The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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СКАЧАТЬ instinctively to labour at depersonalizing all it touches, and thus continually both to undermine and discrown the deeply personal work and world of the experimental forces of the soul. Indeed the thinking seems to be doing this necessarily, since by its very essence it begins and ends with laws, qualities, functions, and parts,—with abstractions, which, at best, can be but skeletons and empty forms of the real and actual, and which, of themselves, ever tend to represent all Reality as something static, not dynamic, as a thing, not as a person or Spirit.

      Here again the true solution will be found in an ever fuller conception of Personality, and of its primary place in the religious life. For even the bare possibility of the truth of all religion, especially of any one of the characteristic doctrines of Christianity, involves a group of personalist convictions. Here the human person begins more as a possibility than a reality. Here the moral and spiritual character has to be built up slowly, painfully, laboriously, throughout all the various stages and circumstances of life, with their endless combinations of pleasure and pain, trouble and temptation, inner and outer help and hindrance, success and failure. Here the simply Individual is transformed into the truly Personal only by the successive sacrifice of the lower, of the merely animal and impoverishingly selfish self, with the help of God’s constant prevenient, concomitant, and subsequent grace. And here this constantly renewed dropping and opposing of the various lower selves, in proportion as they appear and become lower, to the soul’s deepest insight, in the growing light of its conscience and the increasing elevation of the moral personality, involves that constant death to self, that perpetual conversion, that unification and peace in and through a continuous inner self-estrangement and conflict, which is the very breath and joy of the religious life.

      Only if all this be so, to a quite unpicturable extent, can even the most elementary Christianity be more than an amiable intruder, or a morbid surplusage in the world. And at same time, if all this be so, then all within us is in need of successive, never-ending purification and elaboration; and the God who has made man with a view to his gradually achieving, and conquering his real self, must have stored means and instruments, for the attainment of this man’s true end, constant readiness, within himself. Now our whole Intellectual nature is a great storehouse of one special class of such instruments. For it is clear that the moral and spiritual side of our nature will, more than any other, constantly require three things: Rest, Expression, and Purification. And the intellectual activities will, if only they be kept sufficiently vigorous and independent, alone be in a position sufficiently to supply some forms of these three needs. For they can rest the moral-spiritual activities, since they, the intellectual ones, primarily neglect emotion, action, and persons, and are directly occupied with abstractions and with things. They can and should express the results of those moral, spiritual activities, because the religious facts and experiences require, like all other facts, to be constantly stated and re-stated by the intellect in terms fairly understandable by the civilization and culture of the successive ages of the world. Above all, they can help to purify those moral-spiritual activities, owing to their interposing, by their very nature, a zone of abstraction, of cool, clear thinking, of seemingly adequate and exhaustive, but actually impoverishing and artificial concepts, and of apparently ultimate, though really only phenomenal determinism, between the direct informations of the senses, to which the Individual clings, and the inspirations of the moral and spiritual nature, which constitute the Person. Thus this intellectual abstractive element is, if neither minimized in the life of the soul, nor allowed to be its sole element or its last, a sobering, purifying, mortifying, vivifying bath and fire.

      VII. Three Final Objections to such a conception of Religion, and their Answers.

      Now there are three obvious objections to such a conception: with their consideration, this Introduction shall conclude.

      1. This conception not excessively intellectual.

      Does not, in the first place, such a view of life appear preposterously intellectual? What of the uneducated, of the toiling millions? What of most women and of all children? Are then all these, the overwhelming majority of mankind, the objects of Christ’s predilection, the very types chosen by Himself of His spirit and of God’s ideal for man, precluded from an essential element of religion? Or are we, at the least, to hold that an ethical and spiritual advantage is necessarily attached, and this too for but a small minority of mankind, to a simply intellectual function and activity? If there was a thing specially antagonistic to Christ and condemned by Him, it was the arrogance of the Schools of His day; if there is a thing apparently absent from Christ’s own life it is all philosophizing: even to suggest its presence seems at once to disfigure and to lower Him. Is then Reasoning, the School, to be declared not only necessary for some and for mankind at large, but necessary, in a sense, for all men and for the religious life itself?

      The answer to all this appears not far to seek. The element which we have named the intellectual, is but one of the faculties of every living soul; and hence, in some degree and form, it is present and operative in every one of us. And there is probably no greater difference between these degrees and forms, with regard to this element, than there is between the degrees and forms found in the other two elements of religion. For this intellectual, determinist element would be truly represented by every however simple mental attention to things and their mechanism, their necessary laws and requirements. Hence, the Venerable Anna Maria Taigi, the Roman working-man’s wife, attending to the requirements and rules of good washing and of darning of clothes; St. Jean Batiste de la Salle, the Breton gentleman, studying the psychology of school-children’s minds, and adapting his school system to it; St. Jerome labouring at his minute textual criticism of manuscripts of all kinds; St. Anselm and St. Thomas toiling at the construction of their dialectic systems,—all these, amongst endless other cases, are but illustrations of the omnipresence and endless variety of this element, which is busy with the rules and processes that govern things.

      And it is impossible to see why, simply because of their superior intellectual gifts and development, men like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Cassian and Duns Scotus, Nicolas of Coes and Pascal, Rosmini and Newman, should count as necessarily less near to God and Christ, than others with fewer of such gifts and opportunities. For it is not as though such gifts were considered as ever of themselves constituting any moral or spiritual worth. Nothing can be more certain than that great mental powers can be accompanied by emptiness or depravity of heart. The identical standard is to be applied to these as to all other gifts: they are not to be considered as substitutes, but only as additional material and means for the moral and spiritual life; and it is only inasmuch as they are actually so used, that they can effectively help on sanctity itself. It is only contended here that such gifts do furnish additional means and materials for the devoted will- and grace-moved soul, towards the richest and deepest spiritual life. For the intellectual virtues are no mere empty name: candour, moral courage, intellectual honesty, scrupulous accuracy, chivalrous fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested collaboration, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening solitude: these and many other cognate qualities bear upon them the impress of God and of His Christ. And yet they all as surely find but a scanty field of development outside of the intellectual life, as they are not the only virtues or class of virtues, and as the other two elements each produce a quite unique group of virtues of their own and require other means and materials for their exercise.

      2. Such a conception not Pelagian.

      But, in the second place, is not such a view of life Pelagian at bottom? Have we not argued throughout, as if the religious life were to be begun, and carried on, and achieved simply by a constant succession of efforts of our own; and as though it could be built up by us, like to some work of art, by a careful, conscious balancing of part against part? Is not all this pure Naturalism? Is not religion a life, and hence an indivisible whole? And is not this life simply the gift of God, capable of being received, but not produced by us; of being dimly apprehended as present, but not of being clearly СКАЧАТЬ