth and of His truest followers.[124] Here, in the deliberate suicide of this undoubtedly noble Lutheran girl, we get an act which but brings out the strength and weakness of Quietism wherever found. For the greatest constituents of the Christian spirit are undoubtedly there: free self-sacrifice, impelled by love of God, of Christ, and of all men, and by hatred of self.--Yet, because they here suppress other, equally necessary, constituents, and are out of their proper context and bereft of their proper checks, they but render possible and actual a deed of piteous self-delusion. How terrible is false simplification, the short cut taken by pure logic, operating without a sufficient induction from facts, and within an ardent, self-immolating temperament!

4. _Rome’s condemnation of Quietism._

All this is abundantly sufficient to explain and justify Rome’s condemnation of Quietism. The term “Quietists” appears, I think, for the first time,--at least in an invidious sense,--in the Letter which Cardinal Caraccioli, Archbishop of Naples, addressed to Pope Innocent XI (Odescalchi) on June 30, 1682, and in which he graphically describes the abuses which, (under pretext or through the misapplication of spiritual Quiet and Passivity), had now appeared in his Diocese: souls apparently incapable of using their beads or making the sign of the Cross; or which will neither say a vocal prayer nor go to Confession; or which, when in this prayer of Quiet, even when at Holy Communion, will strive to drive away any image, even of Our Lord Himself, that may present itself to their imagination; or which tear down a Crucifix, as a hindrance to union with God; or which look upon all the thoughts that come to them in the quietude of prayer, as so many rays and effluences from God Himself, exempting them henceforth from every law.[125]

Yet it is important to bear well in mind, the special circumstances, the admitted limits, and the probable signification of Rome’s condemnations.

(1) As to the circumstances of the time, it appears certain that it was the ready circulation of the doctrines of the Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos in the _Guida Spirituale_, 1675, and the abuses of the kind we have just now detailed, and that sprang from this circulation, which formed the primary reason and motive for the otherwise excessively severe treatment of a man and a book, which had both received the very highest and the most deliberate ecclesiastical approbations. That these two circumstances were the determining causes of at least the severity of his condemnation is well brought out by the circumstance that, during his two years’ trial (1685-1687), not only the short _Guida_ but his whole obtainable correspondence (some twenty thousand letters) were examined, and that it is at least as much on such occasional manuscript material, and on Molinos’s own oral admissions,--in prison and doubtless, in part at least, under torture,--that the condemnation was based, containing, as it does, certain revoltingly immoral propositions and confessions, admittedly absent from his published writings.

But if at least some shadow of doubt rests upon the moral character of Molinos, not a shadow of such suspicion or of doubt concerning his perfectly Catholic intentions can, in justice, be allowed to rest upon his chief follower and the most distinguished apologist for his doctrine, the saintly Oratorian and Bishop, the much-tried Cardinal Petrucci; any more than Fénelon’s moral and spiritual character, or deeply Catholic spirit and intentions, can, (in spite of the painfully fierce and unjust attack upon both by Bossuet in his formally classic invective, _Relation sur le Quiétisme_), for one moment be called in question.[126] Other admittedly deeply spiritual and entirely well-intentioned Catholics, whose writings were also condemned during this time when devotional expressions having an at all quietistic tinge or drift were very severely judged, are Mère Marie de l’Incarnation (Marie Guyard), a French Ursuline Religious, who died in Canada in 1672, and the process of whose Beatification has been introduced; the saintly French layman, Jean de Bernières-Louvigny, much admired by Fénelon, who died in 1659; the very interior, though at times somewhat fantastic, Secular Priest, Henri Marie Boudon, who died in 1702; and the very austere but highly experienced ascetical writer, the Jesuit Père Joseph Surin, whom Bossuet had formally approved, and who died in 1668.[127] But Madame Guyon herself, that much-tried and vehemently opposed woman, was held, by many an undoubtedly Catholic-minded, experienced and close observer, to be (in spite of the largely misleading and indeed incorrect character of many of her analyses and expressions) a truly saintly, entirely filial Catholic.[128]

