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TWO
of the names of God which are most
characteristic of the New Testament
seem when we take them together and
examine them closely to contain or involve an
almost complete doctrine of Spirit in its relation
to the life of man. First, there is that absolute
statement which the Fourth Gospel attributes to
Christ Himself, 'God is Spirit'; and the whole
conception of the Divine nature which is implied
by it. Next there is the term most commonly used
by Him, and repeated by the Synoptists
'our
Heavenly Father'. This of course is nearly always
distorted by pious minds; which stress the protective,
cherishing, humanistic note, and so blur
the overwhelming supernatural affirmation. Yet it
is only in the double declaration that our best name
for the ultimate Reality is Spirit, and that nevertheless
this same ineffable and wholly supernatural
Spirit is father of our half-real souls, that we can
hint the real mystery of our situation. Here, we
do stand beyond the time-series, and declare our
own deepest being to be rooted in Eternal Life, to
consist in a direct relationship with Reality.
' Unto
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the rapting Spirit the rapt spright
' exclaimed
Fotherby, enclosing our beatitude in a matchless
phrase.
Neither of these expressions, of course, is peculiar
to Christianity. All that they mean is already
implied in the Psalms and the Prophets, and emerges
in the deepest experiences of first-hand religion
wherever found. But each receives in Christianity
a new expansion and richness of content. The first
term,
'God is Spirit', lifts us far beyond that world
of succession which is the normal object of our
consciousness, and gives precision to our deep sense
of transcendent and abiding Reality. It clears
away the spatial images which dog and blur religious
thought, and places us in a world wholly other than
the dimensional world of sense, and yet a world
that is most truly here. It names, though it cannot
describe, the Object of our metaphysical thirst. It
endorses the instinctive upward glance of awakened
souls: the strange awe and delight which falls upon
these souls when they taste in moments of tranquillity
that 'supreme Being, supreme Life, in
Whom are all moments of time' and realize that
looking up is the same as looking in, since beyond
and within process, and alone giving meaning to
process, is not merely Mind but that super-essential
Life of which Mind is but one facet—the irresistible
attraction of God-Spirit. Baron von Hügel tells us
how in earliest childhood, before the moral struggle
began, he felt all nature to 'be penetrated and
saturated by a Spirit distinct from what I saw,
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distinct from myself the seer'—that inborn sense
of God which is the ground-stuff of natural religion—and moreover that the essence of this purely religious
joy consisted
precisely in the fact that, beautiful
as the external nature was, God did not consist
even in its full totality, but was a Life, an Intelligence,
a Love distinct from it all, in spite of His
close penetration of it all'. Here then we seem to
have the report of a primary experience of the
Spirit, as known by an innate though still unformed
genius for religion. And we see already in this
naive intuition the sharp withdrawal of the genuine
religious sense from any merely immanental apprehension
of God-Spirit ; its emphasis on the distinctness
of the divine. God is here a concrete Reality
underlying all lesser realities ; moulding, inspiring,
and supporting His creation in every detail and at
eyery point.
We can trace this apprehension of Spirit, in
various degrees of richness and distinctness, right
through human experience, from the child to the
saint. Thus it is wonderfully given by Plotinus,
in a passage which seems to anticipate the deepest
intuitions of the Christian contemplatives.
'We
must not', he says,
'think of ourselves as cut off
from the source of Life; rather we breathe and
consist in It, for It does not give Itself to us and
then withdraw Itself, but ever lifts and bears us.' So
too St. Hildegard hears the Spirit say:
'
I am that
living and fiery Essence of the divine substance that
glows in the beauty of the fields. I shine in the
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water, I burn in the sun, and the moon, and the
stars, Mine is the mysterious force of the invisible
wind ... I permeate all things, that they may not
die. I am Life.' And Angela of Foligno tells us how
she saw in vision the whole universe spread before
her; the ocean, and the abyss of space in which the
world lies, and all things that exist therein. And in
all this she could see nothing but the power and
presence of God, in a way that she had no words
to express; so that she cried out in her amazement:
' The whole world is impregnated with
God!' And again Julian of Norwich, more homely
in expression but not less profound,
'We are all
in Him enclosed and He is enclosed in us!'
So 'God is Spirit'
guarantees religion both in its
most transcendental and its most penetrating
aspects: in its certitude of Presence and of purpose;
in its passionate desire for purification, its incurable
'otherness', its tendency towards the simple, the
universal, the spaceless, which is yet the rich, the
concrete, the Here. 'The Holy Spirit', says St.
Thomas Aquinas,
'
is God Himself as He is everywhere
at all times '
; and the very heart of all
personal religion is the tendency of the created
spirit to union with that Spirit-God. Thus the
fact that our awareness of this Holy Spirit is so
limited, fluctuating and sporadic, our understanding
so coloured by apparent contradiction, is seen to
be comparatively unimportant. The emphasis lies
on God, the Fact of all Facts, and His penetrating
action ; not on the partial experiences of our
uneven, tentative and many-levelled consciousness,
still so uncertain in its grasp of all that lies beyond
the world of sense.
For the doctrine of the Holy Spirit means that we
acknowledge and adore the everywhere-present
pressure of God ; not only as a peculiar religious
experience, not as a grace or influence sent out from
another world or order, but as a personal holy
Presence and Energy, the Lord and Giver of Life
in this world and yet distinct from it, penetrating all,
yet other than all, the decisive factor in every
situation. It means God entering into, working on
and using the whole world of things, events, and
persons ; operating at various levels, and most
deeply and freely in that world of souls where His
creation shows a certain kinship with Himself.
Veni, Sancte Spiritus,
Et emitte coelitus
Lucis tuae radium.
And this Presence is moulding, helping and pressing
all His creation on every plane, in every
person, at every point by the direct action of His
divine influence, to move towards greater perfection,
get nearer the pattern of His shining thought.
That influence may be felt as the gentle pressure
on which piety prefers to dwell, or as the shattering
invasion of a compelling and purifying power.
'Mine', said the Voice to St. Hildegard,
'is the blast
of the thundered word by which all things were
made.' When we meditate on all this, we get a
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wonderful sense of the unmeasured action of God,
and the links that bind together the mysterious
rhythms of nature, the great movements of history,
and the hidden springs of Providence and prayer.
'The Divine will', says Caussade,
'unites itself to
our souls by a thousand different means; and that
which it adopts for us is always the best for us.'
Moreover, the fact of this holy spaceless Presence
guarantees and informs all those graded, varied,
contrasting self-disclosures of God, which together
constitute the history of human religion; and all
those intimations of Eternity, those hints of an
imperishable beauty, given to us through rifts in
the natural scene. Our limited minds refuse to
combine the ideas of the personal and the universal.
We set them in opposition ; but that is almost
certainly a mistake. The self-revelation of Spirit
to its sense-conditioned creatures goes all the way
from the cosmic to the homely. It can bless the
votive candle, and burn in the star. Yet even so,
the most awe-struck vision, the most humble communion,
do but touch single strands on the fringed
robe of this Reality who is both Will and Love.
For Spirit, thus conceived, is God, the Pure Absolute,
acting. And it is the prerogative of religion to
discover this action informing every small event of
our inward and outward existence : and thus give
significance to the bewildering mesh of circumstance
which hems us in, whilst leaving in untouched majesty
that Abyss of Being which enfolds and transcends
our island universe of faith.
