The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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СКАЧАТЬ a deep fervour without fanaticism, and a generous sympathy without indifference.

      And lastly, a lay lover of religion speaks throughout, a man to whom the very suspicion that such subjects should or could, on that account, be foreign to him has ever been impossible. A deep interest in religion is evidently part of our very manhood, a thing previous to the Church, and which the Church now comes to develop and to save. Yet such an interest is, in the long run, impossible, if the heart and will alone are allowed to be active in a matter so supremely great and which claims the entire man. “Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also”: man is not, however much we may try and behave as though he were, a mere sum-total of so many separable water-tight compartments; he can no more fruitfully delegate his brains and his interest in the intellectual analysis and synthesis of religion, than he can commission others to do his religious feeling and willing, his spiritual growth and combat, for him.—But this does not of itself imply an individualistic, hence one-sided, religion. For only in close union with the accumulated and accumulating experiences, analyses and syntheses of the human race in general, and with the supreme life and teaching of the Christian and Catholic Church in particular, will such growth in spiritual personality be possible on any large and fruitful scale: since nowhere, and nowhere less than in religion, does man achieve anything by himself alone, or for his own exclusive use and profit.

      And such a layman’s views, even when thus acquired and expressed with a constant endeavour to be, and ever increasingly to become, a unit and part and parcel of that larger, Christian and Catholic whole, will ever remain, in themselves and in his valuation of them, unofficial, and, at best, but so much material and stimulation for the kindly criticism and discriminating attention of his fellow-creatures and fellow-Christians and (should these views stand such informal, preliminary tests) for the eventual utilization of the official Church. To this officiality ever remains the exclusive right and duty to formulate successively, for the Church’s successive periods, according as these become ripe for such formulations, the corporate, normative forms and expressions of the Church’s deepest consciousness and mind. Yet this officiality cannot and does not operate in vacuo, or by a direct recourse to extra-human sources of information. It sorts out, eliminates what is false and pernicious, or sanctions and proclaims what is true and fruitful, and a development of her own life, teaching and commission, in the volunteer, tentative and preliminary work put forth by the Church’s unofficial members.

      And just because both these movements are within, and necessary to, one and the same complete Church, they can be and are different from each other. Hence the following book would condemn itself to pompous unreality were it to mimic official caution and emphasis, whilst ever unable to achieve official authority. It prefers to aim at a layman’s special virtues and function: complete candour, courage, sensitiveness to the present and future, in their obscurer strivings towards the good and true, as these have been in their substance already tested in the past, and in so far as such strivings can be forecasted by sympathy and hope. And I thus trust that the book may turn out to be as truly Catholic in fact, as it has been Catholic in intention; I have striven hard to furnish so continuous and copious a stream of actions and teachings of Christian saints and sages as everywhere to give the reader means of correcting or completing my own inferences; and I sincerely submit these my own conclusions to the test and judgment of my fellow-Christians and of the Catholic Church.

      My obligations to scholars, thinkers and great spiritual souls are far too numerous and great for any exhaustive recognition. Yet there are certain works and persons to whom I am especially indebted; and these shall here be mentioned with most grateful thanks.

      In my Biographical and Critical Part Second, I have had, in Genoa itself, the help of various scholars and friends. Signor Dottore Ridolfo de Andreis first made me realize the importance of Vallebona’s booklet. Padre Giovanni Semeria, the Barnabite, put me in touch with the right persons and documents. The Cavallière L. A. Cervetto, of the Biblioteca Civica, referred me to many useful works. The Librarian of the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana copied out for me the inventory of St. Catherine’s effects. And Signor Dottore Augusto Ferretto, of the Archivio di Stato, made admirably careful, explicitated copies for me, from the originals, so full of difficult abbreviations, of the long series of legal documents which are the rock-bed on which my biography is built.

      The courteous help of the Head Librarian of the Genoese University Library extended to beyond Genoa. For it was owing to his action, in conjunction with that of the Italian Ministry, of the English Embassy in Rome, and of the British Museum Authorities, that the three most important of the manuscripts of St. Catherine’s life were most generously deposited for my use at the latter institution. I was thus enabled to study my chief sources at full leisure in London.

      The Rev. Padre Calvino, Canon Regular of the Lateran, made many kind attempts to trace any possible compositions concerning St. Catherine among the Venerable Battista Vernazza’s manuscripts, preserved by the spiritual descendants of Battista’s Augustinian Canonesses in Genoa; it was not his fault that nothing could be found.

      The Society of Bollandists lent me, for a liberal length of time, various rare books. I shall indeed be proud if my Appendix wins their approbation, since it deals with subject-matters and methods in which they are past-masters. Father Sticker’s pages on St. Catherine, in their Acta Sanctorum (1752), are certainly not satisfactory; they are, however, quite untypical of the Bollandists’ best work, or even of their average performances.

      My obligations in my Psychological and Philosophical Parts First and Third are still more numerous and far more difficult to trace. Indeed it is precisely where these obligations are the most far-reaching that I can least measure them, since the influence of the books and persons concerned has become part of the texture of my own mind.

      But among the great religious spirits or stimulating thinkers of Classical and Patristic times, I am conscious of profound obligations to Plato generally; to Aristotle on two points; to St. Paul; to Plotinus; to Clement of Alexandria; and to St. Augustine. And the Areopagite Literature has necessarily been continuously in my mind. Among Mediaeval writers St. Thomas Aquinas has helped me greatly, in ways both direct and indirect; Eckhart has, with the help of Father H. S. Denifle’s investigations, furnished much food for reflection by his most instructive doctrinal excesses; and the extraordinarily deep and daring spirituality of Jacopone da Todi’s poetry has been studied with the greatest care.

      The Renaissance times have given me Cardinal Nicolas of Coes, whose great Dialogue de Idiota has helped me in various ways. And in the early post-Reformation period I have carefully studied, and have been much influenced by, that many-sided, shrewdly wise book, St. Teresa’s Autobiography. Yet it is St. John of the Cross, that massively virile Contemplative, who has most deeply influenced me throughout this work. St. Catherine is, I think, more like him, in her ultimate spirit, than any other Saint or spiritual writer known to me; she is certainly far more like him than is St. Teresa.

      Later on, I have learnt much from Fénelon’s Latin writings concerning Pure Love, of 1710 and 1712; together with Abbé Gosselin’s admirably lucid Analyse de la Controverse du Quiétisme, 1820, and the Jesuit Father Deharbe’s solid and sober die vollkommene Liebe Gottes, 1856.

      Among modern philosophers I have been especially occupied with, and variously stimulated or warned by, Spinoza, with his deep religious intuition and aspiration, and his determinist system, so destructive because taken by him as ultimate; Leibniz, with his admirably continuous sense of the multiplicity in every living unity, of the organic character, the inside of everything that fully exists, and of the depth and range of our subconscious mental and emotional life; Kant, with his keen criticisms and searching analyses, his profound ethical instincts, and his curious want of the specifically religious sense and insight; Schopenhauer, with his remarkable recognition of the truth and greatness of the Ascetic element and ideal; Trendelenburg, with his continuous requirement of an operative knowledge of the chief stages which any principle or category has passed through in human history, if we would judge this principle with any fruit; СКАЧАТЬ