The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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СКАЧАТЬ deepens and systematizes one of the weakest and most ruinous traditions of his class, age, and people, and falls far short of Socrates, with his deep childlike love of homely wisdom and of technical skill and productiveness. Indeed Matter is considered to be the one occasion of all sin, just as ignorance is considered to be the one true cause of sin. For although Plato throughout holds and proclaims free-will, in the definite sense of freedom of choice; and although he, in some passages, declares the ignorance which (according to him) is the necessary condition of a wrong choice, to be itself voluntary and culpable and to spring from an avoidable attachment to the world of sense: yet he clings, nevertheless, to the Socratic position that all ignorance and immorality are involuntary, that no man does or can act against what he sees to be for his own good.

      All this would of itself suffice to show how and why the Platonic system has, as such, long ceased to live or to be capable of resuscitation. And yet even some of the apparent weaknesses just referred to are nearly or even entirely strong points in his scheme. So with his treble division of the Soul, if we but soften the distinction of actual parts into a difference of function or of object. For, already in Plato’s own judgment, these parts admit of and require a regular hierarchy of subordination: the Irascible part is the natural ally, if properly tamed and broken in by the Reason, of this Reason against the Concupiscible part: it is the winged steed amongst the two horses of the chariot of the soul, and the charioteer, the Reason, has to see to it that this his winged steed flies not recklessly, but lends all its strength to keep its heavy, wingless, downwards-tending yoke-fellow from plunging them all into the deep and dark. Hence all this really makes for a true, because rich and laborious, Unity in Multiplicity. The same applies to the scheme of the four Cardinal Virtues; for here also there is a balancing and interaction of forces and of duties, which together are well fitted to deepen and fruitfully to unify the soul.

      But above all, there are four main conceptions which, with varying degrees and kinds of clearness, consistency, and proof, run throughout the Dialogues, and which not all the ever-increasing perception of the complexity of their implications, nor all the never-ending costingness of their reproduction, have long kept mankind from accepting and working into their own inner life and into their outlook and labour upon the world without.

      There is, first, the sense of the Universal nature of philosophy. Philosophy is here not a science alongside of other sciences, nor a sect existing with a view to the advantage of its members, nor a substitute for religion or science, art or action; but it stands for the totality of all mental activity, the nearest approach to an adequate realization of the reasonable nature of man. Hence philosophy has constant relations with all departments of human thought and action; or rather they all, with their several methods and ideals, come to enrich and stimulate philosophy, whilst philosophy, in return, reacts upon them all, by clarifying and harmonizing them each with itself and each with all the others.

      There is, next, the constant conviction of the reality of moral accountableness on the one hand, and of the strength of the passions and of the allurements of sense on the other, of the costing ethical character of the search for light and truth, of the ceaseless necessity of a turning of the whole man, of conversion. “As the bodily eye cannot turn from darkness to light without the turning of the whole body, so too when the eye of the soul is turned round, the whole soul must be turned from the world of generation unto that of Being, and become able to endure the sight of Being, and of the brightest and best part of Being, that is to say of the Good.”[2] Hence Philosophy is a Redemption, a Liberation, a Separation of the soul from the body, a Dying and seeking after death, a constant Purification and Recollection of the soul; and the four Cardinal Virtues are so many purifications;[3] and men who have once come to lay the blame of their own confusion and perplexity upon themselves, will hate themselves and escape from themselves into Philosophy, in order to become different and get rid of their former selves.[4]

      There is, in the third place, the dominant consciousness of Multiplicity in Unity and of Unity in Multiplicity, and of the necessity of the soul’s ever moving from one to the other—moving out of itself and into the world of Multiplicity, of sense and exterior work; and moving back into itself, into the world of Unity, of spirit and interior rest. Hence there is and ought to be a double movement of the soul. And this double action does not continue on the same plane, but the moving, oscillating soul is, according to the faithful thoroughness or cowardly slackness of these its movements, ever either mounting higher in truth and spirit, or falling lower away into the sensual and untruthful. For these its ascensions are “effortful,” painful, gradual; they are never fully finished here below, and they nowhere attain to that absolute knowledge which is possessed by God alone.[5] “We ought,” he tells us, “to strive and fly as swiftly as possible from hence thither. And to fly thither is to become like God”; but he adds, “as far as this is possible.”[6]

      And there is, lastly, an unfailing faith in an unexhausted, inexhaustible, transcendent world of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, which gives of itself, but never gives itself wholly, to that phenomenal world which exists only by participation in it; and in a Supreme Goodness, felt and half conceived to be personal and self-communicative, as the cause of all that is anywhere beautiful and one and good.

      These four characteristics of Universality, Conversion, Unification, Transcendence, we find them together in Greek philosophy once, and once only, namely in Plato. Twice again we have indeed a world-embracing, world-moving scheme placed before us, and in each case two of these four characteristics reappear in a deepened and developed form. For Aristotle works out, more fully and satisfactorily than Plato, the characters of Universality and of Unification; especially does the latter find a great improvement. And Plotinus insists, even more constantly and movingly than Plato, upon Conversion as a necessary means, and upon Transcendence as a necessary characteristic of all true philosophy. But Aristotle has lost the Conversion from out of his scheme, and also the Transcendence conceived as at the same time immanent in the world; and Plotinus has lost the Universality, and the Unification conceived as a Unity in Multiplicity.

      4. In Aristotle.

      As to Aristotle, the improvements upon Plato are marked and many. There is the doctrine of the non-existence of the General apart from the Particular; the doctrine of Matter as not simple Non-Being, but as Not-yet-Being, the Possible, the Not-yet-Actual, which is waiting the presence of the Form to give it the Actuality for which it is destined, since Matter requires Form, and Form requires Matter; and the doctrine, here first fully developed, of Motion, the Moved and the Moving.

      Since all Motion, Change, Natural Life spring from Form (and a particular Form), working in and with Matter (a particular and appropriate Matter), the ultimate First Moving Cause must Itself be all-moving and all-unmoved, that is, it must be Pure Form. We thus get the first at all adequate philosophical presentation of Theism: for this Pure Form is then shown to be eternal, unchanging, all thought, self-thinking, and absolutely distinct from the world which it moves. In all other real Beings the Form has, in various degrees, to contend with the manifold impediments of Matter; and in proportion to the Form’s success, does the resultant Being stand high in the scale of Creation. The plant, with its vegetative and plastic soul, stands lowest in the scale of organic life; next comes the animal, with its sensitive and motive soul; and highest stands man, with his rational and volitional soul. And each higher Being takes over, as the lower part of his own nature, the functions and powers of the lower Being; and hence, since all Beings constitute so many several parts of the world’s systematic whole, they are all deserving of the closest study. And Man, destined to be the highest constituent of this whole, can become so only by moving as much as may be out of his entanglement in the lower, the passive functions of his soul, and identifying himself with his true self, with that active power, that pure reason which, itself pure Form, finds its proper objects in the Forms of all things that are.

      Thus we get a system of a certain grand consistency and an impressively constant re-application of certain fundamental ideas to every kind of subject-matter. But the Platonic Dualism, though everywhere vigorously attacked, is yet nowhere fully overcome.

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