(2) As to the limits of these condemnations, we must remember that only two of them,--those of Molinos and of Fénelon,--claim to be directly doctrinal at all; and that Fénelon was never really compromised in the question of Quietism proper, but was condemned on questions of Pure Love alone. Bossuet himself was far less sound as against the central Quietist doctrine of the One Act, which, unless formally revoked, lasts on throughout life, and hence need never be repeated; Fénelon’s early criticism of the Molinos propositions remains one of the clearest extant refutations of that error. Again in the matter of the Passivity of advanced souls, Bossuet was distinctly less normal and sober than Fénelon: for whilst Fénelon taught that in no state does the soul lose all capacity, although the facility may greatly vary, to produce distinct acts of the virtues or vocal prayers and other partially external exercises, Bossuet taught that, in some cases, all capacity of this kind is abolished.[129] “I take,” says Fénelon, “the terms ‘Passive’ and ‘Passivity’ as they actually appear everywhere in the language of the (sound) Mystics, as something opposed to the terms ‘active’ and ‘activity’: ‘Passivity,’ taken in the sense of an entire inaction of the will, would be a heresy.” And he then opposes “Passivity,” not to “Action,” but to that “Activity,” which is a merely natural, restless, and hurried excitation.[130]

(3) And as to the abiding significance of the whole anti-quietist decisions and measures, we shall do well to consider the following large facts. From St. Paul and St. John to Clement of Alexandria and Origen; from these to Dionysius the Areopagite; from the Areopagite to St. Bernard of Clairvaux and then the Franciscan and Dominican Mystics; from these, again, on to the great Renaissance and Counter-Reformation saints and writers of this type,--the German Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and the Italian St. Catherine of Genoa, the Spaniards St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, and the French Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, we get a particular type of religious experience and doctrine, which but unfolds and concentrates, with an unusual articulation, breadth, and depth, what is to be found, on some sides of their spiritual character and teaching, among Saints and religious souls of the more mixed type, such as St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas of Aquin, and St. Ignatius Loyola. And this mixed type, bearing within it a considerable amount of that mystical quiet and emotional-speculative element, is again but a deepening, a purification and a realization of one of the profoundest affinities and constituents of every human heart and will.

Hence, even in the thickest of the quietist controversy, when that mystical element must have seemed, to many, to be discredited once for all, those best acquainted with the rich history of the Church, and with the manifold requirements of the abiding religious consciousness, could not and did not doubt that all that was good, deep, and true in that element would continue to be upheld by, and represented in, the Church.--And it is not difficult to point to the more or less Mystical souls furnished by the Monks, the Friars; the Clerks-Regular, specially the Jesuits; the Secular Clergy; and the Laity, down to the present day. Such writers and Saints as Père de Caussade (_d._ about 1770) on the one hand, and Père Jean N. Grou (_d._ 1803) and the Curé d’Ars (_d._ 1859) on the other hand, carry on the two streams of the predominantly mystical and of the mixed type,--streams so clearly observable before 1687 and 1699. Quietism, the doctrine of the One Act; Passivity in a literal sense, as the absence or imperfection of the power and use of initiative on the soul’s part in any and every state: these doctrines were finally condemned, and most rightly and necessarily condemned; the Prayer of Quiet, and various states and degrees of an ever-increasing predominance of Action over Activity,--an Action which is all the more the soul’s very own, because the more occasioned, directed, and informed by God’s action and stimulation,--these, and the other chief lines of the ancient experience and practice, remain as true, correct, and necessary as ever.

5. _Rome’s alleged change of front._

And yet it is undeniable that the Roman events between 1675 and 1688 do seem, at first sight, to justify the strongly Protestant Dr. Heppe’s contention that those twelve years,--not to speak of the later troubles of Madame Guyon and of Fénelon--witnessed a complete _volte face_, a formal self-stultification, of the Roman teaching and authority, on these difficult but immediately important matters.

(1) Let us put aside the many passages in Molinos’s _Guida_ which were but (more or less) literal reproductions of the teachings of such solemnly approved authorities as Saints Teresa, Peter of Alcantara, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal,--passages which, of course, remained uncondemned even in Molinos’s pages, but which it would often be difficult to distinguish from the parts of his book that were censured. Yet there still remain such facts as the following.

