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The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day

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Title: The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day

Author: Evelyn Underhill


        
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Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Garrett Alley, and the Online
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THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT

AND

THE LIFE OF TO-DAY

BY

EVELYN UNDERHILL

Author of "MYSTICISM," "THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM," etc.



NEW YORK

E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE


Copyright, 1922.

BY E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All rights reserved_


IN MEMORIAM

E.R.B.




PREFACE


This book owes its origin to the fact that in the autumn of 1921 the
authorities of Manchester College, Oxford invited me to deliver the
inaugural course of a lectureship in religion newly established under
the will of the late Professor Upton. No conditions being attached to
this appointment, it seemed a suitable opportunity to discuss, so far as
possible in the language of the moment, some of the implicits which I
believe to underlie human effort and achievement in the domain of the
spiritual life. The material gathered for this purpose has now been
added to, revised, and to some extent re-written, in order to make it
appropriate to the purposes of the reader rather than the hearer. As the
object of the book is strictly practical, a special attempt has been
made to bring the classic experiences of the spiritual life into line
with the conclusions of modern psychology, and in particular, to suggest
some of the directions in which recent psychological research may cast
light on the standard problems of the religious consciousness. This
subject is still in its infancy; but it is destined, I am sure, in the
near future to exercise a transforming influence on the study of
spiritual experience, and may even prove to be the starting point of a
new apologetic. Those who are inclined either to fear or to resent the
application to this experience of those laws which--as we are now
gradually discovering--govern the rest of our psychic life, or who are
offended by the resulting demonstrations of continuity between our most
homely and most lofty reactions to the universe, might take to
themselves the plain words of Thomas à Kempis: "Thou art a man and not
God, thou art flesh and no angel."

Since my subject is not the splendor of historic sanctity but the normal
life of the Spirit, as it may be and is lived in the here-and-now, I
have done my best to describe the character and meaning of this life in
the ordinary terms of present day thought, and with little or no use of
the technical language of mysticism. For the same reason, no attention
has been given to those abnormal experiences and states of
consciousness, which, too often regarded as specially "mystical," are
now recognized by all competent students as representing the unfortunate
accidents rather than the abiding substance of spirituality. Readers of
these pages will find nothing about trances, Ecstasies and other rare
psychic phenomena; which sometimes indicate holiness, and sometimes only
disease. For information on these matters they must go to larger and
more technical works. My aim here is the more general one, of indicating
first the characteristic experiences--discoverable within all great
religions--which justify or are fundamental to the spiritual life, and
the way in which these experiences may be accommodated to the
world-view of the modern man: and next, the nature of that spiritual
life as it appears in human history. The succeeding sections of the book
treat in some detail the light cast on spiritual problems by mental
analysis--a process which need not necessarily be conducted from the
standpoint of a degraded materialism--and by recent work on the
psychology of autistic thought and of suggestion. These investigations
have a practical interest for every man who desires to be the "captain
of his soul." The relation in which institutional religion does or
should stand to the spiritual life is also in part a matter for
psychology; which is here called upon to deal with the religious aspect
of the social instincts, and the problems surrounding symbols and cults.
These chapters lead up to a discussion of the personal aspect of the
spiritual life, its curve of growth, characters and activities; and a
further section suggests some ways in which educationists might promote
the up springing of this life in the young. Finally, the last chapter
attempts to place the fact of the life of the Spirit in its relation to
the social order, and to indicate some of the results which might follow
upon its healthy corporate development. It is superfluous to point out
that each of these subjects needs, at least, a volume to itself: and to
some of them I shall hope to return in the future. Their treatment in
the present work is necessarily fragmentary and suggestive; and is
intended rather to stimulate thought, than to offer solutions.

Part of Chapter IV has already appeared in "The Fortnightly Review"
under the title "Suggestion and Religious Experience." Chapter VIII
incorporates several passages from an article on "Sources of Power in
Human Life" originally contributed to the "Hubert Journal." These are
reprinted by kind permission of the editors concerned. My numerous debts
to previous writers are obvious, and for the most part are acknowledged
in the footnotes; the greatest, to the works of Baron Von Hugely, will
be clear to all students of his writings. Thanks are also due to my old
friend William Scott Palmer, who read part of the manuscript and gave me
much generous and valuable advice. It is a pleasure to express in this
place my warm gratitude first to the Principal and authorities of
Manchester College, who gave me the opportunity of delivering these
chapters in their original form, and whose unfailing sympathy and
kindness so greatly helped me: and secondly, to the members of the
Oxford Faculty of Theology, to whom I owe the great Honor of being the
first woman lecturer in religion to appear in the University list.

  E.U.

  _Epiphany_, 1922.

[** Transcriber's Note: This text contains just a few instances of a
    character with a diacritical mark. The character is a lower-case
    'u' with a macron (straight line) above it. In the text, that
    character is depicted thusly: [=u] **]




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                  PAGE

      PREFACE                                             vii

   I. THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE                      1

  II. HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT                   38

 III. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:
     (I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND                              74

  IV. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:
     (II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION                    112

   V. INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT   153

  VI. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL            191

 VII. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION                228

VIII. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER         266

      PRINCIPAL WORKS USED AND CITED                      300

      INDEX                                               307




THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT

AND

THE LIFE OF TO-DAY

  Initio tu, Domine, terram fundasti; et opera manuum tuarum sunt caeli.
  Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanes; et omnes sicut vestimentum
        veterascent.
  Et sicut opertorium mutabis eos, et mutabuntur;
  Tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficient.
  Filii servorum tuorum habitabunt; et semen eorum in seculum dirigetur.

                                 --Psalm cii: 25-28




CHAPTER I

THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE


This book has been called "The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
To-day" in order to emphasize as much as possible the practical,
here-and-now nature of its subject; and specially to combat the idea
that the spiritual life--or the mystic life, as its more intense
manifestations are sometimes called--is to be regarded as primarily a
matter of history. It is not. It is a matter of biology. Though we
cannot disregard history in our study of it, that history will only be
valuable to us in so far as we keep tight hold on its direct connection
with the present, its immediate bearing on our own lives: and this we
shall do only in so far as we realize the unity of all the higher
experiences of the race. In fact, were I called upon to choose a motto
which should express the central notion of these chapters, that motto
would be--"There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." This
declaration I would interpret in the widest possible sense; as
suggesting the underlying harmony and single inspiration of all man's
various and apparently conflicting expressions of his instinct for
fullness of life. For we shall not be able to make order, in any hopeful
sense, of the tangle of material which is before us, until we have
subdued it to this ruling thought: seen one transcendent Object towards
which all our twisting pathways run, and one impulsion pressing us
towards it.

As psychology is now teaching us to find, at all levels of our craving,
dreaming, or thinking, the diverse expressions of one psychic energy; so
that type of philosophy which comes nearest to the religion of the
Spirit, invites us to find at all levels of life the workings and
strivings of one Power: "a Reality which both underlies and crowns all
our other, lesser strivings."[1] Variously manifested in partial
achievements of order and goodness, in diversities of beauty, and in our
graded apprehensions of truth, this Spirit is yet most fully known to us
in the transcendent values of holiness and love. The more deeply it is
loved by man, the nearer he draws to its heart: and the greater his
love, the more fully does he experience its transforming and energizing
power. The words of Plotinus are still true for every one of us, and are
unaffected by the presence or absence of creed:

"Yonder is the true object of our love, which it is possible to grasp
and to live with and truly to possess, since no envelope of flesh
separates us from it. He who has seen it knows what I say, that the soul
then has another life, when it comes to God, and having come possesses
Him, and knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the
dispenser of true life and that it needs nothing further."[2]

So, if we would achieve anything like a real integration of life--and
until we have done so, we are bound to be restless and uncertain in our
touch upon experience--we are compelled to press back towards contact
with this living Reality, however conceived by us. And this not by way
of a retreat from our actual physical and mental life, but by way of a
fulfilment of it.

More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the
searching question of the disciple in Boehme's Dialogue on the
Supersensual Life: "Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature
into the supersensual ground, without destroying nature?"[3] And such a
coming through into the ground, such a finding and feeling of Eternal
Life, is I take it the central business of religion. For religion is
committed to achieving a synthesis of the eternal and the ever-fleeting,
of nature and of spirit; lifting up the whole of life to a greater
reality, because a greater participation in eternity. Such a
participation in eternity, manifested in the time-world, is the very
essence of the spiritual life: but, set as we are in mutability, our
apprehensions of it can only be partial and relative. Absolutes are
known only to absolute mind; our measurements, however careful and
intricate, can never tally with the measurements of God. As Einstein
conceives of space curved round the sun we, borrowing his symbolism for
a moment, may perhaps think of the world of Spirit as curved round the
human soul; shaped to our finite understanding, and therefore presenting
to us innumerable angles of approach. This means that God can and must
be sought only within and through our human experience. "Where," says
Jacob Boehme, "will you seek for God? Seek Him in your soul, which has
proceeded out of the Eternal Nature, the living fountain of forces
wherein the Divine working stands."[4]

But, on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for
agnosticism. For this our human experience in its humbling imperfection,
however we interpret it, is as real within its own system of reference
as anything else. It is our inevitably limited way of laying hold on the
stuff of existence: and not less real for that than the monkeys' way on
one hand, or the angels' way on the other. Only we must be sure that we
do it as thoroughly and completely as we can; disdaining the indolence
which so easily relapses to the lower level and the smaller world.

And the first point I wish to make is, that the experience which we call
the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all
times and places, and at all levels of life. It is an experience which
is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or
rationalization we may choose to make of it: and no one, as a matter of
fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some
form of the experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and
also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience,
whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as
effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most
readily understand and respond to it.


Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of
analysis, can only say: "The soul knows when in that state that it is in
the presence of the dispenser of true life." Yet in saying this, does he
not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful
longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of
Soul? And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying "More than all
else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless
life in this world,"[5] assures us in these words that he too has known
that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious
experience, in so far as "pure" experience is possible to us; which is
only of course in a limited and relative sense. The subjective element,
all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and
control it. Nevertheless, they refer to man's communion with an
independent objective Reality. This experience is more real and
concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which
theology seeks to explain it. We may then take it, without prejudice to
any special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study is _one
life_; based on experience of one Reality, and manifested in the
diversity of gifts and graces which men have been willing to call true,
holy, beautiful and good. For the moment at least we may accept the
definition of it given by Dr. Bosanquet, as "oneness with the Supreme
Good in every facet of the heart and will."[6] And since without
derogation of its transcendent character, its vigour, wonder and worth,
it is in human experience rather than in speculation that we are bound
to seek it, we shall look first at the forms taken by man's intuition of
Eternity, the life to which it seems to call him; and next at the actual
appearance of this life in history. Then at the psychological machinery
by which we may lay hold of it, the contributions which religious
institutions make to its realization; and last, turning our backs on
these partial explorations of the living Whole, seek if we can to seize
something of its inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way in
which education may best prepare its fulfilment, and the part it must
play in the social group.

We begin therefore at the starting point of this life of Spirit: in
man's vague, fluctuating, yet persistent apprehension of an enduring and
transcendent reality--his instinct for God. The characteristic forms
taken by this instinct are simple and fairly well known. Complication
only comes in with the interpretation we put on them.

By three main ways we tend to realize our limited personal relations
with that transcendent Other which we call divine, eternal or real; and
these, appearing perpetually in the vast literature of religion, might
be illustrated from all places and all times.

First, there is the profound sense of security: of being safely held in
a cosmos of which, despite all contrary appearance, peace is the very
heart, and which is not inimical to our true interests. For those whose
religious experience takes this form, God is the Ground of the soul, the
Unmoved, our Very Rest; statements which meet us again and again in
spiritual literature. This certitude of a principle of permanence within
and beyond our world of change--the sense of Eternal Life--lies at the
very centre of the religious consciousness; which will never on this
point capitulate to the attacks of philosophy on the one hand (such as
those of the New Realists) or of psychology on the other hand, assuring
him that what he mistakes for the Eternal World is really his own
unconscious mind. Here man, at least in his great representatives--the
persons of transcendent religious genius--seems to get beyond all
labels. He finds and feels a truth that cannot fail him, and that
satisfies both his heart and mind; a justification of that
transcendental feeling which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art.
If his life has its roots here, it will be a fruitful tree; and whatever
its outward activities, it will be a spiritual life, since it is lived,
as George Fox was so fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All know
the great passage In St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes
how "the mysterious eye of his soul gazed on the Light that never
changes; above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence."[7] There is
nothing archaic in such an experience. Though its description may depend
on the language of Neoplatonism, it is in its essence as possible and as
fruitful for us to-day as it was in the fourth century, and the doctrine
and discipline of Christian prayer have always admitted its validity.

Here and in many other examples which might be quoted, the spiritual
fact is interpreted in a non-personal and cosmic way; and we must
remember that what is described to us is always, inevitably, the more or
less emotional interpretation, never the pure immediacy of experience.
This interpretation frequently makes use of the symbolisms of space,
stillness, and light: the contemplative soul is "lost in the ocean of
the Godhead," "enters His silence" or exclaims with Dante:

        "la mia vista, venendo sincera,
      e più e più entrava per lo raggio
    dell' alta luce, che da sè è vera."[8]

But in the second characteristic form of the religious experience, the
relationship is felt rather as the intimate and reciprocal communion of
a person with a Person; a form of apprehension which is common to the
great majority of devout natures. It is true that Divine Reality, while
doubtless including in its span all the values we associate with
personality, must far overpass it: and this conclusion has been reached
again and again by profoundly religious minds, of whom among Christians
we need only mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.
Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of
finding place for the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a
prevenient and an answering love. For it is always in a personal and
emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to
God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is
significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of
rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus
we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox
Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing--

"I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself
suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself
at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in
choosing one I should be renouncing all the others--for there is no
turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique
moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious,
sovereign and loving. And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens
out the way of the Lord."[9]

Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: "If," he says, "this Absolute
Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our
life's experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new
life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite
infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is
only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it
associations too human and too limited adequately to express this
profound God-consciousness."[10]

Such a personal God-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those
moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic
activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn.
We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their
philosophy: for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the
self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so
to speak its own guarantees. Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an
"intellectual fountain," hears the Divine Voice crying:

    "I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
    Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me."[11]

Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say:

    "O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!"[12]

Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Divine Wisdom as the Father
and ever-present Companion of the soul,[13] and Kabir, for whom God is
the Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim:

"From the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and
thee: and how shall such love be extinguished?"[14]

Christianity, through its concepts of the Divine Fatherhood and of the
Eternal Christ, has given to this sense of personal communion its
fullest and most beautiful expression:

    "Amore, chi t'ama non sta ozioso,
    tanto li par dolce de te gustare,
    ma tutta ora vive desideroso
    como te possa stretto piú amare;
    ché tanto sta per te lo cor gioioso,
    chi nol sentisse, nol porría parlare
    quanto é dolce a gustare lo tuo sapore."[15]

On the immense question of _what_ it is that lies behind this sense of
direct intercourse, this passionate friendship with the Invisible, I
cannot enter. But it has been one of the strongest and most fruitful
influences in religious history, and gives in particular its special
colour to the most perfect developments of Christian mysticism.

Last--and here is the aspect of religious experience which is specially
to concern us--Spirit is felt as an inflowing power, a veritable
accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group,
impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living-out of its
existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, and lifting it to fresh
levels of life. This sense of enhanced life is a mark of all religions
of the Spirit. "He giveth power to the faint," says the Second Isaiah,
"and to them that hath no might he increaseth strength ... they that
wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk,
and not faint."[16] "I live--yet not I," "I can do all things," says St.
Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this Divine strength invading
and controlling him: and assures his neophytes that they too have
received "the Spirit of power." "My life," says St. Augustine, "shall be
a real life, being wholly full of Thee."[17] "Having found God," says a
modern Indian saint, "the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained
fresh strength."[18] All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the
same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and
endurance.

So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be
resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The
cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite
Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living
and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The
dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us.
These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving
objectives to intellect feeling and will. They must all be taken into
account in any attempt to estimate the full character of the spiritual
life, and this life can hardly achieve perfection unless all three be
present in some measure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Christine
says, that when the voice of God called her it was at one and the same
time a Light, a Drawing, and a Power,[19] and her Indian contemporary
the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that "Seekers after God must realize
Brahma in these three places. They must see Him within, see Him without,
and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself."[20] And
it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of
these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by
us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them,
an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of
which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms
part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from
knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us
how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power,
of beauty which are contained in them.

And if the first type of experience, with the immense feeling of
assurance, of peace, and of quietude which comes from our intuitive
contact with that world which Ruysbroeck called the "world that is
unwalled,"[21] and from the mind's utter surrender and abolition of
resistances--if all this seems to lead to a merely static or
contemplative conception of the spiritual life; the third type of
experience, with its impulse towards action, its often strongly felt
accession of vitality and power, leads inevitably to a complementary and
dynamic interpretation of that life. Indeed, if the first moment in the
life of the Spirit be man's apprehension of Eternal Life, the second
moment--without which the first has little worth for him--consists of
his response to that transcendent Reality. Perception of it lays on him
the obligation of living in its atmosphere, fulfilling its meaning, if
he can: and this will involve for him a measure of inward
transformation, a difficult growth and change. Thus the ideas of new
birth and regeneration have always been, and I think must ever be,
closely associated with man's discovery of God: and the soul's true path
seems to be from intuition, through adoration, to moral effort, and
thence to charity.

