The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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СКАЧАТЬ and of the appeal, as the expression of Mind, of Spirit, and the impression of another mind and spirit; as the manifestation of an infinite Personality, responded and assented to by a personality, finite indeed yet capable of indefinite growth. And hence the fixity of the revelation and of the soul’s assent to it, will be as the fixity of a fountain-head, or as the fixity of river-banks; or again as the fixity of a plant’s growth, or of the gradual leavening of bread, or as that of the successive evolution and identity of the human body. The fixity, in a word, will be conceived and found to be a fixity of orientation, a definiteness of affinities and of assimilative capacity.

      Only full trust, only unconditional surrender suffice for religion. But then religion excites and commands this in a person towards a Person; a surrender to be achieved not in some thing, but in some one,—a some one who is at all, only in as much as he is living, loving, growing; and to be performed, not towards some thing, but towards Some One, Whose right, indeed Whose very power to claim me, consists precisely in that He is Himself absolutely, infinitely and actually, what I am but derivatively, finitely and potentially.

      Thus the very same act and reasons which completely bind me, do so only to true growth and to indefinite expansion. I shall, it is true, ever go back and cling to the definite spacial and temporal manifestations of this infinite Spirit’s personality, but I shall, by this same act, proclaim His eternal presentness and inexhaustible self-interpreting illumination. By the same act by which I believe in the revelation of the workshop of Nazareth, of the Lake of Galilee, of Gethsemane and Calvary, I believe that this revelation is inexhaustible, and that its gradual analysis and theory, and above all its successive practical application, experimentation, acceptance or rejection, and unfolding, confer and call forth poignant dramatic freshness and inexhaustible uniqueness upon and within every human life, unto the end of time.

      All this takes place through the present, the hic et nunc, co-operation of the living God and the living soul. And this ever-to-be reconquered, ever-costing and chequered, ever-“deepenable” interpretation, is as truly fresh as if it were a fresh revelation. For all that comes from the living God, and is worked out by living souls, is ever living and enlivening: there is no such thing as mere repetition, or differentiation by mere number, place, and time, in this Kingdom of Life, either as to God’s action or the soul’s. Infinite Spirit Himself, He creates an indefinite number of, at first largely but potential, persons, no one of which is identical with any other, and provokes and supports an indefinite number of ever different successive acts on the part of each and all of them, that so, through the sum-total of such sources and streams of difference, the nearest creaturely approach may be achieved to the ocean of His own infinite richness.

      2. In the Emotional and Volitional Element, as against the Historical and Institutional Element.

      Now the tendency of a soul, when once awake to this necessary freshness and interiority of feeling with regard to God’s and her own action, will again be towards an impoverishing oneness. It will now tend to shrink away from the External, Institutional altogether. For though it cannot but have experienced the fact that it was by contact with this External that, like unto Antaeus at his contact with Mother Earth, it gained its experience of the Internal, yet each such experience tends to obliterate the traces of its own occasion. Indeed the interior feeling thus achieved tends, in the long run, to make the return to the contact with the fact that occasioned, and to the act that produced it, a matter of effort and repugnance. It seems a case of “a man’s returning to his mother’s womb”; and is indeed a new birth to a fuller life, and hence humiliating, obscure, concentrated, effortful, a matter of trust and labour and pain and faith and love,—a true death of and adieu to the self of this moment, however advanced this self may seem,—a fully willed purifying pang. Only through such dark and narrow Thermopylae passes can we issue on to the wide, sunlit plains. And both plain and sunshine can never last long at a time; and they will cease altogether, if they are not interrupted by this apparent shadow of the valley of death, this concrete action, which invariably modifies not only the soul’s environment, but above all the soul itself.

      Thus does a simply mental prayer readily feel, to the soul that possesses the habit of it, a complete substitute for all vocal prayer; and a generally prayerful habit of mind readily appears an improvement upon all conscious acts of prayer. Thus does a general, indeterminate consciousness of Christ’s spirit and presence, easily feel larger and wider, to him who has it, than the apparent contraction of mind and heart involved in devotion to Him pictured in the definite Gospel scenes or localized in His Eucharistic presence. Thus again does a general disposition of regret for sin and of determination to do better readily feel nobler, to him who has it, than the apparent materiality and peddling casuistry, the attempting the impossible, of fixing for oneself the kind and degree of one’s actual sins, and of determining upon definite, detailed reforms.

      Yet, in all these cases, this feeling will rapidly lead the soul on to become unconsciously weak or feverish, unless the latter manfully escapes from this feeling’s tyranny, and nobly bends under the yoke and cramps itself within the narrow limits of the life-giving concrete act. The Church’s insistence upon some vocal prayer, upon some definite, differentiated, specific acts of the various moral and theological virtues, upon Sacramental practice throughout all the states and stages of the Christian life, is but a living commentary upon the difficulty and importance of the point under discussion. And History, as we have seen, confirms all this.

      3. In the Emotional and Volitional, singly or in combination with the Historical and Institutional, as against the Analytic and Speculative Element.

      But just as the Institutional easily tends to a weakening both of the Intellectual and of the Emotional, so does the Emotional readily turn against not only the Institutional but against the Intellectual as well. This latter hostility will take two forms. Inasmuch as the feeling clings to historical facts and persons, it will instinctively elude or attempt to suppress all critical examination and analysis of these its supports. Inasmuch as it feeds upon its own emotion, which (as so much pure emotion) is, at any one of its stages, ever intensely one and intensely exclusive, it will instinctively fret under and oppose all that slow discrimination and mere approximation, that collection of a few certainties, many probabilities, and innumerable possibilities, all that pother over a very little, which seem to make up the sum of all human knowledge. Such Emotion will thus tend to be hostile to Historical Criticism, and to all the Critical, Analytic stages and forms of Philosophy. It turns away instinctively from the cold manifold of thinking; and it shrinks spontaneously from the hard opaque of action and of the external. All this will again be found to be borne out by history.

      A combination of Institutionalism and Experimentalism against Intellectualism, is another not infrequent abuse, and one which is not hard to explain. For if external, definite facts and acts are found to lead to certain internal, deep, all-embracing emotions and experiences, the soul can to a certain extent live and thrive in and by a constant moving backwards and forwards between the Institution and the Emotion alone, and can thus constitute an ever-tightening bond and dialogue, increasingly exclusive of all else. For although the Institution will, taken in itself, retain for the Emotion a certain dryness and hardness, yet the Emotion can and often will associate with this Institution whatever that contact with it has been found to bring and to produce. And if the Institution feels hard and obscure, it is not, like the Thinking, cold and transparent. Just because the Institution appears to the emotional nature as though further from its feeling, and yet is experienced as a mysterious cause or occasion of this feeling, the emotional nature is fairly, often passionately, ready to welcome what it can thus rest on and lean on, as something having a comfortable fixity both of relation and of resistance. But with regard to Thinking, all this is different. For thought is sufficiently near to Feeling, necessarily to produce friction and competition of some sort, and seems, with its keen edge and endless mobility, to be the born implacable foe of the dull, dead givenness of the Institutional, and of the equal givenness of any one Emotional mood. One of the spontaneous activities of the human soul, the Analytic and Speculative СКАЧАТЬ