Juan Falconi’s _Alfabeto_ and _Lettera_ were at their Fifth Italian edition, 1680, and all five editions had been approved by the Master of the Apostolic Palace; but only in 1688 were these writings forbidden. Yet the _Lettera_ contains, with unsurpassed directness and clearness, the central doctrine of Quietism: an exhortation to the production of one single lively Act of Faith, which will then continue uninterruptedly through the whole earthly life into eternity, and which, consequently, is not to be repeated.[131]

Molinos’s _Guida_ and _Breve Trattato_ appeared in Rome, respectively in 1675 and 1681, with the approbations of five theologians, four of whom were Consultors of the Holy Office,--the Archbishop of Reggio; the Minister-General of the Franciscans; the late General of the Carmelites; Father Martin Esparza, the same Jesuit Theologian-Professor of the Roman College who, some years before, had been one of those who had examined and approved St. Catherine’s _Vita ed Opere_; and the actual General of the Carmelites.[132]

Even after these two writings of Molinos had been criticised by the Jesuits Bell Huomo and Segneri and the Clerk Regular Regio, (Segneri enjoying a deservedly immense reputation, and showing in this affair much moderation and a strong sense of the legitimate claims of Mysticism), the Inquisition examined these criticisms, and forbade, not the incriminated writings of Molinos and Petrucci, but the critique of Bell Huomo _donec corrigatur_, and those of Regio and of Segneri (in his _Lettera_ of 1681) absolutely. Segneri’s subsequent _Concordia_ almost cost him his life, so strong was the popular veneration of Molinos.

Molinos indeed was the guest of Pope Innocent XI himself, and the friend and confidant, amongst countless other spiritually-minded souls, of various Cardinals, especially of the deeply devout Petrucci, Bishop of Jesi, who was raised to the Cardinalate eighteen months after the beginning of Molinos’s trial. The imprisonment of Molinos began in May 1685, but the trial did not end till August 1687, when (after nineteen “Principal Errors of the New Contemplation” had been censured by the Holy Office in February 1687) sixty-eight propositions, out of the two hundred and sixty-three which had been urged against him, were solemnly condemned: of these the clearly and directly immoral ones being admittedly not derived from any printed book, or indeed any ever published letter of his Molinos.[133]

(2) To estimate Rome’s attitude (as far as it concerns the ultimate truth and completeness of these doctrines, taken in their most characteristic and explicit forms) fairly, we shall have to put aside all questions as to the motives that impelled, and the methods that were employed, by either side against the other. Molinos may have been even worse than the condemned propositions represent, and yet Petrucci would remain a saintly soul; and we certainly are driven to ask with Leibniz: “Si Molinos a caché du venin sous ce miel, est-il juste que Petrucci et autres personnes de mérite en soient responsables?”[134] But neither the wickedness of the one nor the sanctity of the other would make the doctrines propounded by them, objectively, any less solid or more spiritual than they are in themselves. The acutely anti-Roman Anglican Bishop Burnet may not have invented or exaggerated when he wrote from Rome, during those critical years, that one of the chief motives which actuated the opponents of the Quietists was the fact that, though the latter “were observed to become more strict in their lives, more retired and serious in their mental devotions, yet … they were not so assiduous at Mass, nor so earnest to procure Masses to be said for their friends: nor … so frequently either at Confession or in processions”: and so “the trade of those that live by these things was sensibly sunk.”[135] And the cruel injustice of many details and processes of the movement against the Quietists,--a movement which soon had much of the character of a popular scare and panic, in reaction against a previous, in part, heedless enthusiasm,--are beyond dispute or justification. Yet mercenary and ruthless as part of the motives and much of the action of the anti-quietists doubtlessly were, the question as to the worth and wisdom of Quietism, (taken objectively, and not as an excusable counter-excess but as a true synthesis of the spiritual life), remains precisely where it was before.

