THE
mind which has reached this point in
its exploration of the strange word Spirit,
may well feel baffled by the paradox which
confronts it. For how shall the 'tranquil operations
of perpetual Providence' be reconciled with
those abrupt experiences of an invading Life and
Power, of personal and incalculable contacts,
which are never wholly absent from the religious
intuitions of great souls? Yet it is certain that these contrasting experiences of a Reality that is
one—of that Spirit which, as St. Thomas says,
'both brings God to the soul and places the soul
in God'—form the warp and weft of a full religious
life. Though we must acknowledge a perfect continuity
between that Creative Spirit disclosed by
the physical universe and the Holy Spirit of Divine
Love, yet here we reach an experience which is
wholly
'other' and for which no degree of nature mysticism
can prepare the soul. Life, as that soul's
awareness deepens, is more and more known to be
immersed in and penetrated by a living spiritual
order. But it is also known to be subject to
sudden new incitements, fresh personal lights and
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calls and penetrations, the ceaseless possibility of
novelty; as that same abiding spiritual order floods
and works upon the stuff of our successive life. It
is true that the world is already
'pregnant with God'; yet also true that the key-word of our
spiritual life is
'Come'. The 'Power of the Spirit'
is no inborn possession of the creature. There is
no place where God is not, no situation in which
He is not there first; yet something from another
dimension called the child Samuel, broke in upon
the young Isaiah in the Temple, and on Saul on the
Damascus road.
And here, that other name of God which is of all
the most surely guaranteed by Christ's own experience
and teaching—'our Heavenly Father'—comes
with its rich suggestions of a personal action which
is the outcome of a personal relationship, to qualify
that sense of boundless Spirit which is the ground
of natural religion. For this term carries us beyond
the awed sense of an unmeasured Reality that
is
'wholly other'; even beyond the confident belief
in a creative and fostering Presence, as the origin
of
'all that is'. It hints at a closer link, a certain
profound likeness in nature, a fetter of love, between
the 'rapting Spirit and rapt spright'. It 'sets up
a relationship within which gifts and illuminations,
genuine expansions and enrichments of our small
experience, can be conceived as coming to the sense-conditioned
creature from the free and generous
action of a spaceless creative Power within the
soul.
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Veni, pater pauperum,
Veni, dator munerum,
Veni, lumen cordium.
Religion is penetrated through and through by this
conviction of human incompleteness; of our
dependence on a personal Reality, which can and
does make good the insufficiencies of a creature
that emerges from the animal yet possesses a capacity
for God. The Christian liturgy returns again
and again to the thought of something given, sent, poured in from the Transcendent, and makes each
sacrament the occasion of a heavenly gift. Rorate
coeli desuper! Pour into our hearts love towards
Thee ! And though we may surely refer that sense
of invasion, even of a shattering impact, which is
a character of great transforming moments, to the
narrow span of our space-conditioned consciousness; yet this too has its value, in so far as it
maintains our sense of dependence on a present
yet infinite Power.
So here we turn back from the contemplation of
the Mystery of Being to our own situation, which
is not less mysterious; our dimly-guessed and yet
direct relationship with that unseen, all-penetrating
Reality.
'The Spirit itself beareth witness with
our spirit, that we are the children of God.' Now
we begin to consider those elements in our own
nature, for which the temporal order cannot account ;
and which, because of their subtlety and uneven
manifestation, we easily push aside and neglect.
And first we perceive that our curious power of
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standing away from succession and judging it to be
incomplete, that sense of the whole temporal
world as dust and ashes, which is a phase in nearly
every full awakening to God, is a part of this
witness to our mysterious kinship with the Unchanging.
Though we arise within the time-series
and are conditioned by it, we know by these signs
that we have another citizenship; beyond succession,
in the eternal order. Our small created
spirits originate with God the Pure Spirit; owe
their being to Him, and depend utterly on Him.
Were this not so, the human soul could never have
reached that realistic experience of the Spirit, which
is characteristic of a fully expanded religious sense.
God, Who is Absolute Being, is also the Father,
Fount, and Origin of souls.
