The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ since their constitution into a book in 1552. Much critical work at Classical and Scriptural texts and documentary problems had, by now, whetted my appetite to try whether I could not at last bring stately order out of this bewildering chaos, by perhaps discovering the authors, dates and intentions of the various texts and glosses thus dovetailed and pieced together into a very Joseph’s coat of many colours, and by showing the successive stages of this, most original and difficult, Saint’s life and legend. All this labour would, in any case, help to train my own mind; and it would, if even moderately successful, offer one more detailed example of the laws that govern such growths, and of the critical method necessary for the tracing out of their operation.

      But the strongest motive revealed itself, in its full force, later than all those other motives, and ended by permeating them all. The wish arose to utilize, as fully as possible, this long, close contact with a soul of most rare spiritual depth,—a soul that presents, with an extraordinary, provocative vividness, the greatness, helps, problems and dangers of the mystical spirit. I now wanted to try and get down to the driving forces of this kind of religion, and to discover in what way such a keen sense of, and absorption in, the Infinite can still find room for the Historical and Institutional elements of Religion, and, at the same time, for that noble concentration upon not directly religious contingent facts and happenings, and upon laws of causation or of growth, which constitutes the scientific temper of mind and its specific, irreplaceable duties and virtues. Thus, having begun to write a biography of St. Catherine, with some philosophical elucidations, I have finished by writing an essay on the philosophy of Mysticism, illustrated by the life of Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna and her friends.

      The book’s chief peculiarities seem to spring inevitably from its fundamental standpoint: hence their frank enumeration may help towards the more ready comprehension of the work.

      The book has, throughout, a treble interest and spirit; historico-critical, philosophical, religious. The historico-critical constituent may attract critical specialists; but will such specialists care for the philosophy? The philosopher may be attracted by the psychological and speculative sections; but will the historical analysis interest him at all? And the soul that is seeking spiritual food and stimulation, will it not readily be wearied by the apparent pettiness of all that criticism, and by the seemingly cold aloofness of all that speculation?—And yet it is the most certain of facts that the human soul is so made as to be unable to part, completely and finally, with any one of these three great interests. Hence, I may surely hope that this trinity of levels of truth and of life, which has so much helped on the growth of my own mind and the constitution of my own character, may, in however different a manner and degree, be found to help others also. This alternation and interstimulation between those three forces and interests within the same soul, and within this soul’s ever-deepening life, is, in any case, too fundamental a feature of this whole outlook for any attempt at its elimination here.

      Then there is a look of repetition and of illogical anticipation about the very structure of the book. For the philosophical First Part says, in general, what the biographical Second Part says in detail; this detail is, in reality, based upon the critical conclusions arrived at in the Appendix, which follows the precise descriptions of the biography; and then the Third, once more a philosophical, Part returns, now fortified by the intervening close occupation with concrete contingent matters, to the renewed consideration, and deeper penetration and enforcement, of the general positions with which the whole work began.—Yet is not this circular method simply a frank application, to the problems in hand, of the process actually lived through by us all in real life, wherever such life is truly fruitful? For, in real life, we ever start with certain general intellectual-emotive schemes and critical principles, as so many draw-nets and receptacles for the capture and sorting out of reality and of our experience of it. We next are brought, by choice or by necessity, into close contact with a certain limited number of concrete facts and experiences. And we then use these facts and experiences to fill in, to confirm or to modify that, more or less tentative and predominantly inherited, indeed ever largely conventional, scheme with which we began our quest. In all these cases of actual life, this apparently long and roundabout, indeed back-before, process is, in reality, the short, because the only fully sincere and humble, specifically human way in which to proceed. The order so often followed in “learned” and “scientific” books is, in spite of its appearance of greater logic and conciseness, far longer; for the road thus covered has to be travelled all over again, according to the circular method just described, if we would gain, not wind and shadow, but substance and spiritual food.

      Then again, there is everywhere a strong insistence upon History as a Science, yet as a Science possessing throughout a method, type and aim quite special to itself and deeply different from those of Physical Science; and an even greater stress upon the important, indeed irreplaceable function of both these kinds of Science, or of their equivalents, in the fullest spiritual life. Here the insistence upon History, as a Science, is still unusual in England; and the stress upon the spiritually purifying power of these Sciences will still appear somewhat fantastic everywhere.—Yet that conception of two branches of ordered human apprehension, research and knowledge, each (in its delicate and clear contrastedness of method, test, end and result) legitimate and inevitable, so that either of them is ruined if forced into the categories of the other, has most certainly come to stay. And the attempt to discover the precise function and meaning of these several mental activities and of their ethical pre-requisites, within the full and spiritual life of the soul, and in view of this life’s consolidation and growth, will, I believe, turn out to be of genuine religious utility. For I hope to show how only one particular manner of conceiving and of practising those scientific activities and this spiritual life and consolidation allows, indeed requires, the religious passion,—the noblest and deepest passion given to man,—to be itself enlisted on the side of that other noble, indestructible thing, severe scientific sincerity. This very sincerity would thus not empty or distract, but would, on the contrary, purify and deepen the soul’s spirituality; and hence this spirituality would continuously turn to that sincerity for help in purifying and deepening the soul. And, surely, until we have somehow attained to some such interaction, the soul must perforce remain timid and weak; for without sincerity everywhere, we cannot possibly develop to their fullest the passion for truth and righteousness even in religion itself.

      And then again a Catholic, one who would be a proudly devoted and grateful son of the Roman Church, speaks and thinks throughout the following pages. Yet it is his very Catholicism which makes him feel, with a spontaneous and continuous keenness, that only if there are fragments, earlier stages and glimpses of truth and goodness extant wheresoever some little sincerity exists, can the Catholic Church even conceivably be right. For though Christianity and Catholicism be the culmination and fullest norm of all religion, yet to be such they must find something thus to crown and measure: various degrees of, or preparations for, their truth have existed long before they came, and exist still, far and wide, now that they have come. Otherwise, Marcion would have been right, when he denied that the Old Testament proceeds from the same God as does the New; and three-fourths or more of the human race would not, to this very moment, be bereft, without fault of their own, of all knowledge of the Historic Christ and of every opportunity for definite incorporation into the Christian Church, since we dare not think that God has left this large majority of His children without any and every glimpse and opportunity of religious truth, moral goodness, and eternal hope. Yet such a recognition of some light and love everywhere involves no trace of levelling down, or even of levelling up; it is, in itself, without a trace of Indifferentism. For if some kinds or degrees of light are thus found everywhere, yet this light is held to vary immensely in different times and places, from soul to soul, and from one religious stage, group or body to another; the measure and culmination of this light is found in the deepest Christian and Catholic light and holiness; and, over and above the involuntary, sincere differences in degree, stage and kind, there are held to exist, also more or less everywhere, the differences caused by cowardice and opposition to the light,—cowardices and oppositions which are as certainly at work within the Christian and Catholic Church as they are amongst the most barbarous of Polytheists. I may well have failed adequately to combine these twin truths; yet only in some such, though more adequate apprehension and combination resides the hope for СКАЧАТЬ