(3) Now I think that two peculiarities, most difficult to notice at the time, seriously differentiate the Molinist movement from the great current of fully Catholic Mysticism, even in those points and elements where the two are materially alike or even identical; and yet that these peculiarities are but the caricature (through further emphasis and systematization) of certain elements present, in a more latent and sporadic manner, in the formulae and philosophic assumptions or explanations of the older Mysticism,--elements which had been borrowed too largely from a, at bottom, profoundly anti-incarnational philosophy, not to be of far less value and of much greater danger than the profoundly true experiences, nobly spiritual maxims, and exquisite psychological descriptions which that predominantly Neo-Platonist framework handed on.

The first peculiarity is that the older Mystics, especially those of the type of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. John of the Cross, but even also those of the more “mixed” type of Mysticism, such as St. Teresa, had indeed quite freely used terms which are vividly true as descriptions of the prima facie aspect and emotional impression of certain states and experiences of the soul: “empty,” “fixed,” “motionless,” “the reason and the will have ceased to act,” “doing nothing,” “incapable of doing anything,” “moved by irresistible grace,” “but one act,” “one single desire”: these and equivalent expressions occur again and again. But these sayings do not here lead up to such a deliberate and exclusive rule as is that given by Falconi, and repeated by Molinos in his _Guida_, Nos. 103-106.[136]

This doctrine of the One Act, in this its negative form,--for it is not to be repeated,--and in its application to the whole waking and sleeping life, is first an exclusive concentration upon, and then a wholesale extension of, one out of the several trends of the older teaching, a doctrine which, compared with that teaching in its completeness, is thin and doctrinaire, and as untrue to the full psychological explanation and working requirements of the soul as it is readily abusable in practice and contrary to the Incarnational type of religion. It is impossible not to feel that the manifold great ocean-waters of life, that the diversely blowing winds of God’s Spirit are here, somehow, expected to flow and breathe in a little shortcut, single channel, through a tiny pipe; one more infallible recipe or prescription is here offered to us, hardly more adequate than the many similar “sure” roads to salvation, declared by this or that body of devout religionists to attach to the practice or possession of this or that particular prayer or particular religious object.

And the second difference is that the older Catholic Mystics leave less the impression that the external side of religion, its _body_, is of little or no importance, and indeed very readily an obstacle to its interior side, its _soul_. And this, again, for the simple reason that their teaching is, in general, less systematic and pointed, more incidental, and careless of much self-consistency.

(4) Yet these two differences have largely sprung from the simple pressing and further extension of precisely the least satisfactory, the explanatory and systematic side,--the form as against the content,--of the older Mystics. For once the more specifically Neo-Platonist constituent, in those Mystics’ explanation and systematization, was isolated from the elements of other provenance which there had kept it in check, and now became, as it were, hypostasized and self-sufficient, this constituent could not but reveal, more clearly than before, its inadequacy as a form for the intensely organic and “incarnational” spiritual realities and processes which it attempted to show forth. That Neo-Platonist constituent, always present in those ancient Mystics, had ever tended to conceive the soul’s unity, at any one moment, as a something outside of all multiplicity whatsoever. Hence this character of the simultaneous unity had only to be extended to the successive unity,--and the literally One Act, as in the present so throughout the future, became a necessary postulate.

And that same constituent had, even in those great teachers of profound maxims, exquisite religious psychology, and noblest living, tended, (however efficaciously checked by all this their Christian experience and by certain specifically Platonist and Aristotelian elements of their philosophy), towards depreciating the necessity, importance, indeed even the preponderant utility, of the External, Contingent, Historical and Institutional, and of the interchange, the inter-stimulation between these sides and expressions of religion and its internal centre and spirit.

