Part 3 — CHAPTER XI CATHERINE’S LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES

Introductory: Catherine’s less ultimate Positions, concerning our Life here, are Four.

We have now attempted, (by means of a doubtless more or less artificial distinction between things that, in real life, constitute parts of one whole in a state of hardly separable inter-penetration,) a presentation of Catherine’s special, mental and psycho-physical, character and temperament, and of the principal literary stimulations and materials which acted upon, and in return were refashioned by, that character; and we have also given, in sufficient detail, the resultant doctrines and world-view acquired and developed by that deep soul and noble mind. The most important and difficult part of our task remains, however, still to be accomplished,—the attempt to get an (at least approximate) estimate of the abiding meaning, place, and worth of this whole, highly synthesized position, for and within the religious life generally and our present-day requirements in particular. For the general outline of the Introduction, (intended there more as an instrument of research and classification for the literature and history then about to be examined, than as this history’s final religious appraisement,) cannot dispense us from now attempting something more precise and ultimate.—I propose, then, to give the next four chapters to an examination of Catherine’s principal positions and practices, the first two, respectively, to “the less ultimate This-World Doctrines”; and “the Other-World Doctrines,” or “the Eschatology”; and the last two to “the Ultimate Implications and Problems” underlying both. The last chapter shall then sum up the whole book, and consider the abiding place and function of Mysticism, in its contrast to, and supplementation of, Asceticism, Institutionalism, and the Scientific Habit and Activity of the Mind.

Now I think the less ultimate spiritual positions, as far as they concern our life here below, which are specially represented, or at least forcibly suggested by, Catherine, can reasonably be accounted as four: Interpretative Religion; a strongly Dualistic attitude towards the body; Quietude and Passivity; and Pure Love. I shall devote a section to each position.

I. Interpretative Religion.

1. Difficulties of the Subjective element of Religion.

Now, by Interpretative Religion, I do not mean to imply that there is anywhere, in rerum natura, such a thing as a religion which is not interpretative, which does not consist as truly of a reaction on the part of the believing soul to certain stimulations of and within it, as of these latter stimulations and actions. As every (even but semi-conscious) act and state of the human mind, ever embraces both such action of the object and such reaction of the subject,—a relatively crude fact of sensation or of feeling born in upon it, and an interpretation, an incorporation of this fact by, and into, the living tissue and organism of this mind: so is it also, necessarily and above all, with the deepest and most richly complex of all human acts and states,—the specifically religious ones. But if this interpretative activity of the mind was present from the very dawn of human reason, and exists in each individual in the precise proportion as mind can be predicated as operative within him at all: this mental activity is yet the last element in the compound process and result which is, or can be, perceived as such by the mind itself. The process is too near to the observer, even when he is once awake to its existence; he is too much occupied with the materials brought before his mind and with moulding and sorting them out; and this moulding and sorting activity is itself too rapid and too deeply independent of those materials as to its form, and too closely dependent upon them as to its content, for the observation by the mind of this same mind’s contributions towards its own affirmations of reality and of the nature of this reality, not ever to appear late in the history of the human race or in the life of any human individual, or not to be, even when it appears difficult, a fitful and an imperfect mental exercise.

And when the discovery of this constant contribution of the mind to its own affirmations of reality is first made, it can hardly fail, for the time being, to occasion misgivings and anxieties of a more or less sceptical kind. Is not the whole of what I have hitherto taken to be a solid world of sense outside me, and the whole of the world of necessary truth and of obligatory goodness within me,—is it not, perhaps, all a merely individual creation of my single mind—a mind cut off from all effective intercourse with reality,—my neighbour’s mind included? For all having, so far, been held to be objective, the mind readily flies to the other extreme, and suspects all to be subjective. Or if all my apprehensions and certainties are the resultants from the interaction between impressions received by my senses and mind and reactions and elaborations on the part of this mind with regard to those impressions, how can I be sure of apprehending rightly, unless I can divide each constituent off from the other? And yet, how can I effect such a continuous discounting of my mind’s action by means of my own mind itself?

And this objection is felt most keenly in religion, when the religious soul first wakes up to the fact that itself, of necessity and continuously, contributes, by its own action, to the constitution of those affirmations and certainties, which, until then, seemed, without a doubt, to be directly borne in upon a purely receptive, automatically registering mind, from that extra-, super-human world which it thus affirmed. Here also, all having for so long been assumed to be purely objective, the temptation now arises to consider it all as purely subjective. Or again, if we insist upon holding that, here too, there are both objective and subjective elements, we readily experience keen distress at our inability clearly to divide off the objective, which is surely the reality, from the subjective, which can hardly fail to be its travesty.

And finally, this doubt and trouble would seem to find specially ready material in the mystical element and form of religion. For here, as we have already seen, psycho-physical and auto-suggestive phenomena and mechanisms abound; here especially does the mind cling to an immediate access to Reality; and here the ordinary checks and complements afforded by the Historical and Institutional, the Analytically Rational, and the Volitional, Practical elements of Religion are at a minimum. Little but the Emotional and the Speculatively Rational elements seems to remain; and these, more than any others, appear incapable of admitting that they are anything other than the pure and direct effects and expressions of spiritual Reality.

What, then, shall we think of all this?

2. Answers to the above difficulties.

We evidently must, in the first instance, guard against any attempt at doing a doctrinaire violence to the undeniable facts of our consciousness or of its docile analysis, by explaining all our knowledge, or only even all our knowledge of any single thing, as either of purely subjective or of purely objective provenance; for everywhere and always these two elements co-exist in all human apprehension, reason, feeling, will, and faith. We find, throughout, an organization, an indissoluble organism, of subjective and objective, hence a unity in diversity, which is indeed so great that (for our own experience and with respect to our own minds at all events), the Subjective does not and cannot exist without the Objective, nor the Objective without the Subjective.

In the next place, we must beware against exalting the Objective against the Subjective, or the Subjective against the Objective, as if Life, Reality, and Truth consisted in the one rather than the other. Because the subjective element is, on the first showing, a work of our own minds, it does not follow (as we shall see more clearly when studying the ultimate problems) that its operations are bereft of correspondence with reality, or, at least, that they are further from reality than are our sense-perceptions. For just as the degree of worth represented by these sense-perceptions can range from the crudest delusion to a stimulation of primary importance and exquisite precision, so also our mental and emotional reaction and penetration represent almost any and every degree of accuracy and value.

And, above all, as already implied, the true priority and superiority lies, not with one of these constituents against the other, but with the total subjective-objective interaction and resultant, which is superior, and indeed gives their place and worth to, those ever interdependent parts.

Now, in the general human experience, the Objective element is constituted, in the first instance and for clear and ready analysis, by the sense-stimulations; and, after some mental response to and elaboration of these, by the larger psychic moods; and later still, by the examples of great spiritual attitudes and of great personalities offered by other souls to the soul that keeps itself open to such impressions. And though the sense of Reality (as contrasted with Appearance), of the Abiding and Infinite (as different from the Passing and the Finite), are doubtless awakened, however faintly and inarticulately, in the human soul from the first, as the background and presupposition of the foreground and the middle-distances of its total world of perceptions and aspirations: yet all these middle-distances, as well as that great background and groundwork, would remain unawakened but for those humble little sense-perceptions on the one hand, and intercourse with human fellow-creatures on the other. And in such intercourse with the minds and souls, or with the literary remains and other monuments of souls, either still living here or gone hence some two thousand years or more, a mass of mental and moral impressions and stimulations, which, in those souls, were largely their own elaborations, offer themselves to any one human mind, or to the minds of a whole generation or country, with the apparent homogeneity of a purely objective, as it were a sense-impression.

Especially in Religion the Historical and Institutional (as Religion’s manifestation in space and time), come down to us thus from the past and surround us in the present, and either press in upon us with a painful weight, or support us with a comforting solidity, thus giving them many of the qualities of things physically seen and touched, say, a mystery play or a vast cathedral. And, on the other hand, the Rational, (whether Analytic or Synthetic,) and the Emotional and Volitional Elements, whenever they are at all preponderant or relatively independent of the other, more objective ones, are liable, in Religion, to look quite exceptionally subjective,—and this in the unfavourable sense of the word, as though either superfluous and fantastic, or as dangerous and destructive.—And yet both that look of the objective elements being, in Religion, more self-sufficing than they appear to be in the ordinary psychic, or the artistic, or social, or scientific life; and that impression conveyed by the subjective elements in Religion, as being there less necessary or more dangerous than elsewhere, are doubtless deceptive. These impressions are simply caused by two very certain facts. Religion is the deepest and most inclusive of all the soul’s energizings and experiences, and hence all its constituents reveal a difference, at least in amount and degree, when compared with the corresponding constituents of the more superficial and more partial activities of the soul; and Religion, just because of this, requires the fullest action and co-operation, the most perfect unity, in and through diversity, of all the soul’s powers, and all mere non-use of any of these forces, even any restriction to the use of but one or two, is here, more readily and extensively than elsewhere, detrimental both to the non-exercised and to the exercised forces, and, above all, is impoverishing to the soul itself and to its religion.

Hence, here as elsewhere, but more than anywhere, our ideal standard will be the greatest possible development of, and inter-stimulation between, each and all of the religious elements, with the greatest possible unity in the resulting organism. And yet,—in view of the very greatness of the result aimed at, and of the fact that its even approximate attainment can, even for any one age of the world, be reasonably expected only from the co-operation of the differently endowed and attracted races and nations, social and moral grades, sexes, ages and individuals that make up mankind,—we shall not only be very tolerant of, we shall positively encourage, largely one-sided developments, provided that each keeps some touch with the elements which itself knows not how to develop in abundance, and that it considers its own self, and works out its own special gift and attrait, as but one out of many variously gifted and apportioned fellow-servants in the Kingdom,—as only one of the countless, mutually complementary, individually ever imperfect, part-expressions of the manifold greatness, of the rich unity of spiritual humanity as willed by God, and of God Himself.