Nor do we mean by such an image to present
our relation with Spirit as the relation of a finite
something
'here', with an infinite Power 'there'
which is yet utterly outside the world; but rather
as an unbroken continuity, in the soul's essential
ground, between the creature and the absolute
creative Love. 'We are all in Himself enclosed',
says Julian of Norwich,
'and He is enclosed in us.'
In that filial adherence, even though it never rise
to consciousness, we can find an explanation at once
spiritual and reasonable for those direct movements
and incitements of the soul whether felt as steady
pressure or as abrupt invasions which are of the
very substance of personal religion ; so too those
painful purifications by which, once it is awakened,
page 25
it is pressed to establish harmony with the indwelling
Power.
'The Spirit', says Caussade, 'keeps school
within us, in the soul's ground. He listens and
speaks, teaches, moves, turns and moulds it as He
wills. Of these workings of Spirit on spirit, the
person concerned knows as it seems almost nothing;
yet comes from them with certain impressions by
which he is completely renewed.' And the same
essential truth which is indeed the philosophic
sanction of all incarnational and sacramental
religion is given in other terms by Von Hügel:
'The central conviction and doctrine of Christianity
is the real prevenience and condescension of the real
God—the penetration of spirit into sense, of the
spaceless into space, of the Eternal into time, of
God into man.' Here is a doctrine of the universe
which already contains in germ a doctrine of redemption,
and a life-history of the human soul. Prophecy
and sanctity, Pentecost and Church, can all be
resumed under this law; and not these alone, but
all intimations of Holiness reaching us through
finite things. These are partial exhibitions of one
Divine method and act.
Thus we reach a truth of the transcendental order
which, once accepted, must transform and control
our whole attitude to the natural order. For it
means first that we, knowers and beholders of that
natural order, cannot fulfil our lives by a correspondence,
however perfect, with the natural alone.
Nor are we to be explained on evolutionary lines,
as merely growing up from within it.
'Spirit'
in
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its unearthly beauty, its overwhelming demand,
breaks in from another world, which is over against us
and yet within us; to possess, purge and transform.
And only under its penetrating action and through
its indwelling presence can any human life become
complete. Moreover, this penetrating action of God
takes place, above all, through and in human spirits;
and along the paths of the common life. Here is
the only territory known to us, in which nature and
supernature meet and merge.
'Spirit and spirit, God and the creature ', says
Von Hügel again,
'are not two material bodies, of
which one can only be where the other is not ;
but, on the contrary, as regards our own spirit,
God's Spirit ever works in closest penetration and
stimulation of our own; just as, in return, we
cannot find God's Spirit simply separate from our
own spirit within ourselves. Our spirit clothes
and expresses His; His Spirit first creates and then
sustains and stimulates our own.'
It may well be that on this doctrine of the interpenetration
of realities, the practical theology of
the future will be built. Nor is it to be suspected
as a disguised pantheism. No theologian of the
modern world has been more consistent and emphatic
than Von Hügel in his warnings concerning
the impoverishment and perversion of the religious
sense which comes from opening the door to any
kind of pantheistic monism. These words are the
words of a teacher intensely concerned to safeguard
those twin truths of the eternal distinctness of God
page 27
and the derivative being of man, without which
we can never hope to construct a sane and realistic,
because humble and creaturely, theology of the
Spirit.
The pendulum swing of religious experience and
religious thought has tended sometimes to overstress
one, and sometimes the other, of these twin
truths. Sometimes it is God's utter distinctness
which is overwhelmingly felt; as when Karl Barth
exclaims that He stands 'over against man and all
that is human, nowhere and never identical with that
which we call God—the unconditioned Halt as against
all human action, and the unconditioned Action
as against all human rest'. This profound religious
intuition, if taken alone, must land us in virtual or
actual Deism; and sterilizes the germ-cells of the
spiritual life. Sometimes, on the other hand, it is
God's immanence in, and total possession of, the
soul which is most actual to us; and this, unbalanced
by its completing opposite, prepares the way for
that pantheism which ever lies in wait for the
exclusive mystic. Only the Christian theology of
the Holy Spirit seems able to safeguard the deep
truths in both these extremes, and by carrying them
up to a higher synthesis, to create a landscape wide
enough and rich enough for all the varied experiences
of the spiritual life. The solemn awe with which
we abase ourselves before, the numen is here softened
and humanized by the humble and loving response
of human nature in its totality to the Divine Nature
incarnate in Christ, and there disclosing on the
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narrow stage of history the ultimate mystery of
redeeming love. And this outward gaze of faith is
saved from a mere hopeless contemplation of the
Other and the Perfect by the veritable experience
of a Spirit of Love and Will already working
'in
closest penetration and stimulation of our own';
a source of energy, and also a personal influence.