Perhaps, amongst all the great ecclesiastically authorized Mystics of that past, the then most recent of them all, St. John of the Cross, comes, by his (theoretically continuous though in his practice by no means exclusive) insistence upon the abstractive and universal, the obscure and invisible, the self-despoiling and simplifying element and movement, nearest to an exclusion of the other element and movement. Indeed the Quietists’ generally strong insistence upon the necessity of a Director and upon Frequent Communion gives their teaching, when taken in its completeness, a prima facie greater Institutionalism than is offered by the spiritual theory of the great Spaniard. Yet if, even in him, one misses, in his theoretical system, a sufficiently organic necessity for the outgoing movement, a movement begun by God Himself, and which cannot but be of fundamental importance and influence for believers in the Incarnation, there is as complete an absence of the doctrinaire One-Act recipe for perfection as in the most Historical and Institutional of Christian teachers. But more about this hereafter.

6. _Four needs recognised by Quietism._

Quietism, then, has undoubtedly isolated and further exaggerated certain explanatory elements of the older Mysticism which, even there, were largely a weakness and not a strength; has thus underrated and starved the Particular, Visible, Historical, Institutional constituents of Religion; and has, indeed, misunderstood the nature of true Unity everywhere. Yet the very eagerness with which it was welcomed at the time,--in France and Italy especially,--and this, not only as a fashion by the _Quidnuncs_, but as so much spiritual food and life by many a deeply religious soul; and the difficulty, and not infrequent ruthlessness of its suppression, indicate plainly enough that, with all its faults and dangers, it was divining and attempting to supply certain profound and abiding needs of the soul. I take these needs to be the following four.

(1) Man has an ineradicable, and, when rightly assuaged, profoundly fruitful thirst for Unity,--for Unification, Synthesis, Harmonization; for a living System, an Organization both within and without himself, in which each constituent gains its full expansion and significance through being, and more and more becoming, just _that_ part and function of a great, dynamic whole; a sense of the essential and ultimate organic connection of all things, in so far as, in any degree or form, they are fair and true and good. And this sense and inevitable requirement alone explain the surprise and pain caused, at first, to us all, by the actual condition of mutual aloofness and hostility, characteristic of most of the constituents of the world within us, as of the world around us, towards their fellow-constituents. A truly atomistic world,--even an atomistic conception of the world,--of life, as a collection of things one alongside of another, on and on, is utterly repulsive to any deeply religious spirit whose self-knowledge is at all equal to its aspirations.--No wonder, then, if the Quietists, haunted by the false alternative of one such impenetrable atom-act or of an indefinite number of them, chose the One Act, and not a multitude of them.

(2) Man has a deep-seated necessity to purify himself by detachment, not only from things that are illicit but even from those that are essential and towards which he is bound to practise a deep and warm attachment. There is no shadow of theoretical or ultimate contradiction here: to love one’s country deeply, yet not to be a _Chauvinist_; to love one’s wife tenderly, yet not to be uxorious; to care profoundly for one’s children, yet to train, rebuke, and ever brace them, when necessary, up to suffering and even death itself: these things so little exclude each the other, that each attachment can only rightly grow in and through the corresponding detachment. The imperfection in all these cases, and in all the analogous, specifically religious ones, lies not in the objects to be loved, nor in these objects being many and of various degrees and kinds of lovableness, nor in the right (both effective and affective, appropriately varied) love of them: but simply in our actual manner of loving them.--No wonder then that Quietism, face to face with the false alternative of either Attachment or Detachment, chose Detachment, (the salt and the leaven of life) and not attachment (life’s meat and meal).

(3) Man has a profound, though ever largely latent, capacity and need for admiration, trust, faith; and does not by any means improve solely by direct efforts at self-improvement, and by explicit examinations of his efforts and failures; but, (a little from the first, and very soon as much, and later on far more), he progresses by means of a happy absorption in anything clean and fruitful that can and does lift him out of and above his smaller self altogether.--And such an absorption will necessarily be unaccompanied, at the time, by any direct consciousness on the part of the mind as to this its absorption. And, religiously, such quiet concentrations will, in so far as they are at all analyzable after the event, consist in a quite inarticulate, and yet profound and spiritually renovating, sense of God; and they will have to be tested, not by their describable content, but by their ethical and religious effects. “Psychology and religion,” says that great psychological authority, Prof. William James, “both admit that there are forces, seemingly outside of the conscious individual, that bring redemption to his life.” “A man’s conscious wit and will, so far as they strain after the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined, whilst the deeper forces of organic ripening within him tend towards a rearrangement that is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with by efforts of too direct and energetic a kind on our part.”[137]--No wonder then that Quietism, finding this element of quiet incubation much ignored and starved in the lives of most religious souls, flew to the other extreme, of making this inarticulateness and wise indirectness of striving into the one test and measure of the perfection of all the constituents of the religious life, instead of insisting upon various degrees and combination of full and direct consciousness and articulation, and of much dimness and indirect alertness, as each requiring the other, and as both required by the complete and normal life of the soul.

