The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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      Here again there is a true answer, I think. Simply all and every one of our acts, our very physical existence and persistence, is dependent, at every moment and in every direction, upon the prevenient, accompanying and subsequent power and help of God; and still more is every religious, every truly spiritual and supernatural act of the soul impossible without the constant action of God’s grace. Yet not only does all this not prevent the soul from consciously acting on her own part, and according to the laws of her own being; but God’s grace acts in and through the medium of her acts, inasmuch as these are good: so that the very same action which, seen as it were from without, is the effect of our own volition, is, seen as it were from within, the effect of God’s grace. The more costly is our act of love or of sacrifice, the more ethical and spiritual, and the more truly it is our own deepest self-expression, so much the more, at the same time, is this action a thing received as well as given, and that we have it to give, and that we can and do give it, is itself a pure gift of God.

      What then is wanted, if we would really cover the facts of the case, is evidently not a conception which would minimize the human action, and would represent the latter as shrinking, in proportion as God’s action increases; but one which, on the contrary, fully faces, and keeps a firm hold of, the mysterious paradox which pervades all true life, and which shows us the human soul as self-active in proportion to God’s action within it, according to St. Bernard’s doctrine already quoted. Grace and the Will thus rise and fall, in their degree of action, together; and man will never be so fully active, so truly and intensely himself, as when he is most possessed by God.

      And since man’s action is thus in actual fact mysteriously double, it should ever be so considered by him; and he should, as St. Ignatius of Loyola says, “pray as if all depended on his prayer, and act as if all depended on his action.” Hence all man’s action, though really incapable of existing for an instant without the aid of God, and though never exclusively his own, can be studied throughout, preliminarily as though it were his exclusive production on its analyzable, human side. And man not only can, he ought to be as thoughtful and careful, as reasonably analytic and systematic about this study of his action as he was careful and consistent in its production,—in both cases, whilst praying and believing as though it were all from God, he can and should behave also as though this action were exclusively his own. As St. Thomas admirably says: “We attribute one and the same effect both to a natural cause and to a divine force, not in the sense of that effect proceeding in part from God, and in part from the human agent. But the effect proceeds entire from both, according to a different mode: just as, in music, the whole effect is attributed to the instrument, and the same entire effect is referred to man as the principal agent.”[41]

      3. Such a conception not Epicurean.

      But, in the last place, is not such a view of life Epicurean? Where is the Cross and Self-Renunciation? Is it not Christ Himself Who has bidden us cut off our right hand and pluck out our right eye, if they offend; Who has declared that he who hateth not his own father and mother for His sake is not worthy of Him; Who has asked, “What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?” and Who has pronounced a special woe upon the rich, and a special blessing upon the poor in spirit? Does not our view, on the contrary, bid a man attend to his hands and eyes, rather than to their possible or even actual offending, euphemistically described here as “friction”; bid him love his father and mother, even though this introduce a conflict into his affections; bid him take care to gain, as far as may be, the whole of his own possible interior and exterior world, as though this would of itself be equivalent to his saving his soul; and thus bid him become rich and full and complex, an aesthete rather than a man of God? In a word, is not our position a masked Paganism, a new Renaissance rather than the nobly stern old Christianity?

      Now here again a true answer is found in a clear intelligence of the actual implications of the position. For if the Intellectual action were here taken as capable of alone, or in any degree directly, forming the foundation of all our other life, so that on a mathematically clear and complete system, appealing to and requiring the abstractive powers alone, would, later on, be built, according to our own further determination, the Institutional and Experimental, or both or neither; then such a position, if possible and actualized, would indeed save us the simultaneous energizing of our whole complex nature, and would, so far, well deserve the accusation of unduly facilitating life; it might be taken as, at least, not beginning with the Cross. But here this is not so. For from the first the External and the Mystical elements are held to be at least as necessary and operative as the Intellectual element; and it is impossible to see how the elimination of this latter, and of the ever-expensive keeping it and its rivals each at their own work, could deepen the truly moral sufferings and sacrifices of the soul’s life.

      If again the Intellectual action were taken, as by Gnosticism of all sorts, as the eventual goal of the whole, so that the External and Mystical would end by being absorbed into the Intellectual, our Knowledge becoming coextensive with Reality itself, then we might again, and with still deeper truth, be accused of eliminating the element of effort and of sacrifice,—the Cross. But here, on the contrary, not only the Intellectual alone does not begin the soul’s life or build up its conditions, but the Intellectual alone does not conclude and crown it. Eternally will different soul-functions conjoin in a common work, eternally will God and the souls of our fellows be for us realities in diverse degrees outside and beyond of our own apprehension of them, and eternally shall we apprehend them differently and to a different degree by our intelligence, by our affection, and by our volition. Hence, even in eternity itself we can, without exceeding the limits of sober thinking and of psychological probability, find a field for the exercise by our souls of something corresponding to the joy and greatness of noble self-sacrifice here below. The loving soul will there, in the very home of love, give itself wholly to and be fulfilled by God, and yet the soul will possess an indefinitely heightened apprehension of the immense excess of this its love and act above its knowledge, and of God Himself above both. And here again it is impossible to see how the elimination of the intellectual element, which becomes thus the very measure of the soul’s own limitations, and of the exceeding greatness of its love and of its Lover, would make the conception more efficaciously humbling and Christian.

      Both at the beginning, then, and throughout, and even at the end of the soul’s life, the intellectual element is necessary, and this above all for the planting fully and finally, in the very depths of the personality, the Cross, the sole means to the soul’s true Incoronation.