Even so did the Oxford Methodists, who began by trying only to worship
God and _be_ good by adhering to a strict devotional rule, soon find
themselves impelled to try to _do_ good by active social work.[22] And
at his highest development, and in so far as he has appropriated the
full richness of experience which is offered to him, man will and should
find himself, as it were, flung to and fro between action and
contemplation. Between the call to transcendence, to a simple self-loss
in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich
and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a
fellow worker with Him: between the soul's profound sense of transcendent
love, and its felt possession of and duty towards immanent love--a paradox
which only some form of incarnational philosophy can solve. It is said
of Abu Said, the great S[=u]fi, at the full term of his development,
that he "did all normal things while ever thinking of God."[23] Here, I
believe, we find the norm of the spiritual life, in such a complete
response both to the temporal and to the eternal revelations and demands
of the Divine nature: on the one hand, the highest and most costing
calls made on us by that world of succession in which we find ourselves;
on the other, an unmoved abiding in the bosom of eternity, "where was
never heard quarter-clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to
turne."[24]

There have been many schools and periods in which one half of this dual
life of man has been unduly emphasized to the detriment of the other.
Often in the East--and often too in the first, pre-Benedictine phase of
Christian monasticism--there has been an unbalanced cultivation of the
contemplative life, resulting in a narrow, abnormal, imperfectly
vitalized a-social type of spirituality. On the other hand, in our own
day the tendency to action usually obliterates the contemplative side of
experience altogether: and the result is the feverishness, exhaustion
and uncertainty of aim characteristic of the over-driven and the
underfed. But no one can be said to live in its fulness the life of the
Spirit who does not observe a due balance between the two: both
receiving and giving, both apprehending and expressing, and thus
achieving that state of which Ruysbroeck said "Then only is our life a
whole, when work and contemplation dwell in us side by side, and we are
perfectly in both of them at once."[25] All Christian writers on the
life of the Spirit point to the perfect achievement of this two-fold
ideal in Christ; the pattern of that completed humanity towards which
the indwelling Spirit is pressing the race. His deeds of power and
mercy, His richly various responses to every level of human existence,
His gift to others of new faith and life, were directly dependent on the
nights spent on the mountain in prayer. When St. Paul entreats us to
grow up into the fulness of His stature, this is the ideal that is
implied.

In the intermediate term of the religious experience, that felt
communion with a Person which is the _clou_ of the devotional life, we
get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of
transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of
contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that
religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual
growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity
has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the
exaggerations to which it has led. Both extremes are richly represented
in the literature of mysticism. But we should remember that Christianity
is not alone in thus requiring place to be made for such a conception of
God as shall give body to all the most precious and fruitful experiences
of the heart, providing simple human sense and human feeling with
something on which to lay hold. In India, there is the existence, within
and alongside the austere worship of the unconditioned Brahma, of the
ardent personal Vaishnavite devotion to the heart's Lord, known as
Bhakti Marga. In Islam, there is the impassioned longing of the S[=u]fis
for the Beloved, who is "the Rose of all Reason and all Truth."

    "Without Thee, O Beloved, I cannot rest;
    Thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon.
    Tho' every hair on my body becomes a tongue
    A thousandth part of the thanks due to Thee I cannot tell."[26]

There is the sudden note of rapture which startles us in the
Neoplatonists, as when Plotinus speaks of "the name of love for what is
there to know--the passion of the lover testing on the 'bosom of his
love."[27] Surely we may accept all these, as the instinctive responses
of a diversity of spirits to the one eternal Spirit of life and love:
and recognize that without such personal response, such a discovery of
imperishable love, a fully lived spiritual life is no more possible than
is a fully lived physical life from which love has been left out.

When we descend from experience to interpretation, the paradoxical
character of such a personal sense of intimacy is eased for us, if we
remember that the religious man's awareness of the indwelling Spirit, or
of a Divine companionship--whatever name he gives it--is just his
limited realization, achieved by means of his own mental machinery, of a
universal and not a particular truth. To this realization he brings all
his human--more, his sub-human--feelings and experiences: not only those
which are vaguely called his spiritual intuitions, but the full weight
of his impulsive and emotional life. His experience and its
interpretation are, then, inevitably conditioned by this apperceiving
mass. And here I think the intellect should show mercy, and not probe
without remorse into those tender places where the heart and the spirit
are at one. Let us then be content to note, that when we consult the
works of those who have best and most fully interpreted their religion
in a universal sense, we find how careful they are to provide a category
for this experience of a personally known and loved indwelling
Divinity--man's Father, Lover, Saviour, ever-present Companion--which
shall avoid its identification with the mere spirit of Nature, whilst
safeguarding its immanence no less than its transcendent quality. Thus,
Julian of Norwich heard in her meditations the voice of God saying to
her, "See! I am in all things! See! I lift never mine hand from off my
works, nor ever shall!"[28] Is it possible to state more plainly the
indivisible identity of the Spirit of Life? "See! I am in _all_ things!"
In the terrific energies of the stellar universe, and the smallest song
of the birds. In the seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much
a part of nature, of those works on which His hands are laid, as the
more easily comprehended economy of the ant-heap and the hive. This
sense of the personal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and
transcending all our highest values, here in our space-time world of
effort, may well be regarded as the differential mark of real spiritual
experience, wherever found. It chimes well with the definition of
Professor Pratt, who observes that the truly spiritual man, though he
may not be any better morally than his non-religious neighbour, "has a
confidence in the universe and an inner joy which the other does not
know--is more at-home in the universe as a whole, than other men."[29]

If, in their attempt to describe their experience of this companioning
Reality, spiritual men of all types have exhausted all the resources and
symbols of poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, in order
to suggest a fraction of the values contained in earthly love. Such a
divine presence is dramatized for Christianity in the historic
incarnation, though not limited by it: and it is continued into history
by the beautiful Christian conception of the eternal indwelling Christ.
The distinction made by the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest
and the Unmanifest God seeks to express this same truth; and shows that
this idea, in one form or another, is a necessity for religious thought.

Further and detailed illustration of spiritual experience in itself, as
a genuine and abiding human fact--a form of life--independent of the
dogmatic interpretations put on it, will come up as we proceed. I now
wish to go on to a second point: this--that it follows that any complete
description of human life as we know it, must find room for the
spiritual factor, and for that religious life and temper in which it
finds expression. This place must be found, not merely in the phenomenal
series, as we might find room for any special human activity or
aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping Perfectionists; but
deep-set in the enduring stuff of man's true life. We must believe that
the union of this life with supporting Spirit cannot _in fact_ be
broken, any more than the organic unity of the earth with the universe
as a whole. But the extent in which we find and feel it is the measure
of the fullness of spiritual life that we enjoy. Organic union must be
lifted to conscious realization: and this to do, is the business of
religion. In this act of realization each aspect of the psychic
life--thought, will and feeling--must have its part, and from each must
be evoked a response. Only in so far as such all-round realization and
response are achieved by us do we live the spiritual life. We do it
perhaps in some degree, every time that we surrender to pure beauty or
unselfish devotion; for then all but the most insensitive must be
conscious of an unearthly touch, and hear the cadence of a heavenly
melody. In these partial experiences something, as it were, of the
richness of Reality overflows and is experienced by us. But it is in the
wholeness of response characteristic of religion--that uncalculated
response to stimulus which is the mark of the instinctive life--that
this Realty of love and power is most truly found and felt by us. In
this generous and heart-searching surrender of religion, rightly made,
the self achieves inner harmony, and finds a satisfying objective for
all its cravings and energies. It then finds its life, and the
possibilities before it, to be far greater than it knew.

We need not claim that those men and women who have most fully realized,
and so at first hand have described to us, this life of the Spirit, have
neither discerned or communicated the ultimate truth of things; nor need
we claim that the symbols they use have intrinsic value, beyond the
poetic power of suggesting to us the quality and wonder of their
transfigured lives. Still less must we claim this discovery as the
monopoly of any one system of religion. But we can and ought to claim,
that no system shall be held satisfactory which does not find a place
for it: and that only in so far as we at least apprehend and respond to
the world's spiritual aspect, do we approach the full stature of
humanity. Psychologists at present are much concerned to entreat us to
"face reality," discarding idealism along with the other phantasies that
haunt the race. Yet this facing of reality can hardly be complete if we
do not face the facts of the spiritual life. Certainly we shall find it
most difficult to interpret these facts; they are confused, and more
than one reading of them is possible. But still we cannot leave them out
and claim to have "faced reality."

Höffding goes so far as to say that any real religion implies and must
give us a world-view.[30] And I think it is true that any vividly lived
spiritual life must, as soon as it passes beyond the level of mere
feeling and involves reflection, involve too some more or less
articulated conception of the spiritual universe, in harmony with which
that life is to be lived. This may be given to us by authority, in the
form of creed: but if we do not thus receive it, we are committed to the
building of our own City of God. And to-day, that world-view, that
spiritual landscape, must harmonize--if it is needed to help our
living--with the outlook, the cosmic map, of the ordinary man. If it be
adequate, it will inevitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless
conflict with it. The stretched-out, graded, striving world of
biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical
relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy--these great
constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind,
must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view
which centres on the God known in religious experience. They are true
within their own systems of reference; and the soul demands a synthesis
wide enough to contain them.

It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional
type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which
devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an
explanation. They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to
live. But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of
modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the
explorations of history and of psychology. Even contrasted with our
every-day unresting strenuous life, it is rather like a conservatory in
a wilderness. Whilst we are inside everything seems all right.

Beauty and fragrance surround us. But emerging from its doors, we find
ourselves meeting the cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of
reality; and discover that such spiritual life as we possess has got to
accommodate itself to the conditions in which they live. If the claim of
religion be true at all, it is plain that the conservatory-type of
spiritual world is inconsistent with it. Imperfect though any conception
we frame of the universe must be--and here we may keep in mind Samuel
Butler's warning that "there is no such source of error as the pursuit
of absolute truth"--still, a view which is controlled by the religious
factor ought to be, so to speak, a hill-top view. Lifting us up to
higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis. Hence, the wider
the span of experience which we are able to bring within our system, the
more valid its claim becomes: and the setting apart of spiritual
experience in a special compartment, the keeping of it under glass, is
daily becoming less possible. That experience is life in its fullness,
or nothing at all. Therefore it must come out into the open, and must
witness to its own most sacred conviction; that the universe as a whole
is a religious fact, and man is not living completely until he is living
in a world religiously conceived.

More and more, as it seems to me, philosophy moves toward this reading
of existence. The revolt from the last century's materialism is almost
complete. In religious language, abstract thought is again finding and
feeling God within the world; and finding too in this discovery and
realization the meaning, and perhaps--if we may dare to use such a
word--the purpose of life. It suggests--and here, more and more,
psychology supports it--that, real and alive as we are in relation to
this system with which we find ourselves in correspondence, yet we are
not so real, nor so alive, as it is possible to be. The characters of
our psychic life point us on and up to other levels. Already we perceive
that man's universe is no fixed order; and that the many ways in which
he is able to apprehend it are earnests of a greater transfiguration, a
more profound contact with reality yet possible to him. Higher forms of
realization, a wider span of experience, a sharpening of our vague,
uncertain consciousness of value--these may well be before us. We have
to remember how dim, tentative, half-understood a great deal of our
so-called "normal" experience is: how narrow the little field of
consciousness, how small the number of impressions it picks up from the
rich flux of existence, how subjective the picture it constructs from
them. To take only one obvious example, artists and poets have given us
plenty of hints that a real beauty and significance which we seldom
notice lie at our very doors; and forbid us to contradict the statement
of religion that God is standing there too.

That thought which inspires the last chapters of Professor 'Alexander's
"Space, Time, and Deity," that the universe as a whole has a tendency
towards deity, does at least seem true of the fully awakened human
consciousness.[31] Though St. Thomas Aquinas may not have covered all
the facts when he called man a contemplative animal,[32] he came nearer
the mark than more modern anthropologists. Man has an ineradicable
impulse to transcendence, though sometimes--as we may admit--it is
expressed in strange ways: and no psychology which fails to take account
of it can be accepted by us as complete. He has a craving which nothing
in his material surroundings seems adequate either to awaken or to
satisfy; a deep conviction that some larger synthesis of experience is
possible to him. The sense that we are not yet full grown has always
haunted the race. "I am the Food of the full-grown. _Grow,_ and thou
shalt feed on Me!"[33] said the voice of supreme Reality to St.
Augustine. Here we seem to lay our finger on the distinguishing mark of
humanity: that in man the titanic craving for a fuller life and love
which is characteristic of all living things, has a teleological
objective. He alone guesses that he may or should be something other;
yet cannot guess what he may be. And from this vague sense of being _in
via,_ the restlessness and discord of his nature proceed. In him, the
onward thrust of the world of becoming achieves self-consciousness.

The best individuals and communities of each age have felt this craving
and conviction; and obeyed, in a greater or less degree, its persistent
onward push. "The seed of the new birth," says William Law, "is not a
notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting, a magnetic
desire."[34] Over and over again, rituals have dramatized this, desire
and saints have surrendered to it. The history of religion and
philosophy is really the history of the profound human belief that we
have faculties capable of responding to orders of truth which, did we
apprehend them, would change the whole character of our universe;
showing us reality from another angle, lit by another light. And time
after time too--as we shall see, when we come to consider the testimony
of history--favourable variations have arisen within the race and proved
in their own persons that this claim is true. Often at the cost of great
pain, sacrifice, and inward conflict they have broken their attachments
to the narrow world of the senses: and this act of detachment has been
repaid by a new, more lucid vision, and a mighty inflow of power. The
principle of degrees assures us that such changed levels of
consciousness and angles of approach may well involve introduction into
a universe of new relations, which we are not competent to
criticize.[35] This is a truth which should make us humble in our
efforts to understand the difficult and too often paradoxical utterances
of religious genius. It suggests the puzzlings of philosophers and
theologians--and, I may add, of psychologists too--over experiences
which they have not shared, are not of great authority for those whose
object is to find the secret of the Spirit, and make it useful for life.
Here, the only witnesses we can receive are, on the one part, the
first-hand witnesses of experience, and on the other part, our own
profound instinct that these are telling us news of our native land.

Baron von Hügel has finely said, that the facts of this spiritual life
are themselves the earnests of its objective. These facts cannot be
explained merely as man's share in the cosmic movement towards a yet
unrealized perfection; such as the unachieved and self-evolving Divinity
of some realist philosophers. "For we have no other instance of an
unrealized perfection producing such pain and joy, such volitions, such
endlessly varied and real results; and all by means of just this vivid
and persistent impression that this Becoming is an already realized
Perfection."[36] Therefore though the irresistible urge and the effort
forward, experienced on highest levels of love and service, are plainly
one-half of the life of the Spirit--which can never be consistent with a
pious indolence, an acceptance of things as they are, either in the
social or the individual life--yet, the other half, and the very
inspiration of that striving, is this certitude of an untarnishable
Perfection, a great goal really there; a living God Who draws all
spirits to Himself. "Our quest," said Plotinus, "is of an End, not of
ends: for that only can be chosen by us which is ultimate and noblest,
that which calls forth the tenderest longings of our soul."[37]

There is of course a sense in which such a life of the Spirit is the
same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Even if we consider it in relation
to historical time, the span within which it has appeared is so short,
compared with the ages of human evolution, that we may as well regard it
as still in the stage of undifferentiated infancy. Yet even babies
change, and change quickly, in their relations with the external world.
And though the universe with which man's childish spirit is in contact
be a world of enduring values; yet, placed as we are in the stream of
succession, part of the stuff of a changing world and linked at every
point with it, our apprehensions of this life of spirit, the symbols we
use to describe it--and we must use symbols--must inevitably change too.
Therefore from time to time some restatement becomes imperative, if
actuality is not to be lost. Whatever God meant man to do or to be, the
whole universe assures us that He did not mean him to stand still. Such
a restatement, then, may reasonably be called a truly religious work;
and I believe that it is indeed one of the chief works to which religion
must find itself committed in the near future. Hence my main object In
this book is to recommend the consideration of this enduring fact of the
life of the Spirit and what it can mean to us, from various points of
view; thus helping to prepare the ground for that synthesis which we may
not yet be able to achieve, but towards which we ought to look. It is
from this stand-point, and with this object of examining what we have,
of sorting out if we can the permanent from the transitory, of noticing
lacks and bridging cleavages, that we shall consider in turn the
testimony of history, the position in respect of psychology, and the
institutional personal and social aspects of the spiritual life.

In such a restatement, such a reference back to actual man, here at the
present day as we have him--such a demand for a spiritual interpretation
of the universe, which will allow us to fit in all his many-levelled
experiences--I believe we have the way of approach to which religion
to-day must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that
museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which--agreeable as it
may be to the historic or æsthetic sense--makes it so unreal to our
workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the
tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is
already a marked character of contemporary thought.

And note that, working on this basis, we need not in order to find room
for the facts commit ourselves to the harsh dualism, the opposition
between nature and spirit, which is characteristic of some earlier forms
of Christian thought. In this dualism, too, we find simply an effort to
describe felt experience. It is an expression of the fact, so strongly
and deeply felt by the richest natures, that there _is_ an utter
difference in kind between the natural life of use and wont, as most of
us live it, and the life that is dominated by the spiritual
consciousness. The change is indeed so great, the transfiguration so
complete, that they seize on the strongest language in which to state
it. And in the good old human way, referring their own feelings to the
universe, they speak of the opposing and incompatible worlds of matter
and of spirit, of nature and of grace. But those who have most deeply
reflected, have perceived that the change effected is not a change of
worlds. It is rather such a change of temper and attitude as will
disclose within our one world, here and now, the one Spirit in the
diversity of His gifts; the one Love, in homeliest incidents as well as
noblest vision, laying its obligations on the soul; and so the true
nature and full possibilities of this our present life.