(4) And Man has a deep-seated sense of shame, in precise proportion as he becomes spiritually awake, about appropriating to himself his virtues and spiritual insight, even in so much as he perceives and admits his possession of them. Not all his consciousness and conviction of the reality of his own efforts and initiative, can or does prevent a growing sense that this very giving of his is (in a true sense) God’s gift,--that his very seeking of God ever implies that he had, in some degree, already found God,--that God had already sought him out, in order that he might seek and find God.--No wonder then that, once more shrinking from a Unity constituted in a Multiplicity, Quietism should, (with the apparently sole choice before it, of God Himself operating literally all, or of man subtracting something from that exclusive action and honour of God), have chosen God alone and entire, rather than, as it were, a fragmentary, limited, baffled influence and efficiency of the Almighty within His Own creature. Yet here again the greater does not supplant, but informs, the lesser; and the Incarnational action of God is, in this supreme question also, the central truth and secret of Christianity.

7. _Multiplicity and unity, in different proportions, needful for all spiritual life._

We find, then, that it is essential for even the most advanced souls, that they should keep and increase the sense and the practice of a right multiplicity, as ever a constituent and essential condition of every concrete, living unity; of a right attachment, as ever the necessary material and content for a fruitful and enriching detachment; of a right consciousness and articulation of images, thoughts, feelings, volitions, and external acts, as ever stimulations, restful alternations, and food for a wise and strengthening prayer or states of Quiet and inarticulation; and of a right personal initiative and responsibility, as the most precious means and element for the operations of God.

We find, too, that it is equally important, for even the most imperfect souls, to be helped towards some, (though but ever semi-conscious and intermittent), sense of the unity which alone can give much worth or meaning to their multiplicity; of the detachment which alone can purify and spiritualize their attachments; of the self-oblivion, in rapt and peaceful admiration, which alone can save even their right self-watchings and self-improvements from still further centring them in themselves; and of the true self-abandonment to pure grace and the breathing of God’s Spirit, which alone can give a touch of winning freedom and of joyful spaciousness to all the prudence and right fear and conscious responsibility which, left alone, will hip, darken and weigh down the religious soul.

And thus we shall find that there is no degree of perfection for any one set of souls which is not, in some form and amount, prefigured and required by all other souls of good-will; and again, that there is no one constituent, to which any one soul is specially drawn, which does not require the supplementation and corrective of some other constituents, more fully represented in other souls of possibly lower sanctity.

Thus each soul and grade requires all the others; and thus the measure of a soul’s greatness is not its possessing things which cannot, in any degree or way, be found in, or expected of, all human souls, in proportion as they are fully and characteristically human, but, on the contrary, its being full of a spirit and a force which, in different degrees and forms, are the very salt and yeast, the very light and life, of all men in every place and time.

The following weighty declaration, long ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas, fully covers, I think, the doctrine and ideal aimed at throughout this section: “Already in this life we ought continuously to enjoy God, as a thing most fully our own, in all our works.… Great is the blindness and exceeding the folly of many souls that are ever seeking God, continuously sighing after God, and frequently desiring God: whilst, all the time, they are themselves the tabernacles of the living God … since their soul is the seat of God, in which He continuously reposes. Now who but a fool deliberately seeks a tool which he possesses under lock and key? or who can use and profit by an instrument which he is seeking? or who can draw comfort from food for which he hungers, but which he does not relish at leisure? Like unto all this is the life of many a just soul, which ever seeks God and never tarries to enjoy Him; and all the works of such an one are, on this account, less perfect.”[138]