3. Partial developments of the full Gospel Ideal.

Now in the New Testament we have a most instructive, at first sight puzzling phenomenon, illustrative of the positions just taken up. For here it is clear that, with regard to the distinction between richly many-sided but as yet unarticulated religion, and comparatively one-sided and limited but profoundly developed religion, we have two considerably contrasted types of spiritual tone and teaching. We get the predominantly “Objective” strand of life and doctrine, in the pre-Pauline parts and in their non-Pauline echoes, i.e. in the substance of the Synoptic tradition, and in the Epistles of St. James and of St. Peter; and we find the predominantly “Subjective” strain in the “Pauline” parts, St. Paul’s Epistles and the Joannine Gospel and Letters.—And it has become more and more clear that it is the pre-Pauline parts which give us the most immediately and literally faithful, and especially the most complete and many-sided, picture of Our Lord’s precise words and actions; whereas the Pauline parts give us rather what some of these great creative forces were and became for the first generations of Christians and for the most penetrating of Christ’s early disciples and lovers. And yet it is the latter documents which, at first sight, appear to be the deeper, the wider, and the more profoundly spiritual; whereas the former look more superficial, more temporal and local, and more simply popular and material.

And yet,—though this first impression has been held to be finally true by large masses of Christians; although the Greek Fathers predominantly, and, in the West, the great soul of an Augustine, and the powerful but one-sided personalities of a Luther and a Calvin have, in various degrees and ways, helped to articulate and all but finally fix it for the general Christian consciousness: this view is yielding, somewhat slowly but none the less surely, to the sense that it is the Synoptic, the pre-Pauline tradition which contains the fuller arsenal of the spiritual forces which have transfigured and which still inspire the world of souls. This, of course, does not mean that the Pauline-Joannine developments were not necessary, or are not abiding elements towards the understanding of the Christian spirit.

And, to come to the true answer to our objection, such a judgment does not mean that the reflective penetration and reapplication of the original more spontaneous message was, from the very nature of the case, inferior to the first less articulated announcement of the Good Tidings. But it merely signifies that this necessary process of reflection could only be applied to parts of the original, immensely rich and varied, because utterly living, divinely spiritual, whole; and that, thus, the special balance and tension which characterized the original, complete spirit and temper, could, however profoundly, be reproduced only in part. For the time being this later penetration and resetting of some elements from among the whole of Our Lord’s divinely rich and simple life and teaching, necessarily and rightly, yet none the less most really, ignored, or put for the time into some other context, certain other sides and aspects of that primitive treasure of inexhaustible experience. Only the full, equable, and simultaneous unfolding of all the petals could have realized the promise and content of the bud; whereas the bud, holding enfolded within itself such various elements and combinations of truth, could not expand its petals otherwise than successively, hence, at any one moment only somewhat one-sidedly and partially. Each and all of these unfoldings bring some further insight into, and articulation of, the original spiritual organism; and that they are not more, but less, than the totality of that primitive experience and revelation, does not prove that such reflective work is wrong or even simply dispensable,—for, on the contrary, in some degree or form it was and ever is necessary to the soul’s apprehension of that life and truth,—but simply implies the immensity of the spiritual light and impulsion given by Our Lord, and the relative smallness of even the greatest of His followers.

Thus only if it could be shown that those parts of the New Testament which doubtless give us the nearest approach to the actual words and deeds of Our Lord require us to conceive them as having been without the reflective and emotional element; or again that, in the case of the more derivative parts of the New Testament, it is their reflectiveness, and not their relative incompleteness and one-sidedness, that cause them to be more readily englobed in the former world, than that former world in the latter: could the facts here found be used as an argument against the importance and strict necessity for religion of the reflective and emotional, the “Subjective” elements, alongside of the “Objective,” the Historical and Institutional ones.

It is a most legitimate ground for consolation to a Catholic when he finds the necessities of life and those of learned research both driving us more and more to this conclusion; for it is not deniable that Catholicism has ever refused to do more than include the Pauline and Joannine theologies amongst its earliest and most normative stimulations and expressions; and that it has ever retained, far more than Protestantism, the sense, which (upon the whole) is most unbrokenly preserved by the Synoptists, of, if I may so phrase it, the Christianity of certain true elements in the pre- and extra-Christian religions. For it is in the Synoptists that we get the clear presentation of Our Lord’s attitude towards the Jewish Church of His time, as one, even at its keenest, analogous to that of Savonarola, and not to that of a Luther, still less of a Calvin, towards the Christian Church of their day.—Indeed in these documents all idea of limiting Christianity to what He brought of new, appears as foreign to His mind as it ever has been to that of the Catholic Church. Here we get the most spontaneous and many-sided expression of that divinely human, widely traditional and social, all-welcoming and all-transforming spirit, which embraces both grace and nature, eternity and time, soul and body, attachment and detachment. The Pauline strain stands for the stress necessary to the full spiritualization of all those occasions and materials, as against all, mere unregenerate or static, retention of the simple rudiments or empty names of those things; and predominantly insists upon grace, not nature; eternity, not time; soul, not body; the cross and death here, the Crown and Life hereafter. No wonder it is this latter strain that gets repeated, with varying truth and success, in times of acute transition, and by characters more antithetic than synthetic, more great at developing a part of the truth than the whole.

Thinkers, of such wide historical outlook and unimpeachable detachment from immediate controversial interest as Prof. Wilhelm Dilthey and Dr. Edward Caird, have brought out, with admirable force, this greater fulness of content offered by the Synoptists, and how the Pauline-Joannine writings give us the first and most important of those concentrations upon, and in part philosophic and mystical reinterpretations of, certain constituents of the original happenings, actions and message, as apprehended and transmitted by the first eye-witnesses and believers.[112]—Here I would but try and drive home the apparently vague, but in reality ever pressing and concrete, lesson afforded by the clear and dominant fact of these two groups within the New Testament itself:—of how no mere accumulation of external happenings, or of external testimony as to their having happened,—no amount of history or of institutionalism, taken as sheer, purely positive givennesses,—can anywhere be found, or can anywhere suffice for the human mind and conscience, in the apprehension and embodiment of the truth. For although, in Our Lord’s most literally transmitted sayings and doings, this continuous and inalienable element of the apprehending, organizing, vitalizing mind and heart,—on His part above all, but also on the part of His several hearers and chroniclers,—can mostly still be traced and must everywhere be assumed: yet it is in the Pauline-Joannine literature that the ever important, the rightly and fruitfully “subjective,” the speculative and emotional, the mystical and the volitional strain can best be studied, both as to its necessity and as to its special character and dangers, because here it is developed to the relative exclusion of the other factors of complete religion.

4. The exclusive emotionalism of Dionysius and Jacopone.

Now if even in St. Paul and St. John there is a strong predominance of these reflective-emotional elements, in Dionysius and Jacopone they threaten to become exclusive of everything else. Especially is this the case with the Pseudo-Areopagite, steeped as he is in reflection upon reflections and in emotion upon emotions, often of the most subtle kind: a Christian echo, with curiously slight modifications, of Neo-Platonism in its last stage,—hence, unfortunately, of the over-systematic and largely artificial Proclus, instead of the predominantly experimental and often truly sublime Plotinus. And even Jacopone, although he has distinctly more of the historic element, is still predominantly reflective-emotional, and presents us with many a hardly modified Platonic or Stoic doctrine, derived no doubt from late Graeco-Roman writers and their mediaeval Christian echoes.

5. Catherine’s interpretation of the Gospel Ideal.

Catherine herself, although delightfully free from the long scale of mediations between the soul and God which forms one of the predominant doctrines of the Areopagite, continues and emphasizes most of what is common, and much of what is special to, all and each of these four writers; she is a reflective saint, if ever there was one. And of her too we shall have to say that she is great by what she possesses, and not by what she is without: great because of her noble embodiment of the reflective and emotional, the mystical and volitional elements of Christianity and Religion generally. Religion is here, at first sight at least, all but entirely a thought and an emotion; yet all this thought and emotion is directed to, and occasioned by, an abiding Reality which originates, sustains, regulates, and fulfils it. And although this Reality is in large part conceived, in Greek and specially in Neo-Platonist fashion, rather under its timeless and spaceless, or at least under its cosmic aspect, rather as Law and Substance, than as Personality and Spirit: yet, already because of the strong influence upon her of the noblest Platonic doctrine, it is loved as overflowing Love and Goodness, as cause and end of all lesser love and goodness; and the real, though but rarely articulated, acceptance and influence of History and Institutions, above all the enthusiastic devotion to the Holy Eucharist with all its great implications, gives to the whole a profoundly Christian tone and temper.

True, the Church at large, indeed the single soul (if we would take such a soul as our standard of completeness) requires a larger proportion of those crisp, definite outlines, of those factual, historical, and institutional elements; a very little less than what remains in Catherine of these elements, and her religion would be a simple, even though deep religiosity, a general aspiration, not a definite finding, an explicit religion. Yet it remains certain, although ever readily forgotten by religious souls, especially by theological apologists, that without some degree and kind of those outgoing, apprehending, interpreting activities, no religion is possible. Only the question as to what these activities should be, and what is their true place and function within the whole religious life, remains an open one. And this question we can study with profit in connection with such a life and teaching as Catherine’s, which brings out, with a spontaneous, childlike profundity and daring, the elemental religious passion, the spiritual hunger and thirst of man when he is once fully awake; the depths within him anticipating the heights above him; the affinity to and contact with the Infinite implied and required by that nobly incurable restlessness of his heart, which finds its rest in Him alone Who made it.