Although it is true that we must register our profound sense of the
transcendental character of this spirit-life, its otherness from mere
nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature
receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more
naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language
of convulsion. The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this
perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it.
And whatever its special, language and personal colour be--for all our
news of God comes to us through the consciousness of individual men, and
arrives tinctured by their feelings and beliefs--in the end it does
this by disclosing us to ourselves as spirits growing up, though
unevenly and hampered by our past, through the physical order into
completeness of response to a universe that is itself a spiritual fact.
"Heaven," said Jacob Boehme, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the
Eternal One, wherein all worketh and willeth in quiet love."[38] Such a
manifestation of Spirit must clearly be made through humanity, at least
so far as our own order is concerned: by our redirection and full use of
that spirit of life which energizes us, and which, emerging from the
more primitive levels of organic creation, is ours to carry on and
up--either to new self-satisfactions, or to new consecrations.

It is hardly worth while to insist that the need for such a redirection
has never been more strongly felt than at the present day. There is
indeed no period in which history exhibits mankind as at once more
active, more feverishly self-conscious, and more distracted, than is our
own bewildered generation; nor any which stood in greater need of
Blake's exhortation: "Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage
himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit
for the Building up of Jerusalem."[39]

How many people do each of us know who work and will in quiet love, and
thus participate in eternal life?

Consider the weight of each of these words. The energy, the clear
purpose, the deep calm, the warm charity they imply. Willed work; not
grudging toil. Quiet love, not feverish emotionalism. Each term is quite
plain and human, and each has equal importance as an attribute of
heavenly life. How many politicians--the people to whom we have confided
the control of our national existence--work and will in quiet love? What
about industry? Do the masters, or the workers, work and will in quiet
love? that is to say with diligence and faithful purpose, without
selfish anxiety, without selfish demands and hostilities? What about the
hurried, ugly and devitalizing existence of our big towns? Can we
honestly say that young people reared in them are likely to acquire this
temper of heaven? Yet we have been given the secret, the law of
spiritual life; and psychologists would agree that it represents too the
most favourable of conditions for a full psychic life, the state in
which we have access to all our sources of power.

But man will not achieve this state unless he dwells on the idea of it;
and, dwelling on that idea, opening his mind to its suggestions, brings
its modes of expression into harmony with his thought about the world of
daily life. Our spiritual life to-day, such as it is, tends above all to
express itself in social activities. Teacher after teacher comes forward
to plume himself on the fact that Christianity is now taking a "social
form"; that love of our neighbour is not so much the corollary as the
equivalent of the love of God, and so forth. Here I am sure that all can
supply themselves with illustrative quotations. Yet is there in this
state of things nothing but food for congratulation? Is such a view
complete? Is nothing left out? Have we not lost the wonder and poetry of
the forest in our diligent cultivation of the economically valuable
trees; and shall we ever see life truly until we see it with the poet's
eyes? There is so much meritorious working and willing; and so little
time left for quiet love. A spiritual fussiness--often a material
fussiness too--seems to be taking the place of that inward resort to the
fontal sources of our being which is the true religious act, our chance
of contact with the Spirit. This compensating beat of the fully lived
human life, that whole side of existence resumed in the word
contemplation, has been left out. "All the artillery of the world," said
John Everard, "were they all discharged together at one clap, could not
more deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamourings of desires in the
soul deaf its ears, so you see a man must go into the silence, or else
he cannot hear God speak."[40] And until we remodel our current
conception of the Christian life in such a sense as to give that silence
and its revelation their full value, I do not think that we can hope to
exhibit the triumphing power of the Spirit in human character and human
society. Our whole notion of life at present is such as to set up
resistances to its inflow. Yet the inner mood, the consciousness, which
makes of the self its channel, are accessible to all, if we would but
believe this and act on our belief. "Worship," said William Penn, "is
the supreme act of a man's life."[41] And what is worship but a
reach-out of the finite spirit towards Infinite Life? Here thought must
mend the breach which thought has made: for the root of our trouble
consists in the fact that there is a fracture in our conception of God
and of our relation with Him. We do not perceive the "hidden unity in
the Eternal Being"; the single nature and purpose of that Spirit which
brought life forth, and shall lead it to full realization.

Here is our little planet, chiefly occupied, to our view, in rushing
round the sun; but perhaps found from another angle to fill quite
another part in the cosmic scheme. And on this apparently unimportant
speck, wandering among systems of suns, the appearance of life and its
slow development and ever-increasing sensitization; the emerging of pain
and of pleasure; and presently man with his growing capacity for
self-affirmation and self-sacrifice, for rapture and for grief. Love
with its unearthly happiness, unmeasured devotion, and limitless pain;
all the ecstasy, all the anguish that we extract from the rhythm of life
and death. It is much, really, for one little planet to bring to birth.
And presently another music, which some--not many perhaps yet, in
comparison with its population--are able to hear. The music of a more
inward life, a sort of fugue in which the eternal and temporal are
mingled; and here and there some, already, who respond to it. Those who
hear it would not all agree as to the nature of the melody; but all
would agree that it is something different in kind from the rhythm of
life and death. And in their surrender to this--to which, as they feel
sure, the physical order too is really keeping time--they taste a larger
life; more universal, more divine. As Plotinus said, they are looking at
the Conductor in the midst; and, keeping time with Him, find the
fulfilment both of their striving and of their peace.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Von Hügel: "Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of
Religion," p. 60.]

[Footnote 2: Ennead I, 6. 7.]

[Footnote 3: Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]

[Footnote 4: Op. cit., loc. cit.]

[Footnote 5: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 31.]

[Footnote 6: Bernard Bosanquet: "What Religion Is" p. 32.]

[Footnote 7: Aug.: Conf. VII, 27.]

[Footnote 8: "My vision, becoming more purified, entered deeper and
deeper into the ray of that Supernal Light, which in itself is
true"--Par. XXXIII, 52.]

[Footnote 9: "The Tragic Sense of Life In Men and Peoples," p. 194.]

[Footnote 10: T. Upton: "The Bases of Religious Belief," p. 363.]

[Footnote 11: Blake: "Jerusalem," Cap. i.]

[Footnote 12: Nicholson: "The Divãni Shamsi Tabriz," p. 141.]

[Footnote 13: Ennead V. i. 3.]

[Footnote 14: Kabir, op. cit., p. 41.]

[Footnote 15: "Love, whoso loves thee cannot idle be, so sweet to him to
taste thee; but every hour he lives in longing that he may love thee
more straitly. For in thee the heart so joyful dwells, that he who feels
it not can never say how sweet it is to taste thy savour"--Jacopone da
Todi: Lauda 101.]

[Footnote 16: Isaiah xl, 29-31.]

[Footnote 17: Aug.: Conf. X, 28.]

[Footnote 18: "Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
12.]

[Footnote 19: "Le Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine," p. ii.]

[Footnote 20: "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
20.]

[Footnote 21: Ruysbroeck: "The Book of the XII Béguines;" Cap. 8.]

[Footnote 22: Overton: "Life of Wesley." Cap. 2.]

[Footnote 23: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies In Islamic Mysticism," Cap. I.]

[Footnote 24: "Donne's Sermons," edited by L. Pearsall Smith, p. 236.]

[Footnote 25: Ruysbroeck, "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 14.]

[Footnote 26: Bishr-i-Yasin, cf. Nicholson, op. cit., loc. cit.]

[Footnote 27: Ennead VI. 9. 4.]

[Footnote 28: "Revelations of Divine Love," Cap. II.]

[Footnote 29: Pratt: "The Religious Consciousness," Cap. 2.]

[Footnote 30: Höffding: "Philosophy of Religion," Pt. II, A]

[Footnote 31: Op. cit., Bk. 4, Cap. 1.]

[Footnote 32: "Summa contra Gentiles," L. III. Cap. 37.]

[Footnote 33: Aug: Conf. VII, 10.]

[Footnote 34: "The Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p.
154.]

[Footnote 35: Cf. Haldane, "The Reign of Relativity," Cap. VI.]

[Footnote 36: Von Hügel: "Eternal Life," p. 385.]

[Footnote 37: Ennead I. 4. 6.]

[Footnote 38: Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]

[Footnote 39: Blake: "Jerusalem": To the Christians.]

[Footnote 40: "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 600.]

[Footnote 41: William Penn, "No Cross, No Crown."]




CHAPTER II

HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT


We have already agreed that, if we wish to grasp the real character of
spiritual life, we must avoid the temptation to look at it as merely a
historical subject. If it is what it claims to be, it is a form of
eternal life, as constant, as accessible to us here and now, as in any
so-called age of faith: therefore of actual and present importance, or
else nothing at all. This is why I think that the approach to it through
philosophy and psychology is so much to be preferred to the approach
through pure history. Yet there is a sense in which we must not neglect
such history; for here, if we try to enter by sympathy into the past, we
can see the life of the Spirit emerging and being lived in all degrees
of perfection and under many different forms. Here, through and behind
the immense diversity of temperaments which it has transfigured, we can
best realise its uniform and enduring character; and therefore our own
possibility of attaining to it, and the way that we must tread so to do.
History does not exhort us or explain to us, but exhibits living
specimens to us; and these specimens witness again and again to the fact
that a compelling power does exist in the world--little understood,
even by those who are inspired by it--which presses men to transcend
their material limitations and mental conflicts, and live a new creative
life of harmony, freedom and joy. Directly human character emerges as
one of man's prime interests, this possibility emerges too, and is never
lost sight of again. Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian,
Moslem and Christian all declare with more or less completeness a way of
life, a path, a curve of development which shall end in its attainment;
and history brings us face to face with the real and human men and women
who have followed this way, and found its promise to be true.

It is, indeed, of supreme importance to us that these men and women did
truly and actually thus grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the
pressure of a more intense life, and the demand of a more authentic
love. Their adventures, whatsoever addition legend may have made to
them, belong at bottom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not
of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our imagination but to
our will. Unless the spiritual life were thus a part of history, it
could only have for us the interest of a noble dream: an interest
actually less than that of great poetry, for this has at least been
given to us by man's hard passionate work of expressing in concrete
image--and ever the more concrete, the greater his art--the results of
his transcendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. Thus, as the
tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, from Nazareth to Calvary, made
of Christianity a veritable human revelation of God and not a Gnostic
answer to the riddle of the soul; so the real and solid men and women of
the Spirit--eating, drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the
circumstances of their own time--are the earnests of our own latent
destiny and powers, the ability of the Christian to "grow taller in
Christ."[42] These powers--that ability--are factually present in the
race, and are totally independent of the specific religious system which
may best awaken, nourish, and cause them to grow.

In order, then, that we may be from the first clear of all suspicion of
vague romancing about indefinite types of perfection and keep tight hold
on concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look at the
quality of life exhibited by some of these great examples of dynamic
spirituality, and the movements which they initiated. It is true that we
can only select from among them, but we will try to keep to those who
have followed on highest levels a normal course; the upstanding types,
varying much in temperament but little in aim and achievement, of that
form of life which is re-made and controlled by the Spirit, entinctured
with Eternal Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be educative
for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle
of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens
exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less
picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete
thickness of the modern world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs
now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from us; of saints as
some peculiar species, God's pet animals, living in an incense-laden
atmosphere and less vividly human and various than ourselves. Such
conceptions are empty of historical content in the philosophic sense;
and when we are dealing with the accredited heroes of the Spirit--that
is to say, with the Saints--they are particularly common and
particularly poisonous. As Benedetto Croce has observed, the very
condition of the existence of real history is that the deed celebrated
must live and be present in the soul of the historian; must be
emotionally realized by him _now,_ as a concrete fact weighted with
significance. It must answer to a present, not to a past interest of the
race, for thus alone can it convey to us some knowledge of its inward
truth.

Consider from this point of view the case of Richard Rolle, who has been
called the father of English mysticism. It is easy enough for those who
regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and its subjects as something
different from ourselves, to look upon Rolle's threefold experience of
the soul's reaction to God--the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of
his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his
austere, self-giving life[43]--as the probable result of the reaction of
a neurotic temperament to mediæval traditions. But if, for instance the
Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque
fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student--another Oxford
undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of time--who gave
up that university and the career it could offer him, under the
compulsion of another Wisdom and another Love, then he re-enters the
living past. If, standing by him in that small hut in the Yorkshire
wolds, from which the urgent message of new life spread through the
north of England, he hears Rolle saying "Nought more profitable, nought
merrier than grace of contemplation, the which lifteth us from low
things and presenteth us to God. What thing is grace but beginning of
joy? And what is perfection of joy but grace complete?"[44]--if, I say,
he so re-enters history that he can hear this as Rolle meant it, not as
a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed life's very secret--then,
his heart may be touched and he may begin to understand. And then it may
occur to him that this ardour, and the sacrifice it impelled, the hard
life which it supported, witness to another level of being; reprove his
own languor and comfort, his contentment with a merely physical mental
life, and are not wholly to be accounted for in terms of superstition
or of pathology.

When the living spirit in us thus meets the living spirit of the past,
our time-span is enlarged, and history is born and becomes contemporary;
thus both widening and deepening our vital experience. It then becomes
not only a real mode of life to us; but more than this, a mode of social
life. Indeed, we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into the time
stream to achieve by ourselves, and in defiance of tradition, a true
integration of existence. Thus to defy tradition is to refuse all the
gifts the past can make to us, and cut ourselves off from the cumulative
experiences of the race. The Spirit, as Croce[45] reminds us, is
history, makes history, and is also itself the living result of all
preceding history; since Becoming is the essential reality, the creative
formula, of that life in which we find ourselves immersed.

It is from such an angle as this that I wish to approach the historical
aspect of the life of Spirit; re-entering the past by sympathetic
imagination, refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, but
seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate life, the features which
persist and have significance for it--getting, if we can, face to face
with those intensely living men and women who have manifested it. This
is not easy. In studying all such experience, we have to remember that
the men and women of the Spirit are members of two orders. They have
attachments both to time and to eternity. Their characteristic
experiences indeed are non-temporal, but their feet are on the earth;
the earth of their own day. Therefore two factors will inevitably appear
in those experiences, one due to tradition, the other to the free
movements of creative life: and we, if we would understand, must
discriminate between them. In this power of taking from the past and
pushing on to the future, the balance maintained between stability and
novelty, we find one of their abiding characteristics. When this balance
is broken--when there is either too complete a submission to tradition
and authority, or too violent a rejection of it--full greatness is not
achieved.

In complete lives, the two things overlap: and so perfectly that no
sharp distinction is made between the gifts of authority and of fresh
experience. Traditional formulæ, as we all know, are often used because
they are found to tally with life, to light up dark corners of our own
spirits and give names to experiences which we want to define.
Ceremonial deeds are used to actualize free contacts with Reality. And
we need not be surprised that they can do this; since tradition
represents the crystallization, and handling on under symbols, of all
the spiritual experiences of the race.

Therefore the man or woman of the Spirit will always accept and use some
tradition; and unless he does so, he is not of much use to his
fellow-men. He must not, then, be discredited on account of the
symbolic system he adopts; but must be allowed to tell his news in his
own way. We must not refuse to find reality within the Hindu's account
of his joyous life-giving communion with Ram, any more than we refuse to
find it within the Christian's description of his personal converse with
Christ. We must not discredit the assurance which comes to the devout
Buddhist who faithfully follows the Middle Way, or deny that Pagan
sacramentalism was to its initiates a channel of grace. For all these
are children of tradition, occupy a given place in the stream of
history; and commonly they are better, not worse, for accepting this
fact with all that it involves. And on the other hand, as we shall see
when we come to discuss the laws of suggestion and the function of
belief, the weight of tradition presses the loyal and humble soul which
accepts it, to such an interpretation of its own spiritual intuitions as
its Church, its creed, its environment give to it. Thus St. Catherine of
Genoa, St. Teresa, even Ruysbroeck, are able to describe their intuitive
communion with God in strictly Catholic terms; and by so doing renew,
enrich and explicate the content of those terms for those who follow
them. Those who could not harmonize their own vision of reality with the
current formulæ--Fox, Wesley or Blake, driven into opposition by the
sterility of the contemporary Church--were forced to find elsewhere some
tradition through which to maintain contact with the past. Fox found it
in the Bible; Wesley in patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic
system, when closely examined, is found to have many historic and
Christian connections. And all these regarded themselves far less as
bringers-in of novelty, than as restorers of lost truth. So we must be
prepared to discriminate the element of novelty from the element of
stability; the reality of the intuition, the curve of growth, the moral
situation, from the traditional and often symbolic language in which it
is given to us. The comparative method helps us towards this; and is
thus not, as some would pretend, the servant of scepticism, but rightly
used the revealer of the Spirit of Life in its variety of gifts. In this
connection we might remember that time--like space--is only of secondary
importance to us. Compared with the eons of preparation, the millions of
years of our animal and sub-human existence, the life of the Spirit as
it appears in human history might well be regarded as simultaneous
rather than successive. We may borrow the imagery of Donne's great
discourse on Eternity and say, that those heroic livers of the spiritual
life whom we idly class in comparison with ourselves as antique, or
mediæval men, were "but as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some
at seven, some at eight--all in one morning in respect of this day."[46]

Such a view brings them more near to us, helps us to neglect mere
differences of language and appearance, and grasp the warmly living and
contemporary character of all historic truth. It preserves us, too, from
the common error of discriminating between so-called "ages of faith" and
our own. The more we study the past, the more clearly we recognize that
there are no "ages of faith." Such labels merely represent the arbitrary
cuts which we make in the time-stream, the arbitrary colours which we
give to it. The spiritual man or woman is always fundamentally the same
kind of man or woman; always reaching out with the same faith and love
towards the heart of the same universe, though telling that faith and
love in various tongues. He is far less the child of his time, than the
transformer of it. His this-world business is to bring in novelty, new
reality, fresh life. Yet, coming to fulfil not to destroy, he uses for
this purpose the traditions, creeds, even the institutions of his day.
But when he has done with them, they do not look the same as they did
before. Christ himself has been well called a Constructive
Revolutionary,[47] yet each single element of His teaching can be found
in Jewish tradition; and the noblest of His followers have the same
character. Thus St. Francis of Assisi only sought consistently to apply
the teaching of the New Testament, and St. Teresa that of the Carmelite
Rule. Every element of Wesleyanism is to be found in primitive
Christianity; and Wesleyanism is itself the tradition from which the new
vigour of the Salvation Army sprang. The great regenerators of history
are always in fundamental opposition to the common life of their day,
for they demand by their very existence a return to first principles, a
revolution in the ways of thinking and of acting common among men, a
heroic consistency and single-mindedness: but they can use for their own
fresh constructions and contacts with Eternal Life the material which
this life offers to them. The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis,
Fox or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products of ages of faith.
They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding
apathy and decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break with
society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with
the Spirit. Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and
spiritual greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly modern, even
eccentric at the time at which it appears. We are accustomed to think of
"The Imitation of Christ" as the classic expression of mediæval
spirituality. But when Thomas à Kempis wrote his book, it was the
manifesto of that which was called the Modern Devotion; and represented
a new attempt to live the life of the Spirit, in opposition to
surrounding apathy.