IV. PURE LOVE, OR DISINTERESTED RELIGION: ITS DISTINCTION FROM QUIETISM.

The problem of Pure Love, of Disinterested Religion, can hardly, in practice, be distinguished from that of Quiet and Passivity, if only because Quietists, (those who have considered perfection to diminish more and more the number of the soul’s acts, or at least to eliminate more and more the need of distinctness or difference between them), have, quite inevitably, ever given a special prominence to the question as to what should be the character of those few acts, of that one unbroken act. For once allow this their main question we should all have to answer in the Quietist’s way,--viz. that this single act must, for a perfect soul, to be the most perfect of the acts possible to man, and hence must be an act of Pure Love.--Yet it is well to realize clearly that, if Quietism necessitates an even excessive and unreal doctrine of Pure Love, a moderate and solid Pure-Love teaching has no kind of necessary connection with Quietism. For even though my interior life be necessarily one continuous stream and tissue of acts, countless in their number, variety, and degrees of inter-penetration, it in nowise follows that acts of Pure Love are not the best, or are impossible; nor that, in proportion as Pure Love informs the soul’s multiform acts, such acts must lose in depth and delicacy of variety and articulation. Indeed here, with regard to the very culmination of the interior life, we shall again find and must again test the two conceptions: the finally abstractive and materially simplifying one, which must ever have any one real thing outside of another; and the incarnational and synthetic one, which finds spiritual realities and forces working the one inside and through the other. And the latter view will appear the true one.

1. _New Testament teaching as to Pure Love._

Now we must first try and get some clear ideas as to how this difficult matter stands in the New Testament,--in the Synoptic tradition and in the Pauline-Joannine teaching respectively. Here again it is the former which, (though on its surface it appears as the more ordinary and the more locally coloured teaching), is the richer, in its grandly elastic and manifold simplicity; and it is the latter which has most profoundly penetrated and articulated the ultimate meaning and genius of a part of Our Lord’s doctrine, yet at the cost of a certain narrowing of the variety and breadth of that outlook. In both cases I shall move, from the easier and more popular teaching, to the deepest and most original enunciations and explanations.[139]

(1) The Synoptic teaching starts throughout from the ordinary post-exilic Jewish feeling and teaching, which indeed recognizes the ceremonial obligations and the more tangible amongst the ethical demands as standing under the categorical imperative of the Legal “Thou Shalt,” but places the large territory of the finer moral precepts outside of the Law. So with the “Zedakah,” the “Justice” of almsdeeds, and with the “Gemiluth Chasadim,” the “works of mercy,” such as visiting the sick, burying the dead, and rejoicing with the joyful and sorrowing with the sorrowful. Thus Rabbi Simon the Just tells us: “The world rests on three things: on the Law (_Thorah_), on Worship (_Abodah_), and on Works of Mercy (_Gemiluth Chasadim_)”; and Rabbi Eleazar declared the “Gemiluth Chasadim” to be above the “Zedakah.”[140] And it is especially in view of these works of supererogation that rewards, and indeed a strict scale of rewards, are conceived. Thus already in the Book of Tobit, (written somewhere between 175 and 25 B.C.), we have Tobit instructing his son Tobias that “Prayer is good with Fasting and Alms, more than to buy up treasures of gold. For Alms delivereth from death … they that practise Mercy and Justice shall live long.”[141] And one of the sayings of the Jewish Fathers declares: “So much trouble, so much reward.”[142]

Now this whole scheme and its spirit seems, at first to be taken over quite unchanged by Our Lord. The very Beatitudes end with: “Rejoice … because your reward is great in heaven.” And, in the following Sermon, his hearers are bidden to beware of doing their “Zedakah,”--the “Justice” of Prayer, Fasting, Almsdeeds in order to be seen by men; since, in that case, “ye shall not have reward from your Father Who is in heaven.” And this is driven home in detail: these three kinds of Justice are to be done “in secret,” and “thy Father will repay thee.” Even Prayer itself thus appears as a meritorious good work, one of the means to “treasure up treasures in heaven.” Similarly, the rich man is bid “Go sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor; and thou shalt have a treasure in heaven.” Even “he that shall give you a cup of cold water in My name, shall not lose his reward.” Indeed we have the general principle, “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”[143]