II. Dualistic Attitude towards the Body.

And if Catherine is profoundly reflective, that reflection is, in its general drift, deeply dualistic,—at least in the matter of body and spirit. Their difference and incompatibility; the spirit’s fleeing of the body; the spirit’s getting outside of it,—by ecstasy, for a little while, even in this earthly life, and by this earthly body’s death, for good and all; the body a prison-house, a true purgatory to the soul: all this hangs well together, and is largely, in its very form, of ultimately Neo-Platonist or Platonic origin.

1. New Testament valuations of the body.

Now here is one of the promised instances of a double type—if not of doctrine, yet at least of emotional valuation in the New Testament.

(1) In the Synoptist documents, (with the but apparent, or at least solitary, exceptions, of Jesus’ Fasting in the Desert and of His commendation of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven),[113] we find no direct or acute antagonism to the body, even to the average earthly human body, in the teaching and practice of Our Lord. The Second Coming and its proximity do indeed, here also, dwarf all earthly concerns, in so far as earthly.[114] This background to the teaching and its tradition was, in course of time, in part abstracted from, in part restated.—The entrance into life is through the narrow gate and the steep way; only if a man turn, can he enter into the Kingdom of God; only if he lose his soul, can he find it:[115] this great teaching and example, as to life and joy being ever reached through death to self and by the whole-hearted turning of the soul from its false self to its true source, God: remains, in the very form of its promulgation as given by the Synoptists, the fundamental test and standard of all truly spiritual life and progress. But as to the body in particular, Jesus here knows indeed that “the flesh is weak,” and that we must pray for strength against its weakness:[116] but He nowhere declares it evil—an inevitable prison-house or a natural antagonist to the spirit. The beautiful balance of an unbroken, unstrained nature, and a corresponding doctrine as full of sober earnestness as it is free from all concentrated or systematic dualism, are here everywhere apparent.

(2) It is St. Paul, the man of the strongest bodily passions and temptations, he who became suddenly free from them by the all-transforming lightning-flash of his conversion, who, on and on, remained vividly conscious of what he had been and, but for that grace, still would be, and of what, through that grace, he had become. The deepest shadows are thus ever kept in closest contrast to the highest lights; and the line of demarcation between them runs here along the division between body and soul. “Unhappy man that I am, who can liberate me from this body of sin?” “In my flesh dwelleth no good thing”:[117] are sayings which are both keener in their tone and more limited in their range than are Our Lord’s. And we have seen how, in one of his most depressed moods, he transiently adopts and carries on a specifically Platonist attitude towards the body’s relation to the soul, as he finds it in that beautiful, profoundly Hellenistic treatise, the Book of Wisdom.[118] This attitude evidently represents, in his strenuous and deeply Christian character, only a passing feeling; for, if we pressed it home, we could hardly reconcile it with his doctrine as to the reality and nature of the body’s resurrection. It is indeed clear how the Platonist, and especially the Neo-Platonist, mode of conceiving that relation excludes any and every kind of body from the soul’s final stage of purification and happiness; and how the Synoptic, and indeed the generally Christian conception of it, necessarily eliminates that keen and abiding dualism characteristic of the late Greek attitude.

2. Platonic, Synoptic, and Pauline elements in Catherine’s view.

Now in Catherine we generally find an interesting combination of the Platonic form with the Synoptic substance and spirit: and this can, of course, be achieved only because that abiding form itself is made to signify a changed set and connection of ideas.

(1) We have seen how she dwells much, Plotinus-like, upon the soul’s stripping itself of all its numerous garments, and exposing itself naked to the rays of God’s healing light. Yet in the original Platonic scheme these garments are put on by the soul in its descent from spirit into matter, and are stripped off again in its ascent back out of matter into spirit; in both cases, they stand for the body and its effects. In Catherine, even more than in Plotinus, the garments stand for various evil self-attachments and self-delusions of the soul; and against these evils and dangers the Synoptists furnish endless warnings. And yet she insists upon purity, clear separation, complete abstraction of the soul, in such terms as still to show plainly enough the originally Neo-Platonist provenance of much of her form; for in the Neo-Platonists we get, even more markedly than here, a like insistence upon the natural dissimilarity of the body and the soul, and a cognate longing to get away from it in ecstasy and death. But whilst in the Neo-Platonists there is, at the bottom of all this, a predominant belief that the senses are the primary source and occasion of all sin, so that sin is essentially the contamination of spirit by matter: in Catherine, (although she shares to the full Plotinus’s thirst for ecstasy, as the escape from division and trouble into unity and peace), impurity stands primarily for self-complacency,—belief in, and love of, our imaginary independence of even God Himself; and purity means, in the first instance, the loving Him and His whole system of souls and of life, and one’s own self only in and as part of that system.

It is very instructive to note, in this connection, how, after her four years of directly penitential and ascetical practice, (an activity which, even then, extended quite as much to matters of decentralization of the self as of bodily mortification), her warfare is, in the first instance, all but exclusively directed against the successive refuges and ambushes of self-complacency and self-centredness. Thus there is significance in the secondary place occupied, (even in the Vita, and doubtless still more in her own mind), by the question of continence; indeed her great declaration to the Friar indicates plainly her profound concentration upon the continuous practice of, and growth in, Love Divine, and her comparative indifference to the question of the systematic renunciation of anything but sin and selfish attachments and self-centrednesses of any kind. Her conception of sinners as “cold,” even more than as dark or stained; of God as Fire, even more than as Light; and of purity as indefinitely increasable, since Love can grow on and on: all similarly point to this finely positive, flame-, not snow-conception, in which purity has ceased to be primarily, as with the Greeks, a simple absence of soiledness, even if it be moral soiledness, and has become, as with the Synoptic teaching, something primarily positive, love itself.

In her occasionally intense insistence upon herself as being all evil, a very Devil, and in some of her picturings of her interior combat, we get, on the other hand, echoes, not of Plato, nor again of the Synoptist teaching, but of St. Paul’s “in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing,” and of his combat between flesh and spirit.—Yet the evil which she is thus conscious of, is not sensual nor even sensible evil and temptation, but consists in her unbounded natural claimfulness and intense inclination to sensitive self-absorption.—And this gives, indeed, to these feminine echoes of St. Paul a certain thin shrillness which the original tones have not got, standing there for the massive experiences of a man violently solicitated by both sense and spirit. But it leaves her free to note, as regards the flesh, the whole bodily organism, (and this in beautiful sympathy with Our Lord’s own genially fervent, homely heroic spirit), not its wickedness, but its weakness, its short-livedness, and its appeal for merciful allowance to God, “Who knows that we are dust.” Instead of a direct and pointed dualism of two distinct substances informed by all but incurably antagonistic principles, we thus get a direct conflict between two dispositions of the soul, and a but imperfect correspondence between the body and that soul.

(2) There is, indeed, no doubt that the very ancient association of the ideas of Fire and of spiritual Purification goes back, in the first instance, to the conception of the soul being necessarily stained by the very fact of its connection with the body, and of those stains being finally removed by the body’s death and cremation. We find this severely self-consistent view scattered up and down Hellenic religion and literature.[119] And even in Catherine the fire, a sense of fever-heat, still seizes the body, and this body wastes away, and leaves the soul more and more pure, during those last years of illness.—Yet the striking identity, between that old cluster of ideas and her own forms of thought, brings out, all the more clearly, the immense road traversed by spirituality between the substance of those ideas and the essence of this thought. For in her teaching, which is but symbolized or at most occasioned by those physico-psychical fever-heats, the Fire is, at bottom, so spiritual and so directly busy with the soul alone, that it is ever identical with itself in Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and on earth, and stands for God Himself; and that its effects are not the destruction of a foreign substance, but the bringing back, wherever and as far as possible, of the fire-like soul’s disposition and quality to full harmony with its Fire-source and Parent, God Himself.

(3) Only the Prison-house simile for the body, as essentially an earthly purgatory for the soul, must be admitted, I think, to remain a primarily Platonic, not fully Christianizable conception; just as the absence of all reference by her to the resurrection of the body will have been, in part, occasioned by the strong element of Platonism in her general selection and combination of ideas. Yet it would obviously be unfair to press these two points too much, since, as to the resurrection, her long illness and evidently constant physical discomfort must, even of themselves, have disinclined her to all picturing of an abiding, even though highly spiritualized, bodily organization; and as to the likeness of her body to a prison and purgatory of the soul, we are expressly told that it began only with the specially suffering last part of her life.

3. Dualism pragmatic, not final. Its limits.

Now, for this whole matter of the right conception as to the relations of body and soul, it is clear that any more than partial and increasingly superable antagonism between body and spirit cannot be accepted.