When we re-enter the past, what we find, there is the persistent
conflict between this novelty and this apathy; that is to say between
man's instinct for transcendence, in which we discern the pressure of
the Spirit and the earnest of his future, and his tendency to lag
behind towards animal levels, in which we see the influence of his
racial past. So far as the individual is concerned, all that religion
means by grace is resumed under the first head, much that it means by
sin under the second head. And the most striking--though not the
only--examples of the forward reach of life towards freedom (that is, of
conquering grace) are those persons whom we call men and women of the
Spirit. In them it is incarnate, and through them, as it were, it
spreads and gives the race a lift: for their transfiguration is never
for themselves alone, they impart it to all who follow them. But the
downward falling movement ever dogs the emerging life of spirit; and
tends to drag back to the average level the group these have vivified,
when their influence is withdrawn. Hence the history of the Spirit--and,
incidentally, the history of all churches--exhibits to us a series of
strong movements towards completed life, inspired by vigorous and
transcendent personalities; thwarted by the common indolence and
tendency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed. We have no reason to
suppose that this history is a closed book, or that the spiritual life
struggling to emerge among ourselves will follow other laws.

We desire then, if we can, to discover what it was that these
transcendent personalities possessed. We may think, from the point at
which we now stand, that they had some things which were false, or, at
least, were misinterpreted by them. We cannot without insincerity make
their view of the universe our own. But, plainly, they also possessed
truths and values which most of us have not: they obtained from their
religion, whether we allow that it had as creed an absolute or a
symbolic value, a power of living, a courage and clear vision, which we
do not as a rule obtain. When we study the character and works of these
men and women, observing their nobility, their sweetness, their power of
endurance, their outflowing love, we must, unless we be utterly
insensitive, perceive ourselves to be confronted by a quality of being
which we do not possess. And when we are so fortunate as to meet one of
them in the flesh, though his conduct is commonly more normal than our
own, we know then with Plotinus that the soul _has_ another life. Yet
many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the same liturgies,
acknowledge the same scale of values and same moral law. But as
something, beyond what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the
great artist from the visible world, and he at this encounter becomes
more vividly alive; so for these there was and is in religion a new,
intenser life which they can reach. They seem to represent favourable
variations, genuine movements of man towards new levels; a type of life
and of greatness, which remains among the hoarded possibilities of the
race.

Now the main questions which we have to ask of history fall into two
groups:

First, _Type._ What are the characters which mark this life of the
Spirit?

Secondly, _Process._ What is the line of development by which the
individual comes to acquire and exhibit these characters?

First, then, the _Spiritual Type._

What we see above all in these men and women, so frequently repeated
that we may regard it as classic, is a perpetual serious heroic effort
to integrate life about its highest factors. Their central quality and
real source of power is this single-mindedness. They aim at God: the
phrase is Ruysbroeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the
Spirit. Thus it is the first principle of Hinduism that "the householder
must keep touch with Brahma in all his actions."[48] Thus the Sufi says
he has but two laws--to look in one direction and to live in one
way.[49] Christians call this, and with reason, the Imitation of Christ;
and it was in order to carry forward this imitation more perfectly that
all the great Christian systems of spiritual training were framed. The
New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the central fact of Our Lord's
life was His abiding sense of direct connection with and responsibility
to the Father; that His teaching and works of charity alike were
inspired by this union; and that He declared it, not as a unique fact,
but as a possible human ideal. This Is not a theological, but a
historical statement, which applies, in its degree to every man and
woman who has been a follower of Christ: for He was, as St. Paul has
said, "the eldest in a vast family of brothers." The same single-minded
effort and attainment meet us in other great faiths; though these may
lack a historic ideal of perfect holiness and love. And by a paradox
repeated again and again in human history, it is this utter devotion to
the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant
fruits in the temporal sphere; giving not only the strength to do
difficult things, but that creative charity which "wins and redeems the
unlovely by the power of its love."[50] The man or woman of prayer, the
community devoted to it, tap some deep source of power and use it in the
most practical ways. Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule was
the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the
soul; and it became one of the chief instruments in the civilization of
Europe, carrying forward not only religion, but education, pure
scholarship, art, and industrial reform. The object of St. Bernard's
reform was the restoration of the life of prayer. His monks, going out
into the waste places with no provision but their own faith, hope and
charity, revived agriculture, established industry, literally compelled
the wilderness to flower for God. The Brothers of the Common Life
joined together, in order that, living simply and by their own industry,
they might observe a rule of constant prayer: and they became in
consequence a powerful educational influence. The object of Wesley and
his first companions was by declaration the saving of their own souls
and the living only to the glory of God; but they were impelled at once
by this to practical deeds of mercy, and ultimately became the
regenerators of religion in the English-speaking world.

It is well to emphasize this truth, for it conveys a lesson which we can
learn from history at the present time with much profit to ourselves. It
means that reconstruction of character and reorientation of attention
must precede reconstruction of society; that the Sufi is right when he
declares that the whole secret lies in looking in one direction and
living in one way. Again and again it has been proved, that those who
aim at God do better work than those who start with the declared
intention of benefiting their fellow-men. We must _be_ good before we
can _do_ good; be real before we can accomplish real things. No
generalized benevolence, no social Christianity, however beautiful and
devoted, can take the place of this centring of the spirit on eternal
values; this humble, deliberate recourse to Reality. To suppose that it
can do so, is to fly in the face of history and mistake effect for
cause.

This brings us to the _Second Character_: the rich completeness of the
spiritual life, the way in which it fuses and transfigures the
complementary human tendencies to contemplation and action, the
non-successive and successive aspects of reality. "The love of God,"
said Ruysbroeck, "is an indrawing _and_ outpouring tide";[51] and
history endorses this. In its greatest representatives, the rhythm of
adoration and work is seen in an accentuated form. These people seldom
or never answer to the popular idea of idle contemplatives. They do not
withdraw from the stream of natural life and effort, but plunge into it
more deeply, seek its heart. They have powers of expression and
creation, and use them to the full. St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard,
St. Francis, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius organizing families which shall
incarnate the gift of new life; Fox, Wesley and Booth striving to save
other men; Mary Slessor driven by vocation from the Dundee mill to the
African swamps--these are characteristic of them. We perceive that they
are not specialists, as more earthly types of efficiency are apt to be.
Theirs are rich natures, their touch on existence has often an artistic
quality, St. Paul in his correspondence could break into poetry, as the
only way of telling the truth. St. Jerome lived to the full the lives of
scholar and of ascetic. St. Francis, in his perpetual missionary
activities, still found time for his music songs; St. Hildegarde and St.
Catherine of Siena had their strong political interests; Jacopone da
Todi combined the careers of contemplative politician and poet. So too
in practical matters. St. Catherine of Genoa was one of the first
hospital administrators, St. Vincent de Paul a genius in the sphere of
organized charity, Elizabeth Fry in that of prison reform. Brother
Laurence assures us that he did his cooking the better for doing it in
the Presence of God. Jacob Boehme was a hard-working cobbler, and
afterwards as a writer showed amazing powers of composition. The
perpetual journeyings and activities of Wesley reproduced in smaller
compass the career of St. Paul: he was also an exact scholar and a
practical educationist. Mary Slessor showed the quality of a ruler as
well as that of a winner of souls. In the intellectual region, Richard
of St. Victor was supreme in contemplation, and also a psychologist far
in advance of his time. We are apt to forget the mystical side of
Aquinas; who was poet and contemplative as well as scholastic
philosopher.

And the third feature we notice about these men and women is, that this
new power by which they lived was, as Ruysbroeck calls it, "a spreading
light."[52] It poured out of them, invading and illuminating other men:
so that, through them, whole groups or societies were re-born, if only
for a time, on to fresh levels of reality, goodness and power. Their own
intense personal experience was valid not only for themselves. They
belonged to that class of natural, leaders who are capable,--of
infecting the herd with their own ideals; leading it to new feeding
grounds, improving the common level It is indeed the main social
function of the man or woman of the Spirit to be such a crowd-compeller
In the highest sense; and, as the artist reveals new beauty to his
fellow-men, to stimulate in their neighbours the latent human capacity
for God. In every great surge forward to new life, we can trace back the
radiance to such a single point of light; the transfiguration of an
individual soul. Thus Christ's communion with His Father was the
life-centre, the point of contact with Eternity, whence radiated the joy
and power of the primitive Christian flock: the classic example of a
corporate spiritual life. When the young man with great possessions
asked Jesus, "What shall I do to be saved?" Jesus replied in effect,
"Put aside all lesser interests, strip off unrealities, and come, give
yourself the chance of catching the Infection of holiness from Me."
Whatever be our view of Christian dogma, whatever meaning we attach to
the words "redemption" and "atonement," we shall hardly deny that in the
life and character of the historic Christ something new was thus evoked
from, and added to, humanity. No one can read with attention the Gospel
and the story of the primitive Church, without being struck by the
consciousness of renovation, of enhancement, experienced by all who
received the Christian secret in its charismatic stage. This new factor
is sometimes called re-birth, sometimes grace, sometimes the power of
the Spirit, sometimes being "in Christ." We misread history if we regard
it either as a mere gust of emotional fervour, or a theological idea, or
discount the "miracles of healing" and other proofs of enhanced power by
which it was expressed. Everything goes to prove that the "more abundant
life" offered by the Johannine Christ to His followers, was literally
experienced by them; and was the source of their joy, their enthusiasm,
their mutual love and power of endurance.

On lower levels, and through the inspiration of lesser teachers, history
shows us the phenomena of primitive Christianity repeated again and
again; both within and without the Christian circle of ideas. Every
religion looks for, and most have possessed, some revealer of the
Spirit; some Prophet, Buddha, Mahdi, or Messiah. In all, the
characteristic demonstrations of the human power of transcendence--a
supernatural life which can be lived by us--have begun in one person,
who has become a creative centre mediating new life to his fellow-men:
as were Buddha and Mohammed for the faiths which they founded. Such
lives as those of St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, Wesley,
Booth are outstanding examples of the operation of this law. The parable
of the leaven is in fact an exact description of the way in which the
spiritual consciousness--the supernatural urge--is observed to spread in
human society. It is characteristic of the regenerate type, that he
should as it were overflow his own boundaries and energize other souls:
for the gift of a real and harmonized life pours out inevitably from
those who possess it to other men. We notice that the great mystics
recognize again and again such a fertilizing and creative power, as a
mark of the soul's full vitality. It is not the personal rapture of the
spiritual marriage, but rather the "divine fecundity" of one who is a
parent of spiritual children; which seems to them the goal of human
transcendence, and evidence of a life truly lived on eternal levels, in
real union with God. "In the fourth and last degree of love the soul
brings forth its children," says Richard of St. Victor.[53] "The last
perfection to supervene upon a thing," says Aquinas, "is its becoming
the cause of other things."[54] In a word, it is creative. And the
spiritual life as we see it in history is thus creative; the cause of
other things.

History is full of examples of this law: that the man or woman of the
spirit is, fundamentally, a life-giver; and all corporate achievement of
the life of the spirit flows from some great apostle or initiator, is
the fruit of discipleship. Such corporate achievement is a form of group
consciousness, brought into being through the power and attraction of a
fully harmonized life, infecting others with its own sharp sense of
Divine reality. Poets and artists thus infect in a measure all those
who yield to their influence. The active mystic, who is the poet of
Eternal Life, does it in a supreme degree. Such a relation of master and
disciples is conspicuous in every true spiritual revival; and is the
link between the personal and corporate aspects of regeneration. We see
it in the little flock that followed Christ, the Little Poor Men who
followed Francis, the Friends of Fox, the army of General Booth. Not
Christianity alone, but Hindu and Moslem history testify to this
necessity. The Hindu who is drawn to the spiritual life must find a
_guru_ who can not only teach its laws but also give its atmosphere; and
must accept his discipline in a spirit of obedience. The S[=u]fi
neophyte is directed to place himself in the hands of his _sheikh_ "as a
corpse in the hands of the washer"; and all the great saints of Islam
have been the inspiring centres of more or less organized groups.

History teaches us, in fact, that God most often educates men through
men. We most easily recognize Spirit when it is perceived transfiguring
human character, and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic
contagion. Though the new light may flash, as it seems, directly into
the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous
outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even here, careful
analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment,
tradition, teaching literary or oral, have prepared the way for it.
There is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense with human
experience and education. Even the noblest of the sons and daughters of
God are also the sons and daughters of the race; and are helped by those
who go before them. And as regards the generality, not isolated effort
but the love and sincerity of the true spiritual teacher--and every man
and woman of the Spirit is such a teacher within his own sphere of
influence--the unselfconscious trust of the disciple, are the means by
which the secret of full life has been handed on. "One loving spirit,"
said St. Augustine, "sets another on fire"; and expressed in this phrase
the law which governs the spiritual history of man. This law finds
notable expression in the phenomena of the Religious Order; a type of
association, found in more or less perfection in every great religion,
which has not received the attention it deserves from students of
psychology. If we study the lives of those who founded these
Orders--though such a foundation was not always intended by them--we
notice one general characteristic: each was an enthusiast, abounding in
zest and hope, and became in his lifetime a fount of regeneration, a
source of spiritual infection, for those who came under his influence.
In each the spiritual world was seen "through a temperament," and so
mediated to the disciples; who shared so far as they were able the
master's special secret and attitude to life. Thus St. Benedict's sane
and generous outlook is crystallized in the Benedictine rule. St.
Francis' deep sense of the connection between poverty and freedom gave
Franciscan regeneration its peculiar character. The heroisms of the
early Jesuit missionaries reflected the strong courageous temper of St.
Ignatius. The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct inheritance
from St. Teresa's mystical experience. The great Orders in their purity
were families, inheriting and reproducing the salient qualities of their
patriarch; who gave, as a father to his children, life stamped with his
own characteristics.

Yet sooner or later after the withdrawal of its founder, the group
appears to lose its spontaneous and enthusiastic character. Zest fails.
Unless a fresh leader be forthcoming, it inevitably settles down again
towards the general level of the herd. Thence it can only be roused by
means of "reforms" or "revivals," the arrival of new, vigorous leaders,
and the formation of new enthusiastic groups: for the bulk of men as we
know them cannot or will not make the costing effort needed for a
first-hand participation in eternal life. They want a "crowd-compeller"
to lift them above themselves. Thus the history of Christianity is the
history of successive spiritual group-formations, and their struggle to
survive; from the time when Jesus of Nazareth formed His little flock
with the avowed aim of "bringing in the Kingdom of God"--transmuting the
mentality of the race, and so giving it more abundant life.

Christians appeal to the continued teaching and compelling power of
their Master, the influence and infection of His spirit and atmosphere,
as the greatest of the regenerative forces still at work within life:
and this is undoubtedly true of those devout spirits able to maintain
contact with the eternal world in prayer. The great speech of Serenus de
Cressy in "John Inglesant" described once for all the highest type of
Christian spirituality.[55] But in practice this link and this influence
are too subtle for the mass of men. They must constantly be
re-experienced by ardent and consecrated souls; and by them be mediated
to fresh groups, formed within or without the institutional frame. Thus
in the thirteenth century St. Francis, and in the fourteenth the Friends
of God, created a true spiritual society within the Church, by restoring
in themselves and their followers the lost consistency between Christian
idea and Christian life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Fox and Wesley possessed by the same essential vision, broke away from
the institution which was no longer supple enough to meet their needs,
and formed their fresh groups outside the old herd.

When such creative personalities appear and such groups are founded by
them, the phenomena of the spiritual life reappear in their full vigour,
and are disseminated. A new vitality, a fresh power of endurance, is
seen in all who are drawn within the group and share its mind. This is
what St. Paul seems to have meant, when he reminded his converts that
they had the mind of Christ. The primitive friars, living under the
influence of Francis, did practice the perfect poverty which is also
perfect joy. The assured calm and willing sufferings of the early
Christians were reproduced in the early Quakers, secure in their
possession of the inner light. We know very well the essential
characters of this fresh mentality; the power, the enthusiasm, the
radiant joy, the indifference to pain and hardship it confers. But we
can no more produce it from these raw materials than the chemist's
crucible can produce life. The whole experience of St. Francis is
implied in the Beatitudes. The secret of Elizabeth Fry is the secret of
St. John. The doctrine of General Booth is fully stated by St. Paul. But
it was not by referring inquirers to the pages of the New Testament that
the first brought men fettered by things to experience the freedom of
poverty; the second faced and tamed three hundred Newgate criminals, who
seemed at her first visit "like wild beasts"; or the third created
armies of the redeemed from the dregs of the London Slums. They did
these things by direct personal contagion; and they will be done among
us again when the triumphant power of Eternal Spirit is again exhibited,
not in ideas but in human character.

