The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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      Perhaps the most classic expression of the true Unity is that implied by St. Ignatius of Loyola, when he tells us that “Peace is the simplicity of order.” For order as necessarily implies a multiplicity of things ordered as the unity of the supreme ordering principle. Fénelon, doubtless, at times, especially in parts of his condemned Explication des Maximes des Saints, too much excludes, or seems to exclude, the element of multiplicity in the soul’s intention. Yet, both before and after this book, some of the clearest and completest statements in existence, as to the true unity and diversity to be found in the most perfect life, are to be found among his writings. In his Latin Epistle to Pope Clement XI he insists upon the irreducible element of multiplicity in the motives of the very highest sanctity.

      For he maintains first that, though “in the specific act of Love, the chief of the theological virtues, it is possible to love the absolute perfection of God considered in Himself, without the addition of any motive of the promised beatitude,” yet that “this specific act of love, of its own nature, never excludes, and indeed most frequently includes, this same motive of beatitude.” He asserts next that though, “in the highest grade of perfection amongst souls here below, deliberate acts of simply natural love of ourselves, and even supernatural acts of hope which are not commanded by love mostly cease,” yet that in this “habitual State of any and every most perfect soul upon earth, the promised beatitude is desired, and there is no diminution of the exercise of the virtue of hope, indeed day by day there is an increase in this desire, from the specific motive of hope of this great good, which God Himself bids us all, without exception, to hope for.” And he declares finally that “there is no state of perfection in which souls enjoy an uninterrupted contemplation, or in which the powers of the soul are bound by an absolute incapacity for eliciting the discursive acts of Christian piety; nor is there a state in which they are exempted from following the laws of the Church, and executing all the orders of superiors.”[39]

      All the variety, then, of the interested and of the disinterested; of hope and fear and sorrow; of gratitude and adoration and love; of the Intuitive and Discursive; of Recollection and external Action, is to be found, in a deeper, richer, more multiple and varied and at the same time a more unified unity, in the most perfect life; and all this in proportion to its approach to its own ideal and normality.

      Indeed the same multiplicity in unity is finely traced by St. Bernard, the great contemplative, in every human act that partakes of grace at all. “That which was begun by Grace, gets accomplished alike by both Grace and Free Will, so that they operate mixedly not separately, simultaneously not successively, in each and all of their processes. The acts are not in part Grace, in part Free Will; but the whole of each act is effected by both in an undivided operation.”[40]

      VI. The Special Motives operating in each Element towards the Suppression of the other Elements.

      Now the elements of Multiplicity and Friction and of Unity and Harmonization, absolutely essential to all life, everywhere and always cost us much to keep and gain. But there are also, very special reasons why the three great constituents of religion should, each in its own way, tend continually to tempt the soul to retain only it, and hence to an impoverishing simplification. Let us try and see this tendency at work in the two chief constituents, as against each other, and in combination against the third.

      1. In the Historical and Institutional Element, as against all else.

      We have seen how all religiousness is ever called into life by some already existing religion. And this religion will consist in the continuous commemoration of some great religious facts of the past. It will teach and represent some divine revelation as having been made, in and through such and such a particular person, in such and such a particular place, at such and such a particular time; and such a revelation will claim acceptance and submission as divine and redemptive in and through the very form and manner in which it was originally made. The very peculiarity, which will render the teaching distinctively religious, will hence be a certain real, or at least an at first apparent, externality to the mind and life of the recipient, and a sense of even painful obligation answered by a willing endorsement. All higher religion ever is thus personal and revelational; and all such personal and revelational religion was necessarily first manifested in unique conditions of space and time; and yet it claims, in as much as divine, to embrace all the endless conditions of other spaces and other times.

      And this combination of a clearly contingent constituent and of an imperiously absolute claim is not less, but more visible, as we rise in the scale of religions. The figure of Our Lord is far more clear and definite and richly individual than are the figures of the Buddha or of Mahomet. And at the same time Christianity has ever claimed for Him far more than Buddhism or Mahometanism have claimed for their respective, somewhat shadowy founders. For the Buddha was conceived as but one amongst a whole series of similar revealers that were to come; and Mahomet was but the final prophet of the one God. But Christ is offered to us as the unique Saviour, as the unique revelation of God Himself. You are thus to take Him or leave Him. To distinguish and interpret, analyze or theorize Him, to accept Him provisionally or on conditions,—nothing of all this is distinctively religious. For, here as everywhere else, the distinctive religious act is, as such, an unconditional surrender. Nowhere in life can we both give and keep at the same time; and least of all here, at life’s deepest sources.

      With this acceptance then, in exact proportion as it is religious, a double exclusiveness will apparently be set up. I have here found my true life:—I will turn away then from all else, and will either directly fight, or will at least starve and stunt, all other competing interests and activities—I will have here a (so to speak) spacial, a simultaneous exclusiveness. Religion will thus be conceived as a thing amongst other things, or as a force struggling amongst other forces; we have given our undivided heart to it,—hence the other things must go, as so many actual supernumeraries and possible supplanters. Science and Literature, Art and Politics must all be starved or cramped. Religion can safely reign, apparently, in a desert alone.

      But again, Religion will be conceived, at the same time, as a thing fixed in itself, as given once for all, and to be defended against all change and interpretation, against all novelty and discrimination. We get thus a second, a (so to speak) temporal, successive exclusiveness. Religion will here be conceived as a thing to be kept literally and materially identical with itself and hence as requiring to be defended against any kind of modification. Conceive it as a paste, and all yeast must be kept out; or as wine, and fermentation must be carefully excluded. And indeed Religion here would thus become a stone, even though a stone fallen from heaven, like one of those meteorites worshipped in Pagan antiquity. And the two exclusivenesses, joined together, would give us a religion reduced to such a stone worshipped in a desert.

      Now the point to notice here is, that all this seems not to be an abuse, but to spring from the very essence of religion,—from two of its specific inalienable characteristics—those of externality and authority. And although the extreme just described has never been completely realized in history, yet we can see various approximations to it in Mahometan Egypt, in Puritan Scotland, in Piagnone Florence, in Spain of the Inquisition. Religion would thus appear fated, by its very nature, to starve out all else, and its own self into the bargain.

      What will be the answer to, the escape from, all this, provided by religion itself? The answer and escape will be provided by the intrinsic nature of the human soul, and of the religious appeal made to it. For if this appeal must be conceived by the soul, in exact proportion to the religiousness of both, as incomprehensible by it, as exceeding its present, and even its potential, powers of comprehension; if again this appeal must demand a sacrifice of various inclinations felt at the time to be wrong or inferior; if it must come home to the soul with a sense of constraining obligation, as an act of submission and of sacrifice which it ought and must make: yet it will as necessarily be conceived, at the same time, and again in exact proportion СКАЧАТЬ