(1) A final Dualism is unsound in Psychology, since all the first materials, stimulations, and instruments for even our most abstract thinking are supplied to us by our sense-perceptions, hence also through the body. It is narrow in Cosmology, for we do not want to isolate man in this great universe of visible things; and his link with animal- and plant-life, and even with the mineral creation, is, increasingly as we descend in the scale of beings, his body. It is ruinous for Ethics, because purity, in such a physical-spiritual being as is man, consists precisely in spiritual standards and laws extending to and transforming his merely physical inclinations. It is directly contradictory of the central truth and temper of Christianity, since these require a full acceptance of the substantial goodness and the thorough sanctifiableness of man’s body; of God’s condescension to man’s whole physico-spiritual organism; and of the persistence or reanimation of all that is essential to man’s true personality across and after death. And it is, at bottom, profoundly un-Catholic; the whole Sacramental system, the entire deep and noble conception of the normal relations between the Invisible and the Visible being throughout of the Incarnational type,—an action of the one in the other, which develops the agent and subject at the same time that it spiritualizes the patient, the object, is in direct conflict with it. Neo-Platonism came more and more to treat the body and the entire visible creation as an intrinsic obstacle to spirit, to be eliminated by the latter as completely as possible; at least this very prominent strain within it was undoubtedly pushed on to this extreme by the Gnostic sects. But Christianity has ever to come back to its central presupposition—the substantial goodness and spiritual utility and transfigurableness of body and matter; and to its final end,—the actual transformation of them by the spirit into ever more adequate instruments, materials, and expressions of abiding ethical and religious values and realities.

(2) The fact is that here, as practically at every chief turning-point in ethical and religious philosophy, the movement of the specifically Christian life and conviction is not a circle round a single centre,—detachment; but an ellipse round two centres,—detachment and attachment. And precisely in this difficult, but immensely fruitful, oscillation and rhythm between, as it were, the two poles of the spiritual life; in this fleeing and seeking, in the recollection back and away from the visible (so as to allay the dust and fever of growing distraction, and to reharmonize the soul and its new gains according to the intrinsic requirements and ideals of the spirit), and in the subsequent, renewed immersion in the visible, (in view both of gaining fresh concrete stimulation and content for the spiritual life, and of gradually shaping and permeating the visible according to and with spiritual ends and forces): in this combination, and not in either of these two movements taken alone, consists the completeness and culmination of Christianity.[120]

(3) It no doubt looks, at first sight, as though the Church, by her canonization of the Monastic Ideal, gave us, for the ultimate pattern and measure of all Christian perfection, as pure and simple a flight of the soul from the body and the world, as (short of insanity or suicide) can be made in this life. But here we have to remember three things.

In the first place, the Church not only forbids all attacks upon the legitimacy, indeed sanctity of marriage, or upon its necessity, indeed duty, for mankind at large; but St. Augustine and St. Thomas only articulate her ordinary, strenuously anti-Manichean teaching, in declaring that man was originally created by God, in body and in soul, not for celibacy but for marriage; and that only owing to the accidental event of the Fall and of its effects,—the introduction of disorder and excess into human nature, but not any corruption of its substance and foundations,—does any inferiority,—the dispositions, motives, and circumstances being equal,—attach to marriage as compared with virginity.[121] Hence, still, the absolute ideal would be that man could and did use marriage as all other legitimate functions and things of sense, as a necessary, and ever more and more perfected, means and expression of truly human spirituality, a spirituality which ever requires some non-spiritual material in which to work, and by working in which the soul itself, not only spiritualizes it, but increasingly develops its own self.

And secondly, detachment, unification, spiritual recollection is the more difficult, and the less obviously necessary, of the two movements, and yet is precisely the one which (by coming upon the extant or inchoate attachments, and by suppressing or purifying them according as they are bad or good) first stamps any and every life as definitely religious at all. No wonder, then, that it is this sacred detachment and love of the Cross that we notice, first of all, in the life and doctrine of Our Lord and of all His followers, indeed in all truly religious souls throughout the world; and that the Church should, by her teaching and selection of striking examples, ever preach and uphold this most necessary test and ingredient, this very salt of all virile and fruitful spirituality.

But, in the third place, a man need only directly attack the family, society, the state; or art, literature, science,—as intrinsically evil or even as, in practice, true hindrances to moral and religious perfection,—and the Church,—both the learning and experimenting, and the official and formulating Church,—will at once disavow him: so strong is, at bottom, the instinct that attachment and variety of interests,—variety both in kind and in degree—that materials, occasions, and objects for spirituality to leaven and to raise, and to work on in order to be itself deepened and developed,—are as truly essential to the spiritual life as are detachment, and unity, and transcendence of ultimate motive and aim; these latter furnishing to the soul the power gradually to penetrate all that material, and, in and through this labour, more and more to articulate its own spiritual character.

(4) No man can become, or is proclaimed to have become, a Christian saint, who has not thus achieved a profound spiritualization and unification of a more or less recalcitrant material and multiplicity. In some cases, it is the unity and detachment that greatly predominate over the multiplicity and attachment,—as, say, in the Fathers of the Desert. In other cases, it is the variety and attachment that strikes us first of all,—as, for instance, in Sir Thomas More and Edmund Campion. And, in a third set of cases, it is the depth of the unity and detachment, in the breath of the variety and attachment, which is the dominant characteristic, so with St. Paul and St. Augustine. Catherine herself belongs, for her great middle period, rather to the third group than to either of the other two; only during her penitential period and her last long illness does she clearly belong to the group of intensely detached and unified saints.—It is evidently impossible in such a matter to do more than insist upon the necessity of both movements; upon the immensely fruitful friction and tension which their well-ordered alternation introduces into the soul’s inner life; and upon the full ideal and ultimate measure for the complete and perfected man, humanity at large, being a maximum of multiplicity and attachment permeated and purified by a maximum of unity and detachment. The life which can englobe and organize both these movements, with their manifold interaction, will have a multitude of warm attachments, without fever or distraction, and a great unity of pure detachment, without coldness or emptiness: it will have the, winning because rich, simplicity and wondrous combination of apparent inevitableness and of seeming paradox furnished by all true life, hence exhibited in its greatest fulness by the religious life which, at its deepest, is deeper any other kind of life.

III. Quietude and Passivity. Points in this tendency to be considered here.

We have inevitably somewhat anticipated another matter, in which Catherine shows all the true Mystic’s affinities: the craving for simplification and permanence of the soul’s states,—her practice and teaching as to Quietude and Passivity. Pushed fully home, this tendency involves four closely related, increasingly profound, convictions and experiences. Utter unification of the soul’s functions, indeed utter unity of its substance: i.e. the soul does one single thing, and seems to do it by one single act; itself is simply one, and expresses itself by one sole act. Passivity of the soul: i.e. the soul does not apparently act at all, it simply is and receives—it is now nothing but one pure immense recipiency. Immediacy of contact between the soul and God: i.e. there seems to be nothing separating, or indeed in any way between, the soul and God. And, finally, an apparent coalescence of the soul and God: i.e. the soul is God, and God is the soul.—Only the first two points, and then the closely related question of Pure Love, shall occupy us here; the last two points must stand over for our penultimate chapter.

1. Distinction between experiences, their expression, and their analysis.

We have already studied the psycho-physical occasions, concomitants, and embodiments of Catherine’s keen desire for, and profound experience of, spiritual unification and passivity; and we can have no kind of doubt as to the factual reality and the practical fruitfulness of the state so vividly described by her. Here we have only to inquire into the accuracy of the analysis and terminology effected and employed by her, in so far as they seem to claim more than simply to describe the soul’s own feeling and impression as to these states thus experienced by itself. We have then to consider the nature and truth of what can roughly be styled Quietism and Passivity.

Now here especially will it be necessary for us carefully to distinguish between the direct experiences, impressions, and instinctive requirements of the soul,—here all souls, in precise proportion to their depth and delicacy of holiness and of self-knowledge are our masters, and furnish us with our only materials and tests; and, on the other hand, the implications and analysis of these states, as, in the first instance, psychological, and then as requiring elucidation with regard to their ontological cause and reality by means of a religious philosophy,—here, psychology, and religious philosophy, especially also the discriminations and decisions of theologians and Church authorities as expressive of these ultimate questions, will be our guides.[122]

(1) If we start from the history of the nomenclature which, (though present only partially in Catherine’s sayings, for she nowhere uses the term “passivity”), runs, with however varying a completeness, right through the Christian Mystics more or less from the first, we shall find that it consists, roughly, of three stages, and, throughout, of two currents. There is the Pre-Pauline and Pre-Philonian stage; the stage of Paul, Philo, and John, through Clement and Origen, on to Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine; and the stage from the Pseudo-Dionysius onward, down to Nicolas of Coes inclusive, and which, to this hour, still largely influences us all.—And there are the two currents. The one tends so to emphasize the sense and reality of the soul’s simple receptivity, and of what the soul receives at such, apparently, purely receptive times, as to ignore, or even practically deny, the undeniable fact that this very receptivity is, inevitably, an act of its own. Its decisive terms are Passivity, Fixedness, Oneness. The other current realizes that Grace does not destroy, violate, or supplant Nature, either entirely or in part, but that it awakens, purifies, and completes it, so that every divine influx is also ever a stimulation of all the good and true energy already, even though latently, present in the soul. And its characteristic terms are “Action” (as distinguished from “Activity”), Growth, Harmony.

(2) And we should note with care that these two currents are not simply Heathen and Christian respectively. For if that great, indeed all but central, term and conception of “Action” has been wisely generalized by most Christian Mystics, as the truly Christian substitute for the strongly Neo-Platonist term “Passivity”: that term and conception of “Action” was first fixed and elucidated by Aristotle, who, as Mr. Schiller well puts it, “has packed into his technical term ‘Energeia,’ and especially into the combination ‘Unmoving Energy,’ all that was most distinctive, most original, most fundamental, and most profound in his philosophy”;[123] whilst the second term, “Passivity,” goes on figuring in Christian Mystics and Mystical Theologies—(in spite of its demonstrably dangerous suggestions and frequently scandalous history)—because the religious, especially the Christian, consciousness requires a term for the expression of one element of all its deepest experiences, that character of “giveness” and of grace, of merciful anticipation by God, which marks all such states, in exact proportion to their depth and to the soul’s awakeness.