I think, then, that history justifies us in regarding the full living of
the spiritual life as implying at least these three characters. First,
single-mindedness: to mean only God. Second, the full integration of the
contemplative and active sides of existence, lifted up, harmonized, and
completely consecrated to those interests which the self recognizes as
Divine. Third, the power of reproducing this life; incorporating it in a
group. Before we go on, we will look at one concrete example which
illustrates all these points. This example is that of St. Benedict and
the Order which he founded; for in the rounded completeness of his life
and system we see what should be the normal life of the Spirit, and its
result.

Benedict was born in times not unlike our own, when wars had shaken
civilization, the arts of peace were unsettled, religion was at a low
ebb. As a young man, he experienced an intense revulsion from the
vicious futility of Roman society, fled into the hills, and lived in a
cave for three years alone with his thoughts of God. It would be easy to
regard him as an eccentric boy: but he was adjusting himself to the real
centre of his life. Gradually others who longed for a more real
existence joined him, and he divided them into groups of twelve, and
settled them in small houses; giving them a time-table by which to live,
which should make possible a full and balanced existence of body, mind
and soul. Thanks to those years of retreat and preparation, he knew what
he wanted and what he ought to do; and they ushered in a long life of
intense mental and spiritual activity. His houses were schools, which
taught the service of God and the perfecting of the soul as the aims of
life. His rule, in which genial human tolerance, gentle courtesy, and a
profound understanding of men are not less marked than lofty
spirituality, is the classic statement of all that the Christian
spiritual life implies and should be.[56]

What, then, is the character of the life which St. Benedict proposed as
a remedy for the human failure and disharmony that he saw around him? It
was framed, of course, for a celibate community: but it has many
permanent features which are unaffected by his limitation. It offers
balanced opportunities of development to the body, the mind and the
spirit; laying equal emphasis on hard work, study, and prayer. It aims
at a robust completeness, not at the production of professional
ascetics; indeed, its Rule says little about physical austerities,
insists on sufficient food and rest, and countenances no extremes.
According to Abbot Butler, St. Benedict's day was divided into three and
a half hours for public worship, four and a half for reading and
meditation, six and a half for manual work, eight and a half for sleep,
and one hour for meals. So that in spite of the time devoted to
spiritual and mental interests, the primitive Benedictine did a good
day's work and had a good night's rest at the end of it. The work might
be anything that wanted doing, so long as the hours of prayer were not
infringed. Agriculture, scholarship, education, handicrafts and art have
all been done perfectly by St. Benedict's sons, working and willing in
quiet love. This is what one of the greatest constructive minds of
Christendom regarded as a reasonable way of life; a frame within which
the loftiest human faculties could grow, and man's spirit achieve that
harmony with God which is its goal. Moreover, this life was to be
social. It was in the beginning just the busy useful life of an Italian
farm, lived in groups--in monastic families, under the rule and
inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a Father who really was the
spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility,
obedience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character which are the
authentic fruits of the Spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has
something still to say to us; some reproof to administer to our hurried
and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time
for reality. We shall find in it and its creator, if we look, all those
marks of the regenerate life of the Spirit which history has shown to us
as normal: namely the transcendent aim, the balanced career of action
and contemplation, the creative power, and above all the principle of
social solidarity and discipleship.

We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on the second point, the
process by which the individual normally develops this life of the
Spirit, the serial changes it demands; for plainly, to know this is of
practical importance to us. The full inwardness of these changes will be
considered when we come to the personal aspect of the spiritual life.
Now we are only concerned to notice that history tends to establish the
constant recurrence of a normal process, recognizable alike in great and
small personalities under the various labels which have been given to
it, by which the self moves from its usually exclusive correspondence
with the temporal order to those full correspondences with reality, that
union with God, characteristic of the spiritual life. This life we must
believe in some form and degree to be possible for all; but we study it
best on heroic levels, for here its moments are best marked and its
fullest records survive.

The first moment of this process seems to be, that man falls out of love
with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it.
Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his
nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he
has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict,
disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis,
abandoning his gay and successful social existence; in Richard Rolle,
turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit's life; in the restless
misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; in Fox, desperately seeking "something
that could speak to his condition"; and also in two outstanding
examples from modern India, those of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore
and the Sadhu Sundar Singh. This dissatisfaction, sometimes associated
with the negative vision or conviction of sin, sometimes with the
positive longing for holiness and peace, is the mental preparation of
conversion; which, though not a constant, is at least a characteristic
feature of the beginning of the spiritual life as seen in history. We
might, indeed, expect some crucial change of attitude, some inner
crisis, to mark the beginning of a new life which is to aim only at God.
Here too we find one motive of that movement of world-abandonment which
so commonly follows conversion, especially in heroic souls. Thus St.
Paul hides himself in Arabia; St. Benedict retires for three years to
the cave at Subiaco; St. Ignatius to Manresa. Gerard Groot, the
brilliant and wealthy young Dutchman who founded the brotherhood of the
Common Life, began his new life by self-seclusion in a Carthusian cell.
St. Catherine of Siena at first lived solitary in her own room. St.
Francis with dramatic completeness abandoned his whole past, even the
clothing that was part of it. Jacopone da Todi, the prosperous lawyer
converted to Christ's poverty, resorted to the most grotesque devices to
express his utter separation from the world. Others, it is true, have
chosen quieter methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls the
cell of self-knowledge the solitude they required; but _some_ decisive
break was imperative for all. History assures us that there is no easy
sliding into the life of the Spirit.

A secondary cause of such world refusal is the first awakening of the
contemplative powers; the intuition of Eternity, hitherto dormant, and
felt at this stage to be--in its overwhelming reality and appeal--in
conflict with the unreal world and unsublimated active life. This is the
controlling idea of the hermit and recluse. It is well seen in St.
Teresa; whom her biographers describe as torn, for years, between the
interests of human intercourse and the imperative inner voice urging her
to solitary self-discipline and prayer. So we may say that in the
beginning of the life of the Spirit, as history shows it to us, if
disillusion marks the first moment, some measure of asceticism, of
world-refusal and painful self-schooling, is likely to mark the second
moment.

What we are watching is the complete reconstruction of personality; a
personality that has generally grown into the wrong shape. This is
likely to be a hard and painful business; and indeed history assures us
that it is, and further that the spiritual life is never achieved by
taking the line of least resistance and basking in the divine light.
With world-refusal, then, is intimately connected stern moral conflict;
often lasting for years, and having as its object the conquest of
selfhood in all its insidious forms. "Take one step out of yourself,"
say the S[=u]fis, "and you will arrive at God."[57] This one step is the
most difficult act of life; yet urged by love, man has taken it again
and again. This phase is so familiar to every reader of spiritual
biography, that I need not insist upon it. "In the field of this body,"
says Kabir, "a great war goes forward, against passion, anger, pride and
greed. It is in the Kingdom of Truth, Contentment and Purity that this
battle is raging, and the sword that rings forth most loudly is the
sword of His Name."[58] "Man," says Boehme, "must here be at war with
himself if he wishes to be a heavenly citizen ... fighting must be the
watchword, not with tongue and sword, but with mind and spirit; and not
to give over."[59] The need of such a conflict, shown to us in history,
is explained on human levels by psychology. On spiritual levels it is
made plain to all whose hearts are touched by the love of God. By this
way all must pass who achieve the life of the Spirit; subduing to its
purposes their wayward wills, and sublimating in its power their
conflicting animal impulses. This long effort brings, as its reward a
unification of character, an inflow of power: from it we see the mature
man or woman of the Spirit emerge. In St. Catherine of Genoa this
conflict lasted for four years, after which the thought of sin ceased to
rule her consciousness.[60] St. Teresa's intermittent struggles are
said to have continued for thirty years. John Wesley, always deeply
religious, did not attain the inner stability he calls assurance till he
was thirty-five years old. Blake was for twenty years in mental
conflict, shut off from the sources of his spiritual life. So slowly do
great personalities come to their full stature, and subdue their
vigorous impulses to the one ruling idea.

The ending of this conflict, the self's unification and establishment in
the new life, commonly means a return more or less complete to that
world from which the convert had retreated; taking up of the fully
energized and fully consecrated human existence, which must express
itself in work no less than in prayer; an exhibition too of the capacity
for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the "first
return" of the Buddhist saint is "from the absolute world to the world
of phenomena to save all sentient beings."[61] Thus St. Benedict's and
St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for
their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a
disappointed and world-weary woman and then a penitent, emerges as a
busy and devoted hospital matron and inspired teacher of a group of
disciples. St. Teresa's long interior struggles precede her vigorous
career as founder and reformer; her creation of spiritual families, new
centres of contemplative life. The vast activities of Fox and Wesley
were the fruits first of inner conflict, then of assurance--the
experience of God and of the self's relation to Him. And on the highest
levels of the spiritual life as history shows them to us, this
experience and realization, first of profound harmony with Eternity and
its interests, next of a personal relation of love, last of an
indwelling creative power, a givenness, an energizing grace, reaches
that completeness to which has been given the name of union with God.

The great man or woman of the Spirit who achieves this perfect
development is, it is true, a special product: a genius, comparable with
great creative personalities in other walks of life. But he neither
invalidates the smaller talent nor the more general tendency in which
his supreme gift takes its rise. Where he appears, that tendency is
vigorously stimulated. Like other artists, he founds a school; the
spiritual life flames up, and spreads to those within his circle of
influence. Through him, ordinary men, whose aptitude for God might have
remained latent, obtain a fresh start; an impetus to growth. There is a
sense in which he might say with the Johannine Christ, "He that
receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me"; for yielding to his magnetism,
men really yield to the drawing of the Spirit itself. And when they do
this, their lives are found to reproduce--though with less
intensity--the life history of their leader. Therefore the main
characters of that life history, that steady undivided process of
sublimation; are normal human characters. We too may heal the discords
of our moral nature, learn to judge existence in the universal light,
bring into consciousness our latent transcendental sense, and keep
ourselves so spiritually supple that alike in times of stress and hours
of prayer and silence we are aware of the mysterious and energizing
contact of God. Psychology suggests to us that the great spiritual
personalities revealed in history are but supreme instances of a
searching self-adjustment and of a way of life, always accessible to
love and courage, which all men may in some sense undertake.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 42: Everard, "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 555]

[Footnote 43: _Canor Dulcor, Canor;_ cf. Rolle: "The Fire of Love," Bk.
1, Cap. 14]

[Footnote 44: Rolle: "The Mending of Life," Cap. XII.]

[Footnote 45: Benedetto Croce: "Theory and History of Historiography,"
trans. by Douglas Ainslie, p. 25.]

[Footnote 46: "Donne's Sermons," p. 236.]

[Footnote 47: B.H. Streeter, in "The Spirit," p. 349 _seq_.]

[Footnote 48: "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap.
23.]

[Footnote 49: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. i.]

[Footnote 50: Baron von Hügel In the "Hibbert Journal," July, 1921.]

[Footnote 51: Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 10.]

[Footnote 52: Ruysbroeck: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk.
II, Cap. 39.]

[Footnote 53: R. of St. Victor: "De Quatuor Gradibus Violentæ
Charitatis" (Migne, Pat. Lat.) T. 196, Col. 1216.]

[Footnote 54: "Summa Contra Gentiles," Bk. III, Cap. 21.]

[Footnote 55: J.E. Shorthouse: "John Inglesant," Cap. 19.]

[Footnote 56: Cf. Delatte: "The Rule of St. Benedict"; and C. Butler:
"Benedictine Monachism."]

[Footnote 57: R.A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. 1.]

[Footnote 58: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 44.]

[Footnote 59: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 111.]

[Footnote 60: Cf. Von Hügel: "The Mystical Element of Religion," Vol. I,
Pt. II.]

[Footnote 61: McGovern: "An Introduction to Mahãyãna Buddhism," p. 175.]




CHAPTER III

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT

(I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND


Having interrogated history in our attempt to discover the essential
character of the life of the Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to
see what psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; and of
the relation in which it stands to the mechanism of our psychic life. It
is hardly necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried out,
would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an inquiry which we are not yet in
a position to undertake. True, more and more material is daily becoming
available for it: but many of the principles involved are, even yet,
obscure. Therefore any conclusions at which we may arrive can only be
tentative; and the theories and schematic representations that we shall
be obliged to use must be regarded as mere working diagrams--almost
certainly of a temporary character--but useful to us, because they do
give us an interpretation of inner experience with which we can deal. I
need not emphasize the extent in which modern developments of psychology
are affecting our conceptions of the spiritual life, and our reading of
many religious phenomena on which our ancestors looked with awe. When we
have eliminated the more heady exaggerations of the psycho-analysts, and
the too-violent simplifications of the behaviourists, it remains true
that many problems have lately been elucidated in an unexpected, and
some in a helpful, sense. We are learning in particular to see in true
proportion those abnormal states of trance and ecstasy which were once
regarded as the essentials, but are now recognized as the by-products,
of the mystical life. But a good deal that at first sight seems
startling, and even disturbing to the religious mind, turns out on
investigation to be no more than the re-labelling of old facts, which
behind their new tickets remain unchanged. Perhaps no generation has
ever been so much at the mercy of such labels as our own. Thus many
people who are inclined to jibe at the doctrine of original sin welcome
it with open arms when it is reintroduced as the uprush of primitive
instinct. Opportunity of confession to a psychoanalyst is eagerly sought
and gladly paid for, by troubled spirits who would never resort for the
same purpose to a priest. The formulæ of auto-suggestion are freely used
by those who repudiate vocal prayer and acts of faith with scorn. If,
then, I use for the purpose of exposition some of those labels which are
affected by the newest schools, I do so without any suggestion that they
represent the only valid way of dealing with the psychic life of man.
Indeed, I regard these labels as little more than exceedingly clever
guesses at truth. But since they are now generally current and often
suggestive, it is well that we should try to find a place for spiritual
experience within the system which they represent; thus carrying through
the principle on which we are working, that of interpreting the abiding
facts of the spiritual life, so far as we can, in the language of the
present day.

First, then, I propose to consider the analysis of mind, and what It has
to tell us about the nature of Sin, of Salvation, of Conversion; what
light it casts on the process of purgation or self-purification which is
demanded by all religions of the Spirit; what are the respective parts
played by reason and instinct in the process of regeneration; and the
importance for religious experience of the phenomena of apperception.

We need not at this point consider again all that we mean by the life of
the Spirit. We have already considered it as it appears in history--its
inexhaustible variety, its power, nobility, and grace. We need only to
remind ourselves that what we have got to find room for in our
psychological scheme is literally, a changed and enhanced life; a life
which, immersed in the stream of history, is yet poised on the eternal
world. This life involves a complete re-direction of our desires and
impulses, a transfiguration of character; and often, too, a sense of
subjugation to superior guidance, of an access of impersonal strength,
so overwhelming as to give many of its activities an inspirational or
automatic character. We found that this life was marked by a rhythmic
alternation between receptivity and activity, more complete and
purposeful than the rhythm of work and rest which conditions, or should
condition, the healthy life of sense. This re-direction and
transfiguration, this removal to a higher term of our mental rhythm, are
of course psychic phenomena; using this word in a broad sense, without
prejudice to the discrimination of any one aspect of it as spiritual.
All that we mean at the moment is, that the change which brings in the
spiritual life is a change in the mind and heart of man, working in the
stuff of our common human nature, and involving all that the modern
psychologist means by the word psyche.

We begin therefore with the nature of the psyche as this modern,
growing, changing psychology conceives it; for this is the raw material
of regenerate man. If we exclude those merely degraded and pathological
theories which have resulted from too exclusive a study of degenerate
minds, we find that the current conception of the psyche--by which of
course I do not mean the classic conceptions of Ward or even William
James--was anticipated by Plotinus, when he said in the Fourth Ennead,
that every soul has something of the lower life for the purposes of the
body and of the higher for the purposes of the Spirit, and yet
constitutes a unity; an unbroken series of ascending values and powers
of response, from the levels of merely physical and mainly unconscious
life to those of the self-determining and creative consciousness.[62] We
first discover psychic energy as undifferentiated directive power,
controlling response and adaption to environment; and as it develops,
ever increasing the complexity of its impulses and habits, yet never
abandoning anything of its past. Instinct represents the correspondence
of this life-force with mere nature, its effort as it were to keep its
footing and accomplish its destiny in the world of time. Spirit
represents this same life acting on highest levels, with most vivid
purpose; seeking and achieving correspondence with the eternal world,
and realities of the loftiest order yet discovered to be accessible to
us. We are compelled to use words of this kind; and the proceeding is
harmless enough so long as we remember that they are abstractions, and
that we have no real reason to suppose breaks in the life process which
extends from the infant's first craving for food and shelter to the
saint's craving for the knowledge of God. This urgent, craving life is
the dominant characteristic of the psyche. Thought is but the last come
and least developed of its powers; one among its various responses to
environment, and ways of laying hold on experience.

