The School of Charity. Evelyn Underhill

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СКАЧАТЬ fact of facts involves. I believe in One God. We begin there ; not with our own needs, desires, feelings, or obligations. Were all these abolished, His independent splendour would remain, as the Truth which gives its meaning to the world. So we begin by stating with humble delight our belief and trust in the most concrete, most rich of all realities—God. Yet even the power to do this reflects back again to Him, and witnesses to His self-giving to the soul. For Christianity is not a pious reverie, a moral system or a fantasy life; it is a revelation, adapted to our capacity, of the Realities which control life. Those Realities must largely remain unknown to us; limited little creatures that we are. God, as Brother Giles said, is a great mountain of corn from which man, like a sparrow, takes a grain of wheat: yet even that grain of wheat, which is as much as we can carry away, contains all the essentials of our life. We are to carry it carefully and eat it gratefully: remembering with awe the majesty of the mountain from which it comes.

      The first thing this vast sense of God does for us, is to deliver us from the imbecilities of religious self-love and self-assurance; and sink our little souls in the great life of the race, in and upon which this One God in His mysterious independence is always working, whether we notice it or not. When that sense of His unique reality gets dim and stodgy, we must go back and begin there once more; saying with the Psalmist, “All my fresh springs are in thee.” Man, said Christ, is nourished by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Not the words we expect, or persuade ourselves that we have heard; but those unexpected words He really utters, sometimes by the mouths of the most unsuitable people, sometimes through apparently unspiritual events, sometimes secretly within the soul. Therefore seeking God, and listening to God, is an important part of the business of human life: and this is the essence of prayer. We do something immense, almost unbelievable, when we enter that world of prayer, for then we deliberately move out towards that transcendent Being whom Christianity declares to be the one Reality: a Reality revealed to us in three ways as a Creative Love, a Rescuing Love, and an Indwelling, all-pervading Love, and in each of those three ways claiming and responding to our absolute trust. Prayer is the give-and take between the little souls of men and that three-fold Reality.

      So we begin the overhaul of our spiritual equipment not by thinking about our own needs and shortcomings, but by looking up and out at this One Reality, this Unchanging God, and so gaining a standard of comparison, a “control.” That remarkable naturalist and philosopher, Dr. Beebe, whose patient study of living things seems to have brought him so near to the sources of life, says in his latest book Nonsuch, “As a panacea for a host of human ills, worries and fears, I should like to advocate a law that every toothbrush should have a small telescope in its handle, and the two used equally.” As far as the life of religion is concerned, if we always used the telescope before we used the toothbrush—looked first at the sky of stars, the great ranges of the beauty and majesty of God, and only then at our own small souls and their condition, needs, and sins—the essential work of the toothbrush would be much better done; and without that self-conscious conviction of its overwhelming importance, and the special peculiarities and requirements of our own set of teeth, which the angels must surely find amusing. “Where I left myself I found God; where I found myself, I lost God,” says Meister Eckhart. Our eyes are not in focus for His Reality, until they are out of focus for our own petty concerns.

      What then is the nature of that Eternal God, the Substance of all that is, so far as we are able to apprehend Him? What is the quality of that mysterious starlight the telescope helps us to discern? We are Christians; and so we accept, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the Christian account of His character. God is Love, or rather Charity; generous, out-flowing, self-giving love, Agape. When all the qualities which human thought attributes to Reality are set aside, this remains. Charity is the colour of the Divine personality, the spectrum of Holiness. We believe that the tendency to give, to share, to cherish, is the mainspring of the universe, ultimate cause of all that is, and reveals the Nature of God: and therefore that when we are most generous we are most living and most real. “Who dwelleth in Charity dwelleth in God, and God in him”; our true life develops within a spiritual world which lives and glows in virtue of His Eternal Charity. To enter the Divine order then, achieve the full life for which we are made, means entering an existence which only has meaning as the channel and expression of an infinite, self-spending love. This is not piety. It is not altruism. It is the clue to our human situation.

      The Creed, our list of the spiritual truths to which our inner life must be conformed, is all about a God who is Charity, a Charity that is God. It tells us that what we call creation is the never-ceasing action of a self-spending personal love; and all the experiences and acts of religion are simply our small experience of, and response to, the pressure and the call of that same creative Love which rules the stars. “Behold, Lord, from whence such love proceedeth!” exclaims Thomas à Kempis. It proceeds from the very heart of the universe. For Christians this is the ultimate fact, which must govern the whole conduct of life. We are each created, sought, possessed and maintained by a living Reality that is Charity; truly known by us in and through His free, generous self-giving, and in no other way. The life which we are called upon to manifest in space and time is a living spark of this generous Love. That means that the true demand of religion will never be a demand for correct behaviour or correct belief; but for generosity, as the controlling factor in every relation between man and God and man and man. To look at ourselves and our lives after looking at this great truth is surely enough to bring self-satisfied piety down with a run.

      When we look out towards this Love that moves the stars and stirs in the child’s heart, and claims our total allegiance and remember that this alone is Reality and we are only real so far as we conform to its demands, we see our human situation from a fresh angle; and perceive that it is both more humble and dependent, and more splendid, than we had dreamed. We are surrounded and penetrated by great spiritual forces, of which we hardly know anything. Yet the outward events of our life cannot be understood, except in their relation to that unseen and intensely living world, the Infinite Charity which penetrates and supports us, the God whom we resist and yet for whom we thirst; who is ever at work, transforming the self-centred desire of the natural creature into the wide-spreading, outpouring love of the citizen of Heaven.

      CHAPTER II

      ONE GOD, CREATOR

      The Divine action bathes the whole universe. It penetrates all creatures, it hovers above them. Wherever they are, it is. It goes before them, it is with them, it follows them. They need but let themselves be borne upon its waves.—De Caussade.

      The governing thought of the Creed is truly the first and last word of religion. It covers our whole response to reality. “I believe in One God”—not “I want,” or “I feel,” but “He Is”—all the rest flows from that, or is a special exhibition of it. Christian history is not the story of a number of individual religious experiences and developments. It describes the self-revelation and self-giving of that one infinitely generous God in whom, because of that revelation and self-giving, the soul believes. All the various forms of prayer and contemplation, or the disciplines of the spiritual life, only matter because they help, deepen, and purify our humble communion with this One God, infinite in His richness, delicacy and power; who is touching, calling and changing His creatures in countless ways, by the unceasing action of creative love. He is there first, over-passing in His Perfection all our partial discoveries. That which we really know about God, is not what we have been clever enough to find out, but what the Divine Charity has secretly revealed.

      And so we go on to make our first statement about this One God who is the controlling reality of life, and try to see what this should mean for our prayer ; that is, our small effort to correspond with Him. Christianity says that this One God is best defined as “Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible.” No limits are placed to the Divine fatherhood. The universe in its wholeness, and with all its disconcerting contrasts—the world of beauty, the world of science, the world of love, and those mysterious deeps of being of which the СКАЧАТЬ