(3) Now Aristotle’s conception of God’s Unmoving Energy, is taken over by St. Thomas in the form of God being One Actus Purus,—sheer Energy, His very peace and stillness coming from the brimming fulness of His infinite life. And even finite spirit, whilst fully retaining, indeed deepening, its own character, can and does penetrate finite spirit through and through,—the law of Physics, which does not admit more than one body in any one place, having here no kind of application,—so that the Infinite Spirit is at once conceived unspiritually, if He is conceived as supplanting, and not as penetrating, stimulating, and transforming the finite spirits whom He made into an increasing likeness to Him, their Maker. And hence according to the unanimous teaching of the most experienced and explicit of the specifically Theistic and Christian Mystics, the appearance, the soul’s own impression, of a cessation of life and energy of the soul in periods of special union with God or of great advance in spirituality, is an appearance only. Indeed this, at such times strong, impression of rest springs most certainly from an unusually large amount of actualized energy, an energy which is now penetrating, and finding expression by, every pore and fibre of the soul. The whole moral and spiritual creature expands and rests, yes; but this very rest is produced by Action “unperceived because so fleet,” so near, so all fulfilling; or rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, emotional, volitional, so finely interwoven, so exceptionally stimulative and expressive of the soul’s deepest aspirations, that these acts are not perceived as so many single acts, indeed that their very collective presence is apt to remain unnoticed by the soul itself.

(4) Close parallels to such a state are abundant in all phases and directions of the soul’s life. The happiest and most fruitful moments for our aesthetic sense, those in which our mind expands most and grows most, hence is most active in aesthetic “action” (though not “activity”) are those in which we are unforcedly and massively absorbed in drinking in, with a quiet intentness, the contrasts and harmonies, the grand unity in variety, the very presence and spirit of an alpine upland, or of a river’s flowing, or of the ocean’s outspread, or of the Parthenon sculptures or of Rafael’s madonnas. At such moments we altogether cease to be directly conscious of ourselves, of time or of the body’s whereabouts; and when we return to our ordinary psychical and mental condition, we do so with an undeniable sense of added strength and youthfulness,—somewhat as though our face, old and haggard, were, after gazing in utter self-oblivion upon some resplendent youthfulness, to feel, beyond all doubt, all its many wrinkles to have gone. And so too with the mind’s absorption in some great poem or philosophy or character.—In all these cases, the mind or soul energizes and develops, in precise proportion as it is so absorbed in the contemplation of these various over-againstnesses, these “countries” of the spirit, as to cease to notice its own overflowing action. It is only when the mind but partially attends that a part of it remains at leisure to note the attention of the other part; when the mind is fully engrossed, and hence most keenly active, there is no part of it sufficiently disengaged to note the fact of the engrossment and action of, now, the whole mind. And, with the direct consciousness of our mind’s action, we lose, for the time being, all clear consciousness of the mind’s very existence. And let it be carefully noted, this absence of the direct consciousness of the self is as truly characteristic of the deepest, most creative, moments of full external action: the degree of mind and will-force operating in Nelson at Trafalgar and in Napoleon at Waterloo, or again in St. Ignatius of Antioch in the Amphitheatre, and in Savonarola at the stake, was evidently in the precisely contrary ratio to their direct consciousness of it or of themselves at all.

(5) Now if such “Passivity,” or Action, is in reality the condition in which the soul attains to its fullest energizing, we can argue back, from this universal principle, to the nature of the various stages and kinds of the Prayer and States of Quiet. In each case, that is, we shall combat the still very common conception that,—though orthodoxy, it is admitted, requires some human action to remain throughout,—such Prayer and States consist (not only as to the immediate feeling of their subjects, but in reality and in their ultimate analysis) in an ever-increasing preponderance of divine action within the soul, and an ever-decreasing remnant of acts of the soul itself. For such a view assumes that God supplants man, and that, so to speak, His Hand appears unclothed alongside of the tissue woven by man’s own mind; whereas God everywhere but stimulates and supports man whom He has made, and His Hand moves ever underneath and behind the tissue,—a tissue which, at best, can become as it were a glove, and suggest the latent hand. The Divine Action will thus stimulate and inform the human action somewhat like the force that drives the blood within the stag’s young antlers, or like the energy that pushes the tender sap-full fern-buds up through the hard, heavy ground.

Thus a special intensity of divine help and presence, and an unusual degree of holiness and of union, have nothing to do with the fewness of the soul’s own acts at such times, but with their quality,—with the preponderance amongst them of divinely informed acts as against merely natural, or wrongly self-seeking, or downrightly sinful acts. And since it is certain that living simplicity is but the harmony and unification, the synthesis, of an organism, and hence is great in precise proportion to the greater perfection of that synthesis, it follows that the living, utterly one-seeming Action or State will, at such times, contain a maximum number of interpenetrating acts and energies, all worked up into this harmonious whole.

2. Four causes of inadequate analysis.

It is plain, I think, that one thoroughly normal, one accidental, and two mischievous, causes have all conspired to arrest or to deflect the analysis of most of the Mystics themselves concerning Simplicity.

For one thing, the soul, as has just been shown, at such moments of harmonious concentration and of willing and thinking in union with God’s Light and Will, necessarily ceases, more or less, to be conscious of its own operations, and, in looking back, braced and rested as it now is, it cannot but think that it either did not act at all, or that its action was reduced to a minimum. For how otherwise could it now feel so rested, when, after its ordinary activity, it feels so tired and dissatisfied? and how otherwise could it be so unable to give any clear account of what happened in those minutes of union? Yet it is, on the contrary, the very fulness of the action which has rested, by expanding, the soul; and which has made the soul, returned to its ordinary distractedness, incapable of clearly explaining that, now past, concentration.

The accidental cause has been the fairly frequent, though not necessary, connection of the more pronounced instances of such habits of mind with more or less of the psycho-physical phenomena of ecstasy, in the technical sense of the word. For, in such trances, the breathing and circulation are retarded, and the operation of the senses is in part suspended. And it was easy to reason, from such visible, literal simplification of the physical life, to a similar modification of the soul’s action at such times; and, from the assumed desirableness of that psycho-physical condition, to the advantage of the supposed corresponding state of the soul itself. Any tendency to an extreme dualism, as to the relations between body and soul, would thus directly help on an inclination to downright Quietism.—Here it is, on the contrary, certain that only in so far as those psycho-physical simplifications are the results of, or conditions for, a deepening multiplicity in unity, a fuller synthetic action of the soul, or, at least, of a fuller penetration by the soul of even one limited experience or idea—an operation which entails not less, but more, energizing of the soul,—are such psycho-physical simplifications of any spiritual advantage or significance. And in such cases they could not be indications of the cessation or diminution of the deepest and most docile energizing of the soul.

And the mischievous causes were a mistake in Psychology and a mistake in Theology. For, as to Psychology, not only was simplicity assumed, (through a mistaken acceptance of the soul’s own feeling, as furnishing the ultimate analysis of its state), to consist, at any one moment, of an act materially and literally one, instead of a great organism of various simultaneous energizings; but this one act was often held to require no kind of repetition. Since the act was one as against any simultaneous multiplicity, so was it one as against any successive multiplicity, even if this latter were taken as a repetition differentiated by number alone. And yet here again energizing is energizing; and though the soul’s acts overlap and interpenetrate each other, and though when, by their number and harmony, they completely fill and pacify the soul, many of them are simultaneously or successively present to the soul in their effects alone: it is nevertheless the renewal, however peaceful and unperceived, of these acts, which keeps the state of soul in existence. For these acts are not simply unowned acts that happen to be present within the soul; they are the soul’s own acts, whether, in addition, the soul is directly conscious of them or not.

And, theologically, the idea was often at work that it was more worthy of God to operate alone and, as it were, in vacuo; and more creaturely of man to make, or try to make, such a void for Him. Yet this is in direct conflict with the fundamental Christian doctrine, of the Condescension, the Incarnation of God to and in human nature, and of the persistence, and elevation of this humanity, even in the case of Christ Himself. God’s action does not keep outside of, nor does it replace, man’s action; but it is,—Our Lord Himself has told us,—that of yeast working in meal, which manifests its hidden power in proportion to the mass of meal which it penetrates and transforms.

3. Four Quietistic aberrations.

Now it is certain that the error of Quietism has, in no doubt many cases, not remained confined to such mistakes in psychological analysis and theological doctrine, but that these have joined hands with, and have furnished a defence to, sloth and love of dreamy ease, or to some impatience of the necessary details of life, or to fanatical attachment to some one mood and form of experience; and that they have, thus reinforced, ravaged not a few wills and souls.

Four chief Quietistic aberrations can be studied in history.

(1) The neglect or even contempt of vocal prayer, and of the historical and institutional elements of religion, at least in the case of more advanced souls, is one of these abuses.—Now it is true, and Catherine has been a striking instance, that the proportion of all these different elements towards one another vary, and should vary, considerably between soul and soul, according to the attrait and degree of advance of each; that the soul’s most solid advance is in the direction of an ever-deepened spiritual devotedness, and not in that of a multiplication of particular devotions; that the use of even the more central of those elements and means may, for souls called to the prayer of Quiet, become remarkably elastic and largely unmethodized; and that, for such souls (and, in various degrees and ways, sooner or latter, for perhaps most other souls), a prayer of peacefully humble expectation and of all but inarticulate, practically indescribable, brooding of love, and of dim, expansive trust and conformity is possible, sometimes alone possible, and is proved right and useful, if it leaves them strengthened to act and to suffer, to help and to devote themselves to their fellows, to Christ, and to God.