This conception of the multiplicity in unity of the psyche, conscious
and unconscious, is probably one of the most important results of
recent psychological advance. It means that we cannot any longer in the
good old way rule off bits or aspects of it, and call them intellect,
soul, spirit, conscience and so forth; or, on the other hand, refer to
our "lower" nature as if it were something separate from ourselves. I am
spirit when I pray, if I pray rightly. I am my lower nature, when my
thoughts and deeds are swayed by my primitive impulses and physical
longings, declared or disguised. I am most wholly myself when that
impulsive nature and that craving spirit are welded into one, subject to
the same emotional stimulus, directed to one goal. When theologians and
psychologists, ignoring this unity of the self, set up arbitrary
divisions--and both classes are very fond of doing so--they are merely
making diagrams for their own convenience. We ourselves shall probably
be compelled to do this: and the proceeding is harmless enough, so long
as we recollect that these diagrams are at best symbolic pictures of
fact. Specially is it necessary to keep our heads, and refuse to be led
away by the constant modern talk of the primitive, unconscious,
foreconscious instinctive and other minds which are so prominent in
modern psychological literature, or by the spatial suggestions of such
terms as threshold, complex, channel of discharge: remembering always
the central unity and non-material nature of that many-faced psychic
life which is described under these various formulæ.

If we accept this central unity with all its implications, it follows
that we cannot take our superior and conscious faculties, set them
apart, and call them "ourselves"; refusing responsibility for the more
animal and less fortunate tendencies and instincts which surge up with
such distressing ease and frequency from the deeps, by attributing these
to nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it become plain that
the sophisticated surface-mind which alone we usually recognize is the
smallest, the least developed, and in some respects still the least
important part of the real self: that whole man of impulse, thought and
desire, which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate
for God. That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, growing, plastic
unit; moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us, and carrying
with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices,
impulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to
us the extent in which the jungle and the Stone Age are still active in
our games, our politics and our creeds; how many of our motives are
still those of primitive man, and how many of our social institutions
offer him a discreet opportunity of self-expression.

Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old thoughts of
religion and the new thoughts of psychology may unite and complete one
another. Here the scientific conception of the psyche is merely
restating the fundamental Christian paradox, that man is truly one, a
living, growing spirit, the creature and child of the Divine Life; and
yet that there seem to be in him, as it were, two antagonistic
natures--that duality which St. Paul calls the old Adam and the new
Adam. The law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the
earthward-tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life
of re-directed desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are
conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise.
True, religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of
the facts. That which one calls original sin, the other calls the
instinctive mind: but the situation each puts before us is the same. "I
find a law," says St. Paul, "that when I would do good evil is present
with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man _but_ I
see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind....
With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law
of sin." Without going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst who said
in my hearing, "If St. Paul had come to me, I feel I could have helped
him," I think it is clear that we are learning to give a new content to
this, and many other sayings of the New Testament. More and more
psychology tends to emphasize the Pauline distinction; demonstrating
that the profound disharmony existing in most civilized men between the
impulsive and the rational life, the many conflicts which sap his
energy, arise from the persistence within us of the archaic and
primitive alongside the modern mind. It demonstrates that the many
stages and constituents of our psychic past are still active in each one
of us; though often below the threshold of consciousness. The blindly
instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety
and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried
over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when
we are off our guard. The more complex life of the human primitive; with
its outlook of wonder, self-interest and fear, developed under
conditions of ignorance, peril and perpetual struggle for life. The
history of primitive man covers millions of years: the history of
civilized man, a few thousand at the most. Therefore it is not
surprising that the primitive outlook should have bitten hard into the
plastic stuff of the developing psyche, and forms still the infantile
foundation of our mental life. Finally, there is the rational life, so
far as the rational is yet achieved by us; correcting, conflicting with,
and seeking to refine and control the vigour of primitive impulse.

But if it is to give an account of all the facts psychology must also
point out, and find place for, the last-comer in the evolutionary
series: the rare and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual
consciousness, bearing witness that we are the children of God, and
pointing, not backward to the roots but onward to the fruits of human
growth. But it cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as
something separate from, and wholly unconditioned by, our racial past.
We must rather conceive it as the crown of our psychic evolution, the
end of that process which began in the dawn of consciousness and which
St. Paul calls "growing up into the stature of Christ." Here psychology
is in harmony with the teaching of those mystics who invite us to
recognize, not a completed spirit, but rather a seed within us. In the
spiritual yearnings, the profound and yet uncertain stirrings of the
religious consciousness, its half-understood impulses to God, we
perceive the floating-up into the conscious field of this deep germinal
life. And psychology warns us, I think, that in our efforts to forward
the upgrowth of this spiritual life, we must take into account those
earlier types of reaction to the universe which still continue
underneath our bright modern appearance, and still inevitably condition
and explain so many of our motives and our deeds. It warns us that the
psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven; and that every one of us
still retains, though not always it is true in a recognizable form, many
of the characters of those stages of development through which the race
has passed--characters which inevitably give their colour to our
religious no less than to our social life.

"I desire," says à Kempis, "to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take
thee. I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and
unmortified passions depress me. I will in my mind be above all things
but in despite of myself I am constrained to be beneath, so I unhappy
man fight with myself and am made grievous to myself while the spirit
seeketh what is above and the flesh what is beneath. O what I suffer
within while I think on heavenly things in my mind; the company of
fleshly things cometh against me when I pray."[63]

"Oh Master," says the Scholar in Boehme's great dialogue, "the creatures
that live in me so withhold me, that I cannot wholly yield and give
myself up as I willingly would."[64]

No psychologist has come nearer to a statement of the human situation
than have these old specialists in the spiritual life.

The bearing of all this on the study of organized religion is of course
of great importance; and will be discussed in a subsequent section. All
that I wish to point out now is that the beliefs, and the explanations
of action, put forward by our rationalizing surface consciousness are
often mere veils which drape the crudeness of our real desires and
reactions to life; and that before life can be reintegrated about its
highest centres, these real beliefs and motives must be tracked down,
and their humiliating character acknowledged. The ape and the tiger, in
fact, are not dead in any one of us. In polite persons they are caged,
which Is a very different thing: and a careful introspection will teach
us to recognize their snarls and chatterings, their urgent requests for
more mutton chops or bananas, under the many disguises which they
assume--disguises which are not infrequently borrowed from ethics or
from religion. Thus a primitive desire for revenge often masquerades as
justice, and an unedifying interest in personal safety can be discerned
in at least some interpretations of atonement, and some aspirations
towards immortality.[65]

I now go on to a second point. It will already be clear that the modern
conception of the many-levelled psyche gives us a fresh standpoint from
which to consider the nature of Sin. It suggests to us, that the essence
of much sin is conservatism, or atavism: that it is rooted in the
tendency of the instinctive life to go on, in changed circumstances,
acting in the same old way. Virtue, perfect rightness of correspondence
with our present surroundings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our
best ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of crude instinct,
the steady control of impulse by such reason as we possess; and
perpetually forces us to use on new and higher levels that machinery of
habit-formation, that power of implanting tendencies in the plastic
psyche, to which man owes his earthly dominance. When our unstable
psychic life relaxes tension and sinks to lower levels than this, and
it Is always tending so to do, we are relapsing to antique methods of
response, suitable to an environment which is no longer there. Few
people go through life without knowing what it is to feel a sudden, even
murderous, impulse to destroy the obstacle in their path; or seize, at
all costs, that which they desire. Our ancestors called these uprushes
the solicitations of the devil, seeking to destroy the Christian soul;
and regarded them with justice as an opportunity of testing our
spiritual strength. It is true that every man has within him such a
tempting spirit; but its characters can better be studied in the
Zoological Gardens than in the convolutions of a theological hell.
"External Reason," says Boehme, "supposes that hell is far from us. But
it is near us. Every one carries it in himself."[66] Many of our vices,
in fact, are simply savage qualities--and some are even savage
virtues--in their old age. Thus in an organized society the
acquisitiveness and self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive
dependent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy and
covetousness, and are seen operating in the dishonesty of the burglar,
the greed and egotism of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the
great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to a perverted
expression of that self-regarding instinct without which the individual
could hardly survive.

When therefore qualities which were once useful on their own level are
outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's
spiritualization, then--whatever they may be--they belong to the body of
death, not to the body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump--none
other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67]
Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as
religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich
declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul.
Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse
satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The
violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to
wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature--the old Adam, in
fact--leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength. He
obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with
the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality
keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural
instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures
came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.[68] St.
Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a
spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.[69] Games and sport
of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a
certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of
games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The
sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent
in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved:
failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the
moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this
fact: for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea, would in London
provoke the immediate attention of the police.

Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back to past levels of
conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its
conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which to
look at the idea of Salvation? We know that all religions of the spirit
have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation: on the
conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued, if
he is to achieve a satisfactory life. What is it, then, from which he
must be saved?

I think that the answer must be, from conflict: the conflict between the
pull-back of his racial origin and the pull-forward of his spiritual
destiny, the antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerging soul,
each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality. We may
as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts
and resistances: that the trite verse about "fightings and fears
within, without" does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive
mind with its ineffective struggles, its inveterate egotism, its
inconsistent impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason need some
reinforcement, some helping power, if they are to conquer and control
his archaic impulsive life. And this salvation, this extrication from
the wrongful and atavistic claims of primitive impulse in its many
strange forms, is a prime business of religion; sometimes achieved in
the sudden convulsion we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower
process of education. The wrong way to do it is seen in the methods of
the Puritan and the extreme ascetic, where all animal impulse is
regarded as "sin" and repressed: a proceeding which involves the risk of
grave physical and mental disorder, and produces even at the best a
bloodless pietism. The right way to do it was described once for all by
Jacob Boehme, when he said that it was the business of a spiritual man
to "harness his fiery energies to the service of the light--" that is to
say, change the direction of our passionate cravings for satisfaction,
harmonize and devote them to spiritual ends. This is true regeneration:
this is the salvation offered to man, the healing of his psychic
conflict by the unification of his instinctive and his ideal life. The
voice which St. Mechthild heard, saying "Come and be reconciled,"
expresses the deepest need of civilized but unspiritualized humanity.

This need for the conversion or remaking of the instinctive life,
rather than the achievement of mere beliefs, has always been appreciated
by real spiritual teachers; who are usually some generations in advance
of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the "root of evil," the
heart of the "old man" and best promise of the "new." Here is the raw
material both of vice and of virtue--namely, a mass of desires and
cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural
and self-regarding. "In will, imagination and desire," says William Law,
"consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature."[70]
The Divine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi "Set love in order, thou
that lovest Me!" declared the one law of mental growth.[71] To use for a
moment the language of mystical theology, conversion, or repentance, the
first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the
direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in
which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast
setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of
the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and
which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard,
conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and
higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true
self-conquest, that the spiritual life in man draws its earnestness,
reality and worth.

"Oh, Academicus," says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would
endorse, "forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a
plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that
there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth
of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives
within us. For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have
in truth none at all. For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and
rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed, and amended, as a
wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a
sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only
restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again as occasion shall
offer."[72] Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild
beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find
the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert
turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to
save his fellow-men. This transformation or sublimation is not the work
of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been
directed into a fresh channel of use.

We may now look a little more closely at the character and
potentialties of our instinctive life: for this life is plainly of the
highest importance to us, since it will either energize or thwart all
the efforts of the rational self. Current psychology, even more plainly
than religion, encourages us to recognize in this powerful instinctive
nature the real source of our conduct, the origin of all those dynamic
personal demands, those impulses to action, which condition the full and
successful life of the natural man. Instincts in the animal and the
natural man are the methods by which the life force takes care of its
own interests, insures its own full development, its unimpeded forward
drive. In so far as we form part of the animal kingdom our own safety,
property, food, dominance, and the reproduction of our own type, are
inevitably the first objects of our instinctive care. Civilized life has
disguised some of these crude demands and the behaviour which is
inspired by them, but their essential character remains unchanged. Love
and hate, fear and wonder, self-assertion and self-abasement, the
gregarious, the acquisitive, the constructive tendencies, are all
expressions of instinctive feeling; and can be traced back to our
simplest animal needs.

But instincts are not fixed tendencies: they are adaptable. This can be
seen clearly in the case of animals whose environment Is artificially
changed. In the dog, for instance, loyalty to the interests of the pack
has become loyalty to his master's household. In man, too, there has
already been obvious modification and sublimation of many instincts.
The hunting impulse begins in the jungle, and may end in the
philosopher's exploration of the Infinite. It is the combative instinct
which drives the reformer headlong against the evils of the world, as it
once drove two cave men at each others' throats. Love, which begins in
the mergence of two cells, ends in the saint's supreme discovery, "Thou
art the Love wherewith the heart loves Thee."[73] The much advertized
herd instinct may weld us into a mob at the mercy of unreasoning
passions; but it can also make us living members of the Communion of
Saints. The appeals of the prophet and the revivalist, the Psalmist's
"Taste and see," the Baptist's "Change your hearts," are all invitations
to an alteration in the direction of desire, which would turn our
instinctive energies in a new direction and begin the domestication of
the human soul for God.

This, then, is the real business of conversion and of the character
building that succeeds it; the harnessing of instinct to idea and its
direction into new and more lofty channels of use, transmuting the
turmoil of man's merely egoistic ambitions, anxieties and emotional
desires into fresh forms of creative energy, and transferring their
interest from narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The seven
deadly sins of Christian ethics--Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth,
Gluttony, and Lust--represent not so much deliberate wrongfulness, as
the outstanding forms of man's uncontrolled and self-regarding
instincts; unbridled self-assertion, ruthless acquisitiveness, and
undisciplined indulgence of sense. The traditional evangelical virtues
of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience which sum up the demands of the
spiritual life exactly oppose them. Over against the self-assertion of
the proud and angry is set the ideal of humble obedience, with its wise
suppleness and abnegation of self-will. Over against the acquisitiveness
of the covetous and envious is set the ideal of inward poverty, with its
liberation from the narrow self-interest of I, Me and Mine. Over against
the sensual indulgence of the greedy, lustful and lazy is set the ideal
of chastity, which finds all creatures pure to enjoy, since it sees them
in God, and God in all creatures. Yet all this, rightly understood, is
no mere policy of repression. It is rather a rational policy of release,
freeing for higher activities instinctive force too often thrown away.
It is giving the wild beast his work to do, training him. Since the
instincts represent the efforts of this urgent life in us to achieve
self-protection and self-realization, it is plain that the true
regeneration of the psyche, its redirection from lower to higher levels,
can never be accomplished without their help. We only rise to the top of
our powers when the whole man acts together, urged by an enthusiasm or
an instinctive need.

Further, a complete and ungraduated response to stimulus--an
"all-or-none reaction"--is characteristic of the instinctive life and of
the instinctive life alone. Those whom it rules for the time give
themselves wholly to it; and so display a power far beyond that of the
critical and the controlled. Thus, fear or rage will often confer
abnormal strength and agility. A really dominant instinct is a veritable
source of psycho-physical energy, unifying and maintaining in vigour all
the activities directed to its fulfilment.[74] A young man in love is
stimulated not only to emotional ardour, but also to hard work in the
interests of the future home. The explorer develops amazing powers of
endurance; the inventor in the ecstasy of creation draws on deep vital
forces, and may carry on for long periods without sleep or food. If we
apply this law to the great examples of the spiritual life, we see in
the vigour and totality of their self-giving to spiritual interests a
mark of instinctive action; and in the power, the indifference to
hardship which these selves develop, the result of unification, of an
"all-or-none" response to the religious or philanthropic stimulus. It
helps us to understand the cheerful austerities of the true ascetic; the
superhuman achievement of St. Paul, little hindered by the "thorn in the
flesh"; the career of St. Joan of Arc; the way in which St. Teresa or
St. Ignatius, tormented by ill-health, yet brought their great
conceptions to birth; the powers of resistance displayed by George Fox
and other Quaker saints. It explains Mary Slessor living and working
bare-foot and bare-headed under the tropical sun, disdaining the use of
mosquito nets, eating native food, and taking with impunity daily risks
fatal to the average European.[75] It shows us, too, why the great
heroes of the spiritual life so seldom think out their positions, or
husband their powers. They act because they are impelled: often in
defiance of all prudent considerations! yet commonly with an amazing
success. Thus General Booth has said that he was driven by "the impulses
and urgings of an undying ambition" to save souls. What was this impulse
and urge? It was the instinctive energy of a great nature in a
sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced power is experienced
will determine its value for life; but its character is much the same in
the convert at a revival, in the postulant's vivid sense of vocation and
consequent break with the world? in the disinterested man of science
consecrated to the search for truth, and in the apostle's self-giving to
the service of God, with its answering gift of new strength and
fruitfulness. Its secret, and indeed the secret of all transcendence is
implied In the direction of the old English mystic: "Mean God all, all
God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God,"[76]
The over-belief, the religious formula in which this instinctive
passion is expressed, is comparatively unimportant The revivalist,
wholly possessed by concrete and anthropomorphic ideas of God which are
impossible to a man of different--and, as we suppose,
superior--education, can yet, because of the burning reality with which
he lives towards the God so strangely conceived, infect those with whom
he comes in contact with the spiritual life.

We are now in a position to say that the first necessity of the life of
the Spirit is the sublimation of the instinctive life, involving the
transfer of our interest and energy to new objectives, the giving of our
old vigour to new longings and new loves. It appears that the invitation
of religion to a change of heart, rather than a change of belief, is
founded on solid psychological laws. I need not dwell on the way in
which Divine love, as the saints have understood it, answers to the
complete sublimation of our strongest natural passion; or the extent in
which the highest experiences of the religious life satisfy man's
instinctive craving for self-realization within a greater Reality, how
he feels himself to be fed with a mysterious food, quickened by a fresh
dower of life, assured of his own safety within a friendly universe,
given a new objective for his energy. It is notorious that one of the
most striking things about a truly spiritual man is, that he has
achieved a certain stability which others lack. In him, the central
craving of the psyche for more life and more love has reached its
bourne; instead of feeding upon those secondary objects of desire which
may lull our restlessness but cannot heal it He loves the thing which he
ought to love, wants to do the deeds which he ought to do, and finds all
aspects of his personality satisfied in one objective. Every one has
really a forced option between the costly effort to achieve this
sublimation of impulse, this unification of the self on spiritual
levels, and the quiet evasion of it which is really a capitulation to
the animal instincts and unordered cravings of our many-levelled being.
We cannot stand still; and this steady downward pull keeps us ever in
mind of all the backward-tending possibilities collectively to be
thought of as sin, and explains to us why sloth, lack of spiritual
energy, is held by religion to be one of the capital forms of human
wrongness.