And yet we can follow the delicate indications of the presence, and the transitions to the expression, of the deeper apprehension and truth. For, on the part of God, the reward appears, in the first instance, as in intrinsic relation to the deed. The reward is the deed’s congenital equivalent: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”; “if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Father … will likewise forgive you your trespasses”; and “everyone who shall confess Me before men, him will I also confess before My Father Who is in heaven.”[144] Or the reward appears as a just inversion of the ordinary results of the action thus rewarded: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land”; take the highest seat at a banquet, and you will be forced down to the lowest, take the lowest, and you will be moved up to the highest; and, generally, “he who findeth his soul, shall lose it; and that loseth his soul, for My sake, shall find it.”[145] Or the reward appears as an effect organically connected with the deed, as its cause or condition: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”[146] And then the reward comes to vary, although the deed remains quantitatively identical, solely because of that deed’s qualitative difference,--_i.e._ according to the variation in its motive: “He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive the reward of a prophet; and he who receiveth a just man in the name of a just man, shall receive the reward of a just man.”[147] And then the reward moves up and up and becomes a grace, through being so far in excess of the work done: “Every one who hath forsaken house … or father or children or fields for My name, shall receive manifold,” indeed “an hundredfold”--“a full … and overflowing measure shall they pour into your lap”; and “whosoever shall humble himself, shall be exalted,”--not simply back to his original level, but into the Kingdom of Heaven. So, too, “Thou wast faithful over a few things, I shall place thee over many things”; indeed this faithful servant’s master “shall place him over all his possessions;” or rather, “blessed are those servants whom the Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching. Amen, I say unto you, that he shall approach … and shall minister unto them.”[148]

This immense disproportion between the work and its reward, and the consequent grace-character of the latter, is driven home with a purposely paradoxical, provocative pointedness, in the two Parables of the Wedding Garment and of the Equal Payment of the Unequal Labourers, both of which are in St. Matthew alone. The former concerns the soul’s call to the kingdom, and that soul’s response. The King here, after having formally invited a certain select number of previously warned relatives and nobles, who all, as such, had a _claim_ upon him, Matt, xxii, 3, sends out invitations with absolute indiscrimination,--to men with no claims or with less than none; to “bad” as well as “good.” And it is the King, again, who gratuitously supplies them each with the appropriate white wedding-feast garment. He has thus a double right to expect all his guests to be thus clothed, and to punish instantly, not the mere negligence, but the active rejection implied on the part of the man clothed in his ordinary clothing (vv. 11, 12). Both call and investiture have been here throughout pure graces, which rendered possible, and which invited but did not force, an acceptance.[149]

The second Parable describes the “Householder” who hired labourers for his vineyard at the first, third, sixth, ninth, and even eleventh hour,--each and all of them for a penny a day; who actually pays out to them, at the end of the day, this one identical pay; and who, to the labourer of the first shift who complains, “These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us who have borne the burden and heat of the day,” declares, “Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take thine own and go thy way: I will give to this last even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil (art thou envious) because I am good” (because I choose to be bountiful)? Matt. xx, 1-15. Here again the overflowing generosity of God’s grace is brought home to us, as operating according to other standards than those of ordinary daily life: nor is this operation unjust, for the Householder paid their due to the first set of workers, whilst rewarding, far above their worth, those poor labourers of the last hour. But, as Jülicher well points out, “we should not pedantically insist upon finding here a doctrine of the strict equality of souls in the Beyond--a doctrine contradicted by other declarations of Jesus. Only the _claim_ of single groups of souls to preferential treatment is combated here …: a certain fundamental religious disposition is to be awakened.” And, as Bugge rightly notes, “the great supreme conception which lies at the bottom of the parable has, parablewise, remained here unnamed: Paul has found the expressive term for it,--‘Grace.’”[150]