But it remains equally true, even for these as for all other souls, that the historical and institutional elements must ever remain represented, and sufficiently represented; indeed the persistence in these elements of religion will be one of the chief means for avoiding delusion. We have St. Teresa’s experience and teaching here, as a truly classical instance. And if the prayer of Quiet will give a special colour, depth, and unity to those more contingent-seeming practices, these practices will, in return, give a particular definiteness, content, and creaturely quality to that prayer. And thus too the universally and profoundly important union and interchange with souls of other, equally legitimate, kinds and degrees of spirituality will be kept up. Only the sum-total of all these souls, only the complete invisible Church, is the full Bride of Christ; and though the souls composing her may and should each contribute a varying predominance of different elements, no soul should be entirely without a certain amount of each of these constituents.

(2) Another abuse is the neglect, contempt, or misapplied fear of not directly religious occupations and labours which, however otherwise appropriate or even necessary to this soul’s growth and destination, tend to disturb its quiet and to absorb a part of its time and attention. Here it is doubtless true that the other elements of religion are also all more or less apprehensive and jealous with regard to actual, or even only possible, non-religious rival interests. And it is certain that they are all right in so far as that a certain interior leisureliness and recollection, a certain ultimate preference for the spiritualizing religious force of the soul as against the materials, non-religious and other, which that force is to penetrate, are necessary to the soul that would advance.

But the fear that characterizes the Historical and Institutional elements is rather a fear, respectively, of error and of disobedience and singularity, whereas on the part of the Mystical element it is a fear of distraction and absorption away from the Unum Necessarium of the soul. Perhaps even among the Canonized Mystics there is none that has more impressively warned us, both by word and example, against this insidious danger, than the distinguished Platonist scholar and deep spiritual writer, Père Jean Nicolas Grou, who, right through the long mystical period of his life, alternated his prayer of Quiet with extensive and vigorous critical work on the Graeco-Latin classics, and whose practice only wants further expansion and application, (according to the largely increased or changed conditions of such not directly religious work), in order to bear much fruit, not only for criticism and science, but, (by the return-effect of such occupations upon the soul’s general temper and particular devotional habits), for spirituality itself. But we must return to this point more fully in our last chapter.

(3) The third abuse is the neglect or contempt of morality, especially on its social, visible, and physical sides. Particular Mystics, and even whole Mystical schools and movements, have undoubtedly in some instances, and have, possibly, in many more cases, been maligned on this point, since even such a spotless life as Fénelon’s, and that of such a profoundly well-intentioned woman as Madame Guyon, did not, for a time, escape the most unjust suspicions. It is also true that, as a man advances in spirituality, he lays increasing stress upon the intention and general attitude of the agent, and increasingly requires to be judged by the same interior standard, if he is to be rightly understood at all. God may and does, to humble and purify him, allow painful temptations and trials from within to combine, apparently, against him, with persecutions and much isolation from without. And the difference, rather than the similarity, between Religion and Morality,—the sense of pure grace, of free pardon, of the strange profound “givenness” of even our fullest willings and of our most emphatically personal achievements,—can and should grow in him more and more.

And yet it is clear that there must have been some fire to account for all that smoke of accusation; that the material and the effect outwards, the body of an action, do matter, as well as does that action’s spirit; that this body does not only act thus outwards, but also inwards, back upon the spirit of the act and of the agent; and that temptations and trials are purifying, not by their simple presence but in proportion as they are resisted, or, if they have been yielded to, in proportion as such defeats are sincerely deplored and renounced. Thus everywhere the full development of any one part of life, and the true unity of the whole, have to be achieved through the gradual assimilation of at first largely recalcitrant other elements, and within an ever-abiding multiplicity—a maximum number of parts and functions interacting within one great organism. And hence not the outrage, neglect, or supersession of morality, but, on the contrary, its deeper development, by more precise differentiation from, and more organic integration into, religion proper, must, here again and here above all, be the final aim. Once more again it is the Incarnational type which is the only fully true, the only genuinely Christian one.

(4) And, finally, there are certain hardly classifiable fanaticisms, which are nevertheless a strictly logical consequence from a wrongly understood Quiet and Passivity,—from Quietism in its unfavourable, condemned sense. I am thinking of such a case as that of Margarethe Peters, a young Quietist, who caused herself to be crucified by her girl-companions, at Wildenspuch, near Schaffhausen, in 1823,—in order to carry out, in full literalness and separateness, the utmost and most painful passivity and dependence and resistless self-donation, in direct imitation of the culminating act of Christ’s life on earth and of His truest followers.[124] Here, in the deliberate suicide of this undoubtedly noble Lutheran girl, we get an act which but brings out the strength and weakness of Quietism wherever found. For the greatest constituents of the Christian spirit are undoubtedly there: free self-sacrifice, impelled by love of God, of Christ, and of all men, and by hatred of self.—Yet, because they here suppress other, equally necessary, constituents, and are out of their proper context and bereft of their proper checks, they but render possible and actual a deed of piteous self-delusion. How terrible is false simplification, the short cut taken by pure logic, operating without a sufficient induction from facts, and within an ardent, self-immolating temperament!

4. Rome’s condemnation of Quietism.

All this is abundantly sufficient to explain and justify Rome’s condemnation of Quietism. The term “Quietists” appears, I think, for the first time,—at least in an invidious sense,—in the Letter which Cardinal Caraccioli, Archbishop of Naples, addressed to Pope Innocent XI (Odescalchi) on June 30, 1682, and in which he graphically describes the abuses which, (under pretext or through the misapplication of spiritual Quiet and Passivity), had now appeared in his Diocese: souls apparently incapable of using their beads or making the sign of the Cross; or which will neither say a vocal prayer nor go to Confession; or which, when in this prayer of Quiet, even when at Holy Communion, will strive to drive away any image, even of Our Lord Himself, that may present itself to their imagination; or which tear down a Crucifix, as a hindrance to union with God; or which look upon all the thoughts that come to them in the quietude of prayer, as so many rays and effluences from God Himself, exempting them henceforth from every law.[125]

Yet it is important to bear well in mind, the special circumstances, the admitted limits, and the probable signification of Rome’s condemnations.

(1) As to the circumstances of the time, it appears certain that it was the ready circulation of the doctrines of the Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos in the Guida Spirituale, 1675, and the abuses of the kind we have just now detailed, and that sprang from this circulation, which formed the primary reason and motive for the otherwise excessively severe treatment of a man and a book, which had both received the very highest and the most deliberate ecclesiastical approbations. That these two circumstances were the determining causes of at least the severity of his condemnation is well brought out by the circumstance that, during his two years’ trial (1685-1687), not only the short Guida but his whole obtainable correspondence (some twenty thousand letters) were examined, and that it is at least as much on such occasional manuscript material, and on Molinos’s own oral admissions,—in prison and doubtless, in part at least, under torture,—that the condemnation was based, containing, as it does, certain revoltingly immoral propositions and confessions, admittedly absent from his published writings.

But if at least some shadow of doubt rests upon the moral character of Molinos, not a shadow of such suspicion or of doubt concerning his perfectly Catholic intentions can, in justice, be allowed to rest upon his chief follower and the most distinguished apologist for his doctrine, the saintly Oratorian and Bishop, the much-tried Cardinal Petrucci; any more than Fénelon’s moral and spiritual character, or deeply Catholic spirit and intentions, can, (in spite of the painfully fierce and unjust attack upon both by Bossuet in his formally classic invective, Relation sur le Quiétisme), for one moment be called in question.[126] Other admittedly deeply spiritual and entirely well-intentioned Catholics, whose writings were also condemned during this time when devotional expressions having an at all quietistic tinge or drift were very severely judged, are Mère Marie de l’Incarnation (Marie Guyard), a French Ursuline Religious, who died in Canada in 1672, and the process of whose Beatification has been introduced; the saintly French layman, Jean de Bernières-Louvigny, much admired by Fénelon, who died in 1659; the very interior, though at times somewhat fantastic, Secular Priest, Henri Marie Boudon, who died in 1702; and the very austere but highly experienced ascetical writer, the Jesuit Père Joseph Surin, whom Bossuet had formally approved, and who died in 1668.[127] But Madame Guyon herself, that much-tried and vehemently opposed woman, was held, by many an undoubtedly Catholic-minded, experienced and close observer, to be (in spite of the largely misleading and indeed incorrect character of many of her analyses and expressions) a truly saintly, entirely filial Catholic.[128]

(2) As to the limits of these condemnations, we must remember that only two of them,—those of Molinos and of Fénelon,—claim to be directly doctrinal at all; and that Fénelon was never really compromised in the question of Quietism proper, but was condemned on questions of Pure Love alone. Bossuet himself was far less sound as against the central Quietist doctrine of the One Act, which, unless formally revoked, lasts on throughout life, and hence need never be repeated; Fénelon’s early criticism of the Molinos propositions remains one of the clearest extant refutations of that error. Again in the matter of the Passivity of advanced souls, Bossuet was distinctly less normal and sober than Fénelon: for whilst Fénelon taught that in no state does the soul lose all capacity, although the facility may greatly vary, to produce distinct acts of the virtues or vocal prayers and other partially external exercises, Bossuet taught that, in some cases, all capacity of this kind is abolished.[129] “I take,” says Fénelon, “the terms ‘Passive’ and ‘Passivity’ as they actually appear everywhere in the language of the (sound) Mystics, as something opposed to the terms ‘active’ and ‘activity’: ‘Passivity,’ taken in the sense of an entire inaction of the will, would be a heresy.” And he then opposes “Passivity,” not to “Action,” but to that “Activity,” which is a merely natural, restless, and hurried excitation.[130]

(3) And as to the abiding significance of the whole anti-quietist decisions and measures, we shall do well to consider the following large facts. From St. Paul and St. John to Clement of Alexandria and Origen; from these to Dionysius the Areopagite; from the Areopagite to St. Bernard of Clairvaux and then the Franciscan and Dominican Mystics; from these, again, on to the great Renaissance and Counter-Reformation saints and writers of this type,—the German Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and the Italian St. Catherine of Genoa, the Spaniards St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, and the French Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, we get a particular type of religious experience and doctrine, which but unfolds and concentrates, with an unusual articulation, breadth, and depth, what is to be found, on some sides of their spiritual character and teaching, among Saints and religious souls of the more mixed type, such as St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas of Aquin, and St. Ignatius Loyola. And this mixed type, bearing within it a considerable amount of that mystical quiet and emotional-speculative element, is again but a deepening, a purification and a realization of one of the profoundest affinities and constituents of every human heart and will.