I go on to another point, which I regard as of special importance.

It must not be supposed that the life of the Spirit begins and with the
sublimation of, the instinctive and emotional life; though this is
indeed for it a central necessity. Nor must we take it for granted that
the apparent redirection of impulse to spiritual objects is always and
inevitably an advance. All who are or may be concerned with the
spiritual training, help, and counselling of others ought clearly to
recognize that there are elements in religious experience which
represent, not a true sublimation, but either disguised primitive
cravings and ideas, or uprushes from lower instinctive levels: for these
experiences have their special dangers. As we shall see when we come to
their more detailed study, devotional practices tend to produce that
state which psychologists call mobility of the threshold of
consciousness; and may easily permit the emergence of natural
inclinations and desires, of which the self does not recognize the real
character. As a matter of fact, a good deal of religious emotion is of
this kind. Instances are the childish longing for mere protection, for a
sort of supersensual petting, the excessive desire for shelter and rest,
voiced in too many popular hymns; the subtle form of self-assertion
which can be detected in some claims to intercourse with God--e.g. the
celebrated conversation of Angela of Foligno with the Holy Ghost;[77]
the thinly veiled human feelings which find expression in the personal
raptures of a certain type of pious literature, and in what has been
well described as the "divine duet" type of devotion. Many, though not
all of the supernormal phenomena of mysticism are open to the same
suspicion: and the Church's constant insistence on the need of
submitting these to some critical test before, accepting them at face
value, is based on a most wholesome scepticism. Though a sense of meek
dependence on enfolding love and power is the very heart of religion,
and no intense spiritual life is possible unless it contain a strong
emotional element, it is of first importance to be sure that its
affective side represents a true sublimation of human feelings and
desires, and not merely an oblique indulgence of lower cravings.

Again, we have to remember that the instinctive self, powerful though it
be? does not represent the sum total of human possibility. The maximum
of man's strength is not reached until all the self's powers, the
instinctive and also the rational, are united and set on one objective;
for then only is he safe from the insidious inner conflict between
natural craving and conscious purpose which saps his energies, and is
welded into a complete and harmonious instrument of life, "The source of
power," says Dr. Hadfield in "The Spirit," "lies not in instinctive
emotion alone, but in instinctive emotion expressed in a way with which
the whole man can, for the time being at least, identify himself.
Ultimately, this is impossible without the achievement of a harmony of
all the instincts _and_ the approval of the reason."[78]

Thus we see that any unresolved conflict or divorce between the
religious instinct and the intellect will mar the full power of the
spiritual life: and that an essential part of the self's readjustment to
reality must consist in the uniting of these partners, as intellect and
intuition are united in creative art. The noblest music, most satisfying
poetry are neither the casual results of uncriticized inspiration nor
the deliberate fabrications of the brain, but are born of the perfect
fusion of feeling and of thought; for the greatest and most fruitful
minds are those which are rich and active on both levels--which are
perpetually raising blind impulse to the level of conscious purpose,
uniting energy with skill, and thus obtaining the fiery energies of the
instinctive life for the highest uses. So too the spiritual life is only
seen in its full worth and splendour when the whole man is subdued to
it, and one object satisfies the utmost desires of heart and mind. The
spiritual impulse must not be allowed to become the centre of a group of
specialized feelings, a devotional complex, in opposition to, or at
least alienated from, the intellectual and economic life. It must on the
contrary brim over, invading every department of the self. When the
mind's loftiest and most ideal thought, its conscious vivid aspiration,
has been united with the more robust qualities of the natural man; then,
and only then, we have the material for the making of a possible saint.

We must also remember that, important as our primitive and instinctive
life may be--and we should neither despise nor neglect it--its religious
impulses, taken alone, no more represent the full range of man's
spiritual possibilities than the life of the hunting tribe or the
African kraal represent his full social possibilities. We may, and
should, acknowledge and learn from our psychic origins. We must never be
content to rest in them. Though in many respects, mental as well as
physical, we are animals still; yet we are animals with a possible
future in the making, both corporate and individual, which we cannot yet
define. All other levels of life assure us that the impulsive nature is
peculiarly susceptible to education. Not only can the whole group of
instincts which help self-fulfilment be directed to higher levels,
united and subdued to a dominant emotional interest; but merely
instinctive actions can, by repetition and control, be raised to the
level of habit and be given improved precision and complexity. This, of
course, is a primary function of devotional exercises; training the
first blind instinct for God to the complex responses of the life of
prayer. Instinct is at best a rough and ready tool of life: practice is
required if it is to produce its best results. Observe, for instance,
the poor efforts of the young bird to escape capture; and compare this
with the finished performance of the parent.[79] Therefore in estimating
man's capacity for spiritual response, we must reckon not only his
innate instinct for God, but also his capacity for developing this
instinct on the level of habit; educating and using its latent powers to
the best advantage. Especially on the contemplative side of life,
education does great things for us; or would do, if we gave it the
chance. Here, then, the rational mind and conscious will must play their
part in that great business of human transcendence, which is man's
function within the universal plan.

It is true that the deep-seated human tendency to God may best be
understood as the highest form of that out-going instinctive craving of
the psyche for more life and love which, on whatever level it be
experienced, is always one. But some external stimulus seems to be
needed, if this deep tendency is to be brought up into consciousness;
and some education, if it is to be fully expressed. This stimulus and
this education, in normal cases, are given by tradition; that is to say,
by religious belief and practice. Or they may come from the countless
minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few
of us have the subtlety to analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or
environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual
order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied,
the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule,
this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of
conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and
reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus. There is, however,
nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself. It has its parallel
in other drastic readjustments to other levels of life; and is merely a
method by which selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the
union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability.

Now we have behind us and within us all humanity's funded instinct for
the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the
Divine. But its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet to very
little. Thus we see that the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" spoke as
a true psychologist when he said that "a secret blind love pressing
towards God" held more hope of success than mere thought can ever do;
"for He may well be loved but not thought--by love He may be gotten and
holden, but by thought never."[80] Nevertheless, if that consistency of
deed and belief which is essential to full power is to be achieved by
us, every man's conception of the God Whom he serves ought to be the
very best of which he is capable. Because ideas which we recognize as
partial or primitive have called forth the richness and devotion of
other natures, we are not therefore excused from trying all things and
seeking a Reality which fulfils to the utmost our craving for truth and
beauty, as well, as our instinct for good. It is easy, natural, and
always comfortable for the human mind to sink back into something just a
little bit below its highest possible. On one hand to wallow in easy
loves, rest in traditional formulæ, or enjoy a "moving type of devotion"
which makes no intellectual demand. On the other, to accept without
criticism the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, and keep safely in
the furrow of intelligent agnosticism.

Religious people have a natural inclination to trot along on mediocre
levels; reacting pleasantly to all the usual practices, playing down to
the hopes and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving for
comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in symbols and spells, and
satisfying its devotional inclinations by any "long psalter unmindfully
mumbled in the teeth."[81] And a certain type of intelligent people have
an equally natural tendency to dismiss, without further worry, the
traditional notions of the past. In so far as all this represents a
slipping back in the racial progress, it has the character of sin: at
any rate, it lacks the true character of spiritual life. Such life
involves growth, sublimation, the constant and difficult redirection of
energy from lower to higher levels; a real effort to purge motive, see
things more truly, face and resolve the conflict between the deep
instinctive and the newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the
nature of their own mental processes sin against the light if they do
not do with them the very best that they possibly can: and the penalty
of this sin must be a narrowing of vision, an arrest. The laws of
apperception apply with at least as much force to our spiritual as to
our sensual impressions: what we bring with us will condition what we
obtain.

"We behold that which we are!" said Ruysbroeck long ago.[82] The mind's
content and its ruling feeling-tone, says psychology, all its memories
and desires, mingle with all incoming impressions, colour them and
condition those which our consciousness selects. This intervention of
memory and emotion in our perceptions is entirely involuntary; and
explains why the devotee of any specific creed always finds in the pure
immediacy of religious experience the special marks of his own belief.
In most acts of perception--and probably, too, in the intuitional
awareness of religious experience--that which the mind brings is bulkier
if less important than that which it receives; and only the closest
analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this
machinery of apperception--humbling though its realization must be to
the eager idealist--does not merely confuse the issue for us; or compel
us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the
contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to many theological
puzzles; whilst its existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual
experiences we should otherwise miss, because it gives to us the means
of interpreting them. Pure immediacy, as such, is almost ungraspable by
us. As man, not as pure spirit, the High Priest entered the Holy of
Holies: that is to say, he took to the encounter of the Infinite the
finite machinery of sense. This limitation is ignored by us at our
peril. The great mystics, who have sought to strip off all image and
reach--as they say--the Bare Pure Truth, have merely become inarticulate
in their effort to tell us what it was that they knew. "A light I cannot
measure, goodness without form!" exclaims Jacopone da Todi.[83] "The
Light of the _World_--the Good _Shepherd_," says St. John, bringing a
richly furnished poetic consciousness to the vision of God; and at once
gives us something on which to lay hold.

Generally speaking, it is only in so far as we bring with us a plan of
the universe that we can make anything of it; and only in so far as we
bring with us some idea of God, some feeling of desire for Him, can we
apprehend Him--so true is it that we do, indeed, behold that which we
are, find that which we seek, receive that for which we ask. Feeling,
thought, and tradition must all contribute to the full working out of
religious experience. The empty soul facing an unconditioned Reality may
achieve freedom but assuredly achieves nothing else: for though the
self-giving of Spirit is abundant, we control our own powers of
reception. This lays on each self the duty of filling the mind with the
noblest possible thoughts about God, refusing unworthy and narrow
conceptions, and keeping alight the fire of His love. We shall find that
which we seek: hence a richly stored religious consciousness, the lofty
conceptions of the truth seeker, the vision of the artist, the boundless
charity and joy in life of the lover of his kind, really contribute to
the fulness of the spiritual life; both on its active and on its
contemplative side. As the self reaches the first degrees of the
prayerful or recollected state, memory-elements, released from the
competition of realistic experience, enter the foreconscious field.
Among these will be the stored remembrances of past meditations,
reading, and experiences, all giving an affective tone conducive to new
and deeper apprehensions. The pure in heart see God, because they bring
with them that radiant and undemanding purity: because the storehouse of
ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings to that encounter,
is free from conflicting desires and images, perfectly controlled by
this feeling-tone.

It is now clear that all which we have so far considered supports, from
the side of psychology, the demand of every religion for a drastic
overhaul of the elements of character, a real repentance and moral
purgation, as the beginning of all personal spiritual life. Man does
not, as a rule, reach without much effort and suffering the higher
levels of his psychic being. His old attachments are hard; complexes of
which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces
which they enchain. He must, then, examine without flinching his
impulsive life, and know what is in his heart, before he is in a
position to change it. "The light which shows us our sins," says George
Fox, "is the light that heals us." All those repressed cravings, those
quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust
into the hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the
surface and, in the language of psychology, "abreacted"; in the language
of religion, confessed. The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges
on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of
repressing it. The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the
hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and their
elements brought up into consciousness and faced: and only the self
which has endured this, can hope to be established in the free Spirit.
It is a process of spiritual hygiene.

Psycho-analysis has taught us the danger of keeping skeletons in the
cupboards of the soul, the importance of tracking down our real motives,
of facing reality, of being candid and fearless in self-knowledge. But
the emotional colour of this process when it is undertaken in the full
conviction of the power and holiness of that life-force which we have
not used as well as we might, and with a humble and loving consciousness
of our deficiency, our falling short, will be totally different from the
feeling state of those who conceive themselves to be searching for the
merely animal sources of their mental and spiritual life. "Meekness in
itself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing," "is naught else but a true
knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is. For surely whoso might
verily see and feel himself as he is, he should verily be meek.
Therefore swink and sweat all that thou canst and mayst for to get thee
a true knowing and feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I trow that
soon after that thou shalt have a true knowing and feeling of God as he
is."[84]

The essence, then, of repentance and purification of character consists
first in the identification, and next in the sublimation of our
instinctive powers and tendencies; their detachment from egoistic
desires and dedication to new purposes. We should not starve or repress
the abounding life within us; but, relieving it of its concentration on
the here-and-now, give its attention and its passion a wider circle of
interest over which to range, a greater love to which it can consecrate
its growing powers. We do not yet know what the limit of such
sublimation may be. But we do know that it is the true path of life's
advancement, that already we owe to it our purest loves, our loveliest
visions, and our noblest deeds. When such feeling, such vision and such
act are united and transfigured in God, and find in contact with His
living Spirit the veritable sources of their power; then, man will have
resolved his inner conflict, developed his true potentialities, and live
a harmonious because a spiritual life.

We end, therefore, upon this conception of the psyche as the living
force within us; a storehouse of ancient memories and animal tendencies,
yet plastic, adaptable, ever pressing on and ever craving for more life
and more love. Only the life of reality, the life rooted in communion
with God, will ever satisfy that hungry spirit, or provide an adequate
objective for its persistent onward push.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 62: Ennead IV. 8. 5.]

[Footnote 63: De Imit. Christi, Bk. III, Cap. 53.]

[Footnote 64: Boehme, "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.]

[Footnote 65: Unamuno has not hesitated to base the whole of religion on
the instinct of self-preservation: but this must I think be regarded as
an exaggerated view. See "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in
Peoples," Caps. 3 and 4.]

[Footnote 66: Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 98.]

[Footnote 67: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 36.]

[Footnote 68: E. Gardner: "St. Catherine of Siena," p. 20.]

[Footnote 69: "Life of St. Teresa," by Herself, Cap. 30.]

[Footnote 70: "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law" p. 59.]

[Footnote 71: Jacopone da Todi, Lauda 90.]

[Footnote 72: "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p. 123.]

[Footnote 73:

    "Amor tu se'quel ama
     donde lo cor te ama."

--Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 81.]

[Footnote 74: Cf. Watts: "Echo Personalities," for several illustrations
of this law.]

[Footnote 75: Livingstone: "Mary Slessor of Calabar," p. 131.]

[Footnote 76: "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap, 40.]

[Footnote 77: "And very often did He say unto me, 'Bride and daughter,
sweet art thou unto Me, I love thee better than any other who is in the
valley of Spoleto.'" ("The Divine Consolations of Blessed Angela of
Foligno," p. 160.)]

[Footnote 78: "The Spirit," edited by B.H. Streeter, p. 93.]

[Footnote 79: Cf. B. Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," Cap. 2.]

[Footnote 80: Op. cit., Cap. 6.]

[Footnote 81: "Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 37.]

[Footnote 82: Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 9.]

[Footnote 83: Lauda 91.]

[Footnote 84: Op. cit., Cap. 13.]




CHAPTER IV

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT

(II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION


In the last chapter we considered what the modern analysis of mind had
to tell us about the nature of the spiritual life, the meaning of sin
and of salvation. We now go on to another aspect of this subject:
namely, the current conception of the unconscious mind as a dominant
factor of our psychic life, and of the extent and the conditions in
which its resources can be tapped, and its powers made amenable to the
direction of the conscious mind. Two principal points must here be
studied. The first is the mechanism of that which is called autistic
thinking and its relation to religious experience: the second, the laws
of suggestion and their bearing upon the spiritual life. Especially must
we consider from this point of view the problems which are resumed under
the headings of prayer, contemplation, and grace. We shall find
ourselves compelled to examine the nature of meditation and
recollection, as spiritual persons have always practised them; and, to
give, if we can, a psychological account of many of their classic
conceptions and activities. We shall therefore be much concerned with
those experiences which are often called mystical, but which I prefer to
call in general contemplative and intuitive; because they extend, as we
shall find, without a break from the simplest type of mental prayer, the
most general apprehensions of the Spirit, to the most fully developed
examples of religious mono-ideism. To place all those intuitions and
perceptions of which God or His Kingdom are the objects in a class apart
from all other intuitions and perceptions, and call them "mystical," is
really to beg the question from the start. The psychic mechanisms
involved in them are seen in action in many other types of mental
activity; and will not, in my opinion, be understood until they are
removed from the category of the supernatural, and studied as the
movements of the one spirit of life--here directed towards a
transcendent objective. And further we must ever keep in mind, since we
are now dealing with specific spiritual experiences, deeply exploring
the contemplative soul, that though psychology can criticize these
experiences, and help us to separate the wheat from the chaff--can tell
us, too, a good deal about the machinery by which we lay hold of them,
and the best way to use it--it cannot explain the experiences, pronounce
upon their Object, or reduce that Object to its own terms.

We may some day have a valid psychology of religion, though we are far
from it yet: but when we do, it will only be true within its own system
of reference. It will deal with the fact of the spiritual life from one
side only. And as a discussion of the senses and their experience
explains nothing about the universe by which these senses are impressed,
so all discussion of spiritual faculty and experience remains within the
human radius and neither invalidates nor accounts for the spiritual
world. When the psychologist has finished telling us all that he knows
about the rules which govern our mental life, and how to run it best, he
is still left face to face with the mystery of that life, and of that
human power of surrender to Spiritual Reality which is the very essence
of religion. Humility remains, therefore, not only the most becoming but
also the most scientific attitude for investigators in this field. We
must, then, remember the inevitably symbolic nature of the language
which we are compelled to use in our attempt to describe these
experiences; and resist all temptation to confuse the handy series of
labels with which psychology has furnished us, with the psychic unity to
which they will be attached.