Hence, even in the thickest of the quietist controversy, when that mystical element must have seemed, to many, to be discredited once for all, those best acquainted with the rich history of the Church, and with the manifold requirements of the abiding religious consciousness, could not and did not doubt that all that was good, deep, and true in that element would continue to be upheld by, and represented in, the Church.—And it is not difficult to point to the more or less Mystical souls furnished by the Monks, the Friars; the Clerks-Regular, specially the Jesuits; the Secular Clergy; and the Laity, down to the present day. Such writers and Saints as Père de Caussade (d. about 1770) on the one hand, and Père Jean N. Grou (d. 1803) and the Curé d’Ars (d. 1859) on the other hand, carry on the two streams of the predominantly mystical and of the mixed type,—streams so clearly observable before 1687 and 1699. Quietism, the doctrine of the One Act; Passivity in a literal sense, as the absence or imperfection of the power and use of initiative on the soul’s part in any and every state: these doctrines were finally condemned, and most rightly and necessarily condemned; the Prayer of Quiet, and various states and degrees of an ever-increasing predominance of Action over Activity,—an Action which is all the more the soul’s very own, because the more occasioned, directed, and informed by God’s action and stimulation,—these, and the other chief lines of the ancient experience and practice, remain as true, correct, and necessary as ever.

5. Rome’s alleged change of front.

And yet it is undeniable that the Roman events between 1675 and 1688 do seem, at first sight, to justify the strongly Protestant Dr. Heppe’s contention that those twelve years,—not to speak of the later troubles of Madame Guyon and of Fénelon—witnessed a complete volte face, a formal self-stultification, of the Roman teaching and authority, on these difficult but immediately important matters.

(1) Let us put aside the many passages in Molinos’s Guida which were but (more or less) literal reproductions of the teachings of such solemnly approved authorities as Saints Teresa, Peter of Alcantara, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal,—passages which, of course, remained uncondemned even in Molinos’s pages, but which it would often be difficult to distinguish from the parts of his book that were censured. Yet there still remain such facts as the following.

Juan Falconi’s Alfabeto and Lettera were at their Fifth Italian edition, 1680, and all five editions had been approved by the Master of the Apostolic Palace; but only in 1688 were these writings forbidden. Yet the Lettera contains, with unsurpassed directness and clearness, the central doctrine of Quietism: an exhortation to the production of one single lively Act of Faith, which will then continue uninterruptedly through the whole earthly life into eternity, and which, consequently, is not to be repeated.[131]

Molinos’s Guida and Breve Trattato appeared in Rome, respectively in 1675 and 1681, with the approbations of five theologians, four of whom were Consultors of the Holy Office,—the Archbishop of Reggio; the Minister-General of the Franciscans; the late General of the Carmelites; Father Martin Esparza, the same Jesuit Theologian-Professor of the Roman College who, some years before, had been one of those who had examined and approved St. Catherine’s Vita ed Opere; and the actual General of the Carmelites.[132]

Even after these two writings of Molinos had been criticised by the Jesuits Bell Huomo and Segneri and the Clerk Regular Regio, (Segneri enjoying a deservedly immense reputation, and showing in this affair much moderation and a strong sense of the legitimate claims of Mysticism), the Inquisition examined these criticisms, and forbade, not the incriminated writings of Molinos and Petrucci, but the critique of Bell Huomo donec corrigatur, and those of Regio and of Segneri (in his Lettera of 1681) absolutely. Segneri’s subsequent Concordia almost cost him his life, so strong was the popular veneration of Molinos.

Molinos indeed was the guest of Pope Innocent XI himself, and the friend and confidant, amongst countless other spiritually-minded souls, of various Cardinals, especially of the deeply devout Petrucci, Bishop of Jesi, who was raised to the Cardinalate eighteen months after the beginning of Molinos’s trial. The imprisonment of Molinos began in May 1685, but the trial did not end till August 1687, when (after nineteen “Principal Errors of the New Contemplation” had been censured by the Holy Office in February 1687) sixty-eight propositions, out of the two hundred and sixty-three which had been urged against him, were solemnly condemned: of these the clearly and directly immoral ones being admittedly not derived from any printed book, or indeed any ever published letter of his Molinos.[133]

(2) To estimate Rome’s attitude (as far as it concerns the ultimate truth and completeness of these doctrines, taken in their most characteristic and explicit forms) fairly, we shall have to put aside all questions as to the motives that impelled, and the methods that were employed, by either side against the other. Molinos may have been even worse than the condemned propositions represent, and yet Petrucci would remain a saintly soul; and we certainly are driven to ask with Leibniz: “Si Molinos a caché du venin sous ce miel, est-il juste que Petrucci et autres personnes de mérite en soient responsables?”[134] But neither the wickedness of the one nor the sanctity of the other would make the doctrines propounded by them, objectively, any less solid or more spiritual than they are in themselves. The acutely anti-Roman Anglican Bishop Burnet may not have invented or exaggerated when he wrote from Rome, during those critical years, that one of the chief motives which actuated the opponents of the Quietists was the fact that, though the latter “were observed to become more strict in their lives, more retired and serious in their mental devotions, yet … they were not so assiduous at Mass, nor so earnest to procure Masses to be said for their friends: nor … so frequently either at Confession or in processions”: and so “the trade of those that live by these things was sensibly sunk.”[135] And the cruel injustice of many details and processes of the movement against the Quietists,—a movement which soon had much of the character of a popular scare and panic, in reaction against a previous, in part, heedless enthusiasm,—are beyond dispute or justification. Yet mercenary and ruthless as part of the motives and much of the action of the anti-quietists doubtlessly were, the question as to the worth and wisdom of Quietism, (taken objectively, and not as an excusable counter-excess but as a true synthesis of the spiritual life), remains precisely where it was before.

(3) Now I think that two peculiarities, most difficult to notice at the time, seriously differentiate the Molinist movement from the great current of fully Catholic Mysticism, even in those points and elements where the two are materially alike or even identical; and yet that these peculiarities are but the caricature (through further emphasis and systematization) of certain elements present, in a more latent and sporadic manner, in the formulae and philosophic assumptions or explanations of the older Mysticism,—elements which had been borrowed too largely from a, at bottom, profoundly anti-incarnational philosophy, not to be of far less value and of much greater danger than the profoundly true experiences, nobly spiritual maxims, and exquisite psychological descriptions which that predominantly Neo-Platonist framework handed on.

The first peculiarity is that the older Mystics, especially those of the type of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. John of the Cross, but even also those of the more “mixed” type of Mysticism, such as St. Teresa, had indeed quite freely used terms which are vividly true as descriptions of the prima facie aspect and emotional impression of certain states and experiences of the soul: “empty,” “fixed,” “motionless,” “the reason and the will have ceased to act,” “doing nothing,” “incapable of doing anything,” “moved by irresistible grace,” “but one act,” “one single desire”: these and equivalent expressions occur again and again. But these sayings do not here lead up to such a deliberate and exclusive rule as is that given by Falconi, and repeated by Molinos in his Guida, Nos. 103-106.[136]

This doctrine of the One Act, in this its negative form,—for it is not to be repeated,—and in its application to the whole waking and sleeping life, is first an exclusive concentration upon, and then a wholesale extension of, one out of the several trends of the older teaching, a doctrine which, compared with that teaching in its completeness, is thin and doctrinaire, and as untrue to the full psychological explanation and working requirements of the soul as it is readily abusable in practice and contrary to the Incarnational type of religion. It is impossible not to feel that the manifold great ocean-waters of life, that the diversely blowing winds of God’s Spirit are here, somehow, expected to flow and breathe in a little shortcut, single channel, through a tiny pipe; one more infallible recipe or prescription is here offered to us, hardly more adequate than the many similar “sure” roads to salvation, declared by this or that body of devout religionists to attach to the practice or possession of this or that particular prayer or particular religious object.

And the second difference is that the older Catholic Mystics leave less the impression that the external side of religion, its body, is of little or no importance, and indeed very readily an obstacle to its interior side, its soul. And this, again, for the simple reason that their teaching is, in general, less systematic and pointed, more incidental, and careless of much self-consistency.

(4) Yet these two differences have largely sprung from the simple pressing and further extension of precisely the least satisfactory, the explanatory and systematic side,—the form as against the content,—of the older Mystics. For once the more specifically Neo-Platonist constituent, in those Mystics’ explanation and systematization, was isolated from the elements of other provenance which there had kept it in check, and now became, as it were, hypostasized and self-sufficient, this constituent could not but reveal, more clearly than before, its inadequacy as a form for the intensely organic and “incarnational” spiritual realities and processes which it attempted to show forth. That Neo-Platonist constituent, always present in those ancient Mystics, had ever tended to conceive the soul’s unity, at any one moment, as a something outside of all multiplicity whatsoever. Hence this character of the simultaneous unity had only to be extended to the successive unity,—and the literally One Act, as in the present so throughout the future, became a necessary postulate.

And that same constituent had, even in those great teachers of profound maxims, exquisite religious psychology, and noblest living, tended, (however efficaciously checked by all this their Christian experience and by certain specifically Platonist and Aristotelian elements of their philosophy), towards depreciating the necessity, importance, indeed even the preponderant utility, of the External, Contingent, Historical and Institutional, and of the interchange, the inter-stimulation between these sides and expressions of religion and its internal centre and spirit.

Perhaps, amongst all the great ecclesiastically authorized Mystics of that past, the then most recent of them all, St. John of the Cross, comes, by his (theoretically continuous though in his practice by no means exclusive) insistence upon the abstractive and universal, the obscure and invisible, the self-despoiling and simplifying element and movement, nearest to an exclusion of the other element and movement. Indeed the Quietists’ generally strong insistence upon the necessity of a Director and upon Frequent Communion gives their teaching, when taken in its completeness, a prima facie greater Institutionalism than is offered by the spiritual theory of the great Spaniard. Yet if, even in him, one misses, in his theoretical system, a sufficiently organic necessity for the outgoing movement, a movement begun by God Himself, and which cannot but be of fundamental importance and influence for believers in the Incarnation, there is as complete an absence of the doctrinaire One-Act recipe for perfection as in the most Historical and Institutional of Christian teachers. But more about this hereafter.

6. Four needs recognised by Quietism.

Quietism, then, has undoubtedly isolated and further exaggerated certain explanatory elements of the older Mysticism which, even there, were largely a weakness and not a strength; has thus underrated and starved the Particular, Visible, Historical, Institutional constituents of Religion; and has, indeed, misunderstood the nature of true Unity everywhere. Yet the very eagerness with which it was welcomed at the time,—in France and Italy especially,—and this, not only as a fashion by the Quidnuncs, but as so much spiritual food and life by many a deeply religious soul; and the difficulty, and not infrequent ruthlessness of its suppression, indicate plainly enough that, with all its faults and dangers, it was divining and attempting to supply certain profound and abiding needs of the soul. I take these needs to be the following four.

(1) Man has an ineradicable, and, when rightly assuaged, profoundly fruitful thirst for Unity,—for Unification, Synthesis, Harmonization; for a living System, an Organization both within and without himself, in which each constituent gains its full expansion and significance through being, and more and more becoming, just that part and function of a great, dynamic whole; a sense of the essential and ultimate organic connection of all things, in so far as, in any degree or form, they are fair and true and good. And this sense and inevitable requirement alone explain the surprise and pain caused, at first, to us all, by the actual condition of mutual aloofness and hostility, characteristic of most of the constituents of the world within us, as of the world around us, towards their fellow-constituents. A truly atomistic world,—even an atomistic conception of the world,—of life, as a collection of things one alongside of another, on and on, is utterly repulsive to any deeply religious spirit whose self-knowledge is at all equal to its aspirations.—No wonder, then, if the Quietists, haunted by the false alternative of one such impenetrable atom-act or of an indefinite number of them, chose the One Act, and not a multitude of them.

(2) Man has a deep-seated necessity to purify himself by detachment, not only from things that are illicit but even from those that are essential and towards which he is bound to practise a deep and warm attachment. There is no shadow of theoretical or ultimate contradiction here: to love one’s country deeply, yet not to be a Chauvinist; to love one’s wife tenderly, yet not to be uxorious; to care profoundly for one’s children, yet to train, rebuke, and ever brace them, when necessary, up to suffering and even death itself: these things so little exclude each the other, that each attachment can only rightly grow in and through the corresponding detachment. The imperfection in all these cases, and in all the analogous, specifically religious ones, lies not in the objects to be loved, nor in these objects being many and of various degrees and kinds of lovableness, nor in the right (both effective and affective, appropriately varied) love of them: but simply in our actual manner of loving them.—No wonder then that Quietism, face to face with the false alternative of either Attachment or Detachment, chose Detachment, (the salt and the leaven of life) and not attachment (life’s meat and meal).

(3) Man has a profound, though ever largely latent, capacity and need for admiration, trust, faith; and does not by any means improve solely by direct efforts at self-improvement, and by explicit examinations of his efforts and failures; but, (a little from the first, and very soon as much, and later on far more), he progresses by means of a happy absorption in anything clean and fruitful that can and does lift him out of and above his smaller self altogether.—And such an absorption will necessarily be unaccompanied, at the time, by any direct consciousness on the part of the mind as to this its absorption. And, religiously, such quiet concentrations will, in so far as they are at all analyzable after the event, consist in a quite inarticulate, and yet profound and spiritually renovating, sense of God; and they will have to be tested, not by their describable content, but by their ethical and religious effects. “Psychology and religion,” says that great psychological authority, Prof. William James, “both admit that there are forces, seemingly outside of the conscious individual, that bring redemption to his life.” “A man’s conscious wit and will, so far as they strain after the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined, whilst the deeper forces of organic ripening within him tend towards a rearrangement that is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with by efforts of too direct and energetic a kind on our part.”[137]—No wonder then that Quietism, finding this element of quiet incubation much ignored and starved in the lives of most religious souls, flew to the other extreme, of making this inarticulateness and wise indirectness of striving into the one test and measure of the perfection of all the constituents of the religious life, instead of insisting upon various degrees and combination of full and direct consciousness and articulation, and of much dimness and indirect alertness, as each requiring the other, and as both required by the complete and normal life of the soul.

(4) And Man has a deep-seated sense of shame, in precise proportion as he becomes spiritually awake, about appropriating to himself his virtues and spiritual insight, even in so much as he perceives and admits his possession of them. Not all his consciousness and conviction of the reality of his own efforts and initiative, can or does prevent a growing sense that this very giving of his is (in a true sense) God’s gift,—that his very seeking of God ever implies that he had, in some degree, already found God,—that God had already sought him out, in order that he might seek and find God.—No wonder then that, once more shrinking from a Unity constituted in a Multiplicity, Quietism should, (with the apparently sole choice before it, of God Himself operating literally all, or of man subtracting something from that exclusive action and honour of God), have chosen God alone and entire, rather than, as it were, a fragmentary, limited, baffled influence and efficiency of the Almighty within His Own creature. Yet here again the greater does not supplant, but informs, the lesser; and the Incarnational action of God is, in this supreme question also, the central truth and secret of Christianity.

7. Multiplicity and unity, in different proportions, needful for all spiritual life.

We find, then, that it is essential for even the most advanced souls, that they should keep and increase the sense and the practice of a right multiplicity, as ever a constituent and essential condition of every concrete, living unity; of a right attachment, as ever the necessary material and content for a fruitful and enriching detachment; of a right consciousness and articulation of images, thoughts, feelings, volitions, and external acts, as ever stimulations, restful alternations, and food for a wise and strengthening prayer or states of Quiet and inarticulation; and of a right personal initiative and responsibility, as the most precious means and element for the operations of God.

We find, too, that it is equally important, for even the most imperfect souls, to be helped towards some, (though but ever semi-conscious and intermittent), sense of the unity which alone can give much worth or meaning to their multiplicity; of the detachment which alone can purify and spiritualize their attachments; of the self-oblivion, in rapt and peaceful admiration, which alone can save even their right self-watchings and self-improvements from still further centring them in themselves; and of the true self-abandonment to pure grace and the breathing of God’s Spirit, which alone can give a touch of winning freedom and of joyful spaciousness to all the prudence and right fear and conscious responsibility which, left alone, will hip, darken and weigh down the religious soul.

And thus we shall find that there is no degree of perfection for any one set of souls which is not, in some form and amount, prefigured and required by all other souls of good-will; and again, that there is no one constituent, to which any one soul is specially drawn, which does not require the supplementation and corrective of some other constituents, more fully represented in other souls of possibly lower sanctity.

Thus each soul and grade requires all the others; and thus the measure of a soul’s greatness is not its possessing things which cannot, in any degree or way, be found in, or expected of, all human souls, in proportion as they are fully and characteristically human, but, on the contrary, its being full of a spirit and a force which, in different degrees and forms, are the very salt and yeast, the very light and life, of all men in every place and time.

The following weighty declaration, long ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas, fully covers, I think, the doctrine and ideal aimed at throughout this section: “Already in this life we ought continuously to enjoy God, as a thing most fully our own, in all our works.… Great is the blindness and exceeding the folly of many souls that are ever seeking God, continuously sighing after God, and frequently desiring God: whilst, all the time, they are themselves the tabernacles of the living God … since their soul is the seat of God, in which He continuously reposes. Now who but a fool deliberately seeks a tool which he possesses under lock and key? or who can use and profit by an instrument which he is seeking? or who can draw comfort from food for which he hungers, but which he does not relish at leisure? Like unto all this is the life of many a just soul, which ever seeks God and never tarries to enjoy Him; and all the works of such an one are, on this account, less perfect.”[138]