Perhaps the most fruitful of all our recent discoveries in the mental
region will turn out to be that which is gradually revealing to us the
extent and character of the unconscious mind; and the possibility of
tapping its resources, bending its plastic shape to our own mould. It
seems as though the laws of its being are at last beginning to be
understood; giving a new content to the ancient command "Know thyself."
We are learning that psycho-therapy, which made such immense strides
during the war, is merely one of the directions in which this knowledge
may be used, and this control exercised by us. That regnancy of spirit
over matter towards which all idealists must look, is by way of coming
at least to a partial fulfilment in this control of the conscious over
the unconscious, and thus over the bodily life. Such control is indeed
an aspect of our human freedom, of the creative power which has been put
into our hands. In all this religion must be interested: because, once
more, it is the business of religion to regenerate the whole man and win
him for Reality.

If we could get rid of the idea that the unconscious is a separate, and
in some sort hostile or animal entity set over against the conscious
mind; and realize that it is, simply, our whole personality, with the
exception of the scrap that happens at any moment to be in
consciousness--then, perhaps, we should more easily grasp the importance
of exploring and mobilizing its powers. As it is, most of us behave like
the owners of a well-furnished room, who ignore every aspect of it
except the window looking out upon the street. This we keep polished,
and drape with the best curtains that we can afford. But the room upon
which we sedulously turn our backs contains all that we have inherited,
all that we have accumulated, many tools which are rusting for want of
use; machinery too which, left to itself, may function satisfactorily,
or may get out of order and work to results that we neither desire nor
dream. The room is twilit. Only by the window is a little patch of
light. Beyond this there is a fringe of vague, fluctuating, sometimes
prismatic radiance: an intermediate region, where the images and things
which most interest us have their place, just within range, or the
fringe of the field of consciousness. In the darkest corners the
machinery that we do not understand, those possessions of which we are
least proud, and those pictures we hate to look at, are hidden away.

This little parable represents, more or less, that which psychology
means by the conscious, foreconscious, and unconscious regions of the
psyche. It must not be pressed, or too literally interpreted; but it
helps us to remember the graded character of our consciousness, its
fluctuating level, and the fact that, as well as the outward-looking
mind which alone we usually recognize, there is also the psychic matrix
from which it has been developed, the inward-looking mind, caring for a
variety of interests of which we hardly, as we say, think at all. We
know as yet little about this mysterious psychic whole: the inner nature
of which is only very incompletely given to us in the fluctuating
experiences of consciousness. But we do know that it, too, receives at
least a measure of the light and the messages coming in by the window of
our wits: that it is the home of memory instinct and habit, the source
of conduct, and that its control and modification form the major part of
the training of character. Further, it is sensitive, plastic, accessible
to impressions, and unforgetting.

Consider now that half-lit region which is called the foreconscious
mind; for this is of special interest to the spiritual life. It is, in
psychological language, the region of autistic as contrasted with
realistic thought.[85] That is to say, it is the agent of reverie and
meditation; it is at work in all our brooding states, from day-dream to
artistic creation. Such autistic thought is dominated not by logic or
will, but by feeling. It achieves its results by intuition, and has its
reasons which the surface mind knows not of. Here, in this
fringe-region--which alone seems fully able to experience adoration and
wonder, or apprehend the values we call holiness, beauty or love--is the
source of that intuition of the heart to which the mystic owes the love
which is knowledge, and the knowledge which is love. Here is the true
home of inspiration and invention. Here, by a process which is seldom
fully conscious save in its final stages, the poet's creations are
prepared, and thence presented in the form of inspiration to the reason;
which--if he be a great artist--criticizes them, before they are given
as poems to the world. Indeed, in all man's apprehensions of the
transcendental these two states of the psyche must co-operate if he is
to realize his full powers: and it is significant that to this
foreconscious region religion, in its own special language, has always
invited him to retreat, if he would know his own soul and thus commune
with his God. Over and over again it assures him under various
metaphors, that he must turn within, withdraw from the window, meet the
inner guest; and such a withdrawal is the condition of all
contemplation.

Consider the opening of Jacob Boehme's great dialogue on the
Supersensual Life.

"The Scholar said to his Master: How may I come to the supersensual
life, that I may see God and hear Him speak?

"His Master said: When thou canst throw thyself for a moment into that
where no creature dwelleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh.

"The Scholar said: Is that near at hand or far off?

"The Master said: It is in thee, if thou canst for a while cease from
all thinking and willing, thou shalt hear the unspeakable words of God.

"The Scholar said: How can I hear when I stand still from thinking and
willing?

"The Master said: When thou standest still from the thinking and willing
of self, then the eternal hearing, seeing and speaking will be revealed
in thee."[86]

In this passage we have a definite invitation to retreat from
volitional to affective thought: from the window to the quiet place
where "no creature dwelleth," and in Patmore's phrase "the night of
thought becomes the light of perception."[87] This fringe-region or
foreconscious is in fact the organ of contemplation, as the realistic
outward looking mind is the organ of action. Most men go through life
without conceiving, far less employing, the rich possibilities which are
implicit in it. Yet here, among the many untapped resources of the self,
lie our powers of response to our spiritual environment: powers which
are kept by the tyrannical interests of everyday life below the
threshold of full consciousness, and never given a chance to emerge.
Here take place those searching experiences of the "inner life" which
seem moonshine or morbidity to those who have not known them.

The many people who complain that they have no such personal religious
experience, that the spiritual world is shut to them, are usually found
to have expected this experience to be given to them without any
deliberate and sustained effort on their own part. They have lived from
childhood to maturity at the little window of consciousness and have
never given themselves the opportunity of setting up correspondences
with any other world than that of sense. Yet all normal men and women
possess, at least in a rudimentary form, some intuition of the
transcendental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty or love. In
some it is dominant, emerging easily and without help; in others it is
latent and must be developed in the right way. In others again it may
exist in virtual conflict with a strongly realistic outlook; gathering
way until it claims its rights at last in a psychic storm. Its
emergence, however achieved, is a part--and for our true life, by far
the most important part--of that outcropping and overflowing into
consciousness of the marginal faculties which is now being recognized as
essential to all artistic and creative activities; and as playing, too,
a large part in the regulation of mental and bodily health.

All the great religions have implicitly understood--though without
analysis--the vast importance of these spiritual intuitions and
faculties lying below the surface of the everyday mind; and have
perfected machinery tending to secure their release and their training.
This is of two kinds: first, religious ceremonial, addressing itself to
corporate feeling; next the discipline of meditation and prayer, which
educates the individual to the same ends, gradually developing the
powers of the foreconscious region, steadying them, and bringing them
under the control of the purified will. Without some such education,
widely as its details may vary, there can be no real living of the
spiritual life.

    "A going out into the life of sense
     Prevented the exercise of earnest realization."[88]

Psychologists sometimes divide men into the two extreme classes of
extroverts and introverts. The extrovert is the typical active; always
leaning out of the window and setting up contacts with the outside
world. His thinking is mainly realistic. That is to say, it deals with
the data of sense. The introvert is the typical contemplative,
predominantly interested in the inner world. His thinking is mainly
autistic, dealing with the results of intuition and feeling, working
these up into new structures and extorting from them new experiences. He
is at home in the foreconscious, has its peculiar powers under control;
and instinctively obedient to the mystic command to sink into the ground
of the soul, he leans towards those deep wells of his own being which
plunge into the unconscious foundations of life. By this avoidance of
total concentration on the sense world--though material obtained from it
must as a matter of fact enter into all, even his most "spiritual"
creations--he seems able to attend to the messages which intuition picks
up from other levels of being. It is significant that nearly all
spiritual writers use this very term of introversion, which psychology
has now adopted as the most accurate that it can find, in a favourable,
indeed laudatory, sense. By it they intend to describe the healthy
expansion of the inner life, the development of the soul's power of
attention to the spiritual, which is characteristic of those real men
and women of prayer whom Ruysbroeck describes as:--

    "Gazing inward with an eye uplifted and open to the Eternal Truth
    Inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and in utter peace."[89]

It is certain that no one who wholly lacks this power of retreat from
the surface, and has failed thus to mobilize his foreconscious energies,
can live a spiritual life. This is why silence and meditation play so
large a part in all sane religious discipline. But the ideal state, a
state answering to that rhythm of work and prayer which should be the
norm of a mature spirituality, is one in which we have achieved that
mental flexibility and control which puts us in full possession of our
autistic _and_ our realistic powers; balancing and unifying the inner
and the outer world.

This being so, it is worth while to consider in more detail the
character of foreconscious thought.

Foreconscious thinking, as it commonly occurs in us, with its unchecked
illogical stream of images and ideas, moving towards no assigned end,
combined in no ordered chain, is merely what we usually call day-dream.
But where a definite wish or purpose, an _end_, dominates this reverie
and links up its images and ideas into a cycle, we get in combination
all the valuable properties both of affective and of directed thinking;
although the reverie or contemplation place in the fringe-region of our
mental life, and in apparent freedom from the control of the conscious
reason. The object of recollection and meditation, which are the first
stages of mental prayer, is to set going such a series and to direct it
towards an assigned end: and this first inward-turning act and
self-orientation are voluntary, though the activities which they set up
are not. "You must know, my daughters," says St. Teresa, "that this is
no supernatural act but depends on our will; and that therefore we can
do it, with that ordinary assistance of God which we need for all our
acts and even for our good thoughts."[90]

Consider for a moment what happens in prayer. I pass over the simple
recitation of verbal prayers, which will better be dealt with when we
come to consider the institutional framework of the spiritual life. We
are now concerned with mental prayer or orison; the simplest of those
degrees of contemplation which may pass gradually into mystical
experience, and are at least in some form a necessity of any real and
actualized spiritual life. Such prayer is well defined by the mystics,
as "a devout intent directed to God."[91] What happens in it? All
writers on the science of prayer observe, that the first necessity is
Recollection; which, in a rough and ready way, we may render as
concentration, or perhaps in the special language of psychology as
"contention." The mind is called in from external interests and
distractions, one by one the avenues of sense are closed, till the hunt
of the world is hardly perceived by it. I need not labour this
description, for it is a state of which we must all have experience: but
those who wish to see it described with the precision of genius, need
only turn to St. Teresa's "Way of Perfection." Having achieved this, we
pass gradually into the condition of deep withdrawal variously called
Simplicity or Quiet; a state in which the attention is quietly and
without effort directed to God, and the whole self as it were held in
His presence. This presence is given, dimly or clearly, in intuition.
The actual prayer used will probably consist--again to use technical
language--of "affective acts and aspirations"; short phrases repeated
and held, perhaps expressing penitence, humility, adoration or love, and
for the praying self charged with profound significance.

"If we would intentively pray for getting of good," says "The Cloud of
Unknowing," "let us cry either with word or with thought or with desire,
nought else nor on more words but this word God.... Study thou not for
no words, for so shouldst thou never come to thy purpose nor to this
work, for it is never got by study, but all only by grace."[92]

Now the question naturally arises, how does this recollected state, this
alogical brooding on a spiritual theme, exceed in religions value the
orderly saying of one's prayers? And the answer psychology suggests is,
that more of us, not less, is engaged in such a spiritual act: that not
only the conscious attention, but the foreconscious region too is then
thrown open to the highest sources of life. We are at last learning to
recognize the existence of delicate mental processes which entirely
escape the crude methods of speech. Reverie as a genuine thought process
is beginning to be studied with the attention it deserves, and new
understanding of prayer must result. By its means powers of perception
and response ordinarily latent are roused to action; and thus the whole
life is enriched. That faculty in us which corresponds, not with the
busy life of succession but with the eternal sources of power, gets its
chance. "Though the soul," says Von Hügel, "cannot abidingly abstract
itself from its fellows, it can and ought frequently to recollect itself
in a simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of direct
preoccupation with God alone bring a deep refreshment and simplification
to the soul."[93]

True silence, says William Penn, of this quiet surrender to reality, "is
rest to the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body;
nourishment and refreshment."[94] Psychology endorses the constant
statements of all religions of the Spirit, that no one need hope to live
a spiritual life who cannot find a little time each day for this retreat
from the window, this quiet and loving waiting upon the unseen "with
the forces of the soul," as Ruysbroeck puts it, "gathered into unity of
the Spirit."[95] Under these conditions, and these only, the intuitive,
creative, artistic powers are captured and dedicated to the highest
ends: and in these powers rather than the rational our best chance of
apprehending eternal values abides, "Taste and _see_ that the Lord is
sweet." "Be still! be still! and _know_ that I am God!"

Since, then, the foreconscious mind and its activities are of such
paramount interest to the spiritual life, we may before we go on glance
at one or two of its characteristics. And first we notice that the fact
that the foreconscious is, so to speak, in charge in the mental and
contemplative type of prayer explains why it is that even the most
devout persons are so constantly tormented by distractions whilst
engaged in it. Very often, they are utterly unable to keep their
attention fixed; and the reason of this is, that conscious attention and
thought are not the faculties primarily involved. What is involved, is
reverie coloured by feeling; and this tends to depart from its assigned
end and drift into mere day-dream, if the emotional tension slackens or
some intruding image starts a new train of associations. The religious
mind is distressed by this constant failure to look steadily at that
which alone it wants to see; but the failure abides in the fact that
the machinery used is affective, and obedient to the rise and fall of
feeling rather than the control of the will. "By love shall He be gotten
and holden, by thought never."

Next, consider for a moment the way in which the foreconscious does and
must present its apprehensions to consciousness. Its cognitions of the
spiritual are in the nature of pure immediacy, of uncriticized contacts:
and the best and greatest of them seem to elude altogether that
machinery of speech and image which has been developed through the life
of sense. The well-known language of spiritual writers about the divine
darkness or ignorance is an acknowledgment of this. God is "known
darkly." Our experience of Eternity is "that of which nothing can be
said." It is "beyond feeling" and "beyond knowledge," a certitude known
in the ground of the soul, and so forth. It is indeed true that the
spiritual world is for the human mind a transcendent world, does differ
utterly in kind from the best that the world of succession is able to
give us; as we know once for all when we establish a contact with it,
however fleeting. But constantly the foreconscious--which, as we shall
do well to remember, is the artistic region of the mind, the home of the
poem, and the creative phantasy--works up its transcendent intuitions in
symbolic form. For this purpose it sometimes uses the machinery of
speech, sometimes that of image. As our ordinary reveries constantly
proceed by way of an interior conversation or narrative, so the content
of spiritual contemplation is often expressed in dialogue, in which
memory and belief are fused with the fruit of perception. The "Dialogue
of St. Catherine of Siena," the "Life of Suso," and the "Imitation of
Christ," all provide beautiful examples of this; but indeed
illustrations of it might be found in every school and period of
religious literature.

Such inward dialogue, one of the commonest spontaneous forms of autistic
thought, is perpetually resorted to by devout minds to actualize their
consciousness of direct communion with God. I need not point out how
easily and naturally it expresses for them that sense of a Friend and
Companion, an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps their
characteristic experience. "Blessed is that soul," says à Kempis, "that
heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of
consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and
take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St. John of the
Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the
most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such
a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate
presence of Spirit. Moreover, the thoughts and words in which the
contemplative expresses his sense of love and dedication reverberate as
it were in the depths of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude
thrown open to these influences: and the instinctive mind, as we have
already seen, is the home of character and of habit formation.

Where there is a tendency to think in images rather than in words, the
experiences of the Spirit may be actualized in the form of vision rather
than of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling will provide the
material. Here we stand at the sources of religious art: which, when it
is genuine, is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and in
those minds attuned to it may evoke again the memory or very presence of
those experiences. But many minds are, as it were, their own religious
artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to
their intuitive apprehensions. So vivid may these structures sometimes
be for them that--to revert again to our original simile--the self turns
from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the
time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the
room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world. When this
happens in a small way, we have what might be called a religious
day-dream of more or less beauty and intensity; such as most devout
people who tend to visualization have probably known. When the break
with the external world is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in
which mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual intuitions.
The Bible is full of examples of this. Good historic instances are the
visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first
contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and
emotional field. Those who have read Canon Streeter's account of the
visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this
type.[97]

I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme
types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth. Our concern is
with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may
live it. But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within
limits represent a perfectly genuine way of doing things, which is
inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is
neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as
superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our
neighbour may live and save his soul. The symbolic world of traditional
piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial
heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than
the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy. We may be sure
that both are more characteristic of the image-making and
structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate
and for us unknowable reality of things. Their value--or the value of
any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived--abides wholly in
the content: the quality of the material thus worked up. The rich
nature, the purified love, capable of the highest correspondences, will
express even in the most primitive duologue or vision the results of a
veritable touching and tasting of Eternal Life. Its psychic
structures--however logic may seek to discredit them--will convey
spiritual fact, have the quality which the mystics mean when they speak
of illumination. The emotional pietist will merely ramble among the
religious symbols and phrases with which the devout memory is stored. It
is true that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does into the
field of consciousness, seems to both classes to have the character of a
revelation. The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with
amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than
ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the
Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life. But the
crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in
from those visions and contacts, that intercourse? Is transcendental
feeling involved in them? "What fruits dost thou bring back from this
thy vision?" says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real
test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of
contemplation. In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and
perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought. In the
second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking
is set going and directed towards an assigned end: the apprehending and
actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In it, a great region of
the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many
choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its
true work: and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully
performed. It is to this region that poetry, art and music--and even, if
I dare say so, philosophy--make their fundamental appeal. No life is
whole and harmonized in which it has not taken its right place.

We must now go on--and 

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