So here we have three experiences or revelations of
God-Spirit, each compensating and enriching the
rest. And while every Godward tending soul will
perhaps combine them in a different manner, and
for none will their outlines be quite clear and neat,
there is no healthy life of the spirit in which some
response to each facet of this threefold revelation is
not found.
So by the Christian doctrine of the Spirit we mean
God Himself in His holy reality and love, in so far
as these can be known to us: the utter distinctness
of His Eternal Being, yet His intimate cherishing
care for His whole creation. We do not mean some
immaterial energy, the soul of an evolving universe.
We mean a substantial Reality, which is there first
in its absolute perfection and living plenitude;
which transcends yet penetrates our world, our
activity, our souls, and draws its transforming
power from the fact that it is already perfect.
'Holy'
Spirit, transcendent and dynamic, is at
once other than our own spirits, other than the
'spirit of nature'; yet felt and known, in its ecstasy
of divine generosity, in all the splendours of creation.
And because truly living, personal, free, it is most
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sharply and personally known, most deeply operative,
in the secret intercourse and discipline of the
interior life of man. That Spirit infinitely exceeds
while it informs the created; not merely in degree,
but also in kind. Even the most feeble and fleeting
religious experience is enough to assure us of that.
It is not subject to the conditions of the striving
evolutionary process, but free and distinct; and
therefore able to intervene, pour out dowers of life
and light, and reveal actual but unguessed levels of
reality beyond the finite structure of the natural
world.
Thus the twin names of
'Spirit' and 'Heavenly
Father' do give us a sort of picture, imperfect but
suggestive, of a Reality which satisfies our metaphysical
cravings and is known in the fundamental
experience of praying souls. First, the certitude
of a most rich and living Fact, yet quite invisible
and unearthly; a region of Spirit truly here, and
already found in our first steps over the threshold
of the sensible, yet stretching away to the unsearchable
depths of the Divine life. And next, the
penetrating and cherishing character of that World
and Presence; so that the impact of its life upon
us is also the impact of its love. This double sense
of God so near and all-penetrating, so steady in
His pressure of the soul towards generosity, purity,
nobleness, and yet so far away in His achieved
perfection of that same generosity, purity and noblenessthis
is the very heart of human religion.
And as we hold these two facts together in medita-
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tion—that boundless Reality, in its delightfulness
and wonder, this intimate, heart-piercing care—our
own world shrinks, the world of daily life and even
the greater world of religion; and we know that it
only has significance as the theatre of that ceaseless
and many-levelled Divine Act. Then, penetrating
all those finite facts, both physical and psychological,
which make up the environment and conditioning
character of our life, we know an Infinite Fact,
personal and creative, whose moulding pressure and
demands reach us through and in that finite environment
to which our natural lives are tuned. For if
the lovely natural scene is like a great fresco where
we see the breadth and splendour of the thought, of
God, the soul is like a little bit of ivory, on which
the same Artist works with an intimate and detailed
love.
Such a doctrine of the holy, living Spirit's moulding
action can never be translated into the terms of
'emergent evolution' or other process: because it
is of the essence of Christian philosophy, endorsed
by Christian experience, to hold that Spirit is there
first.
'With thee is the well of life'—the prime
originating cause. Therefore, while Christian philosophy
can in a general sense accept and spiritualize
the evolutionary account of natural process, it cannot
accept as complete the evolutionary account of
cause. Beyond and within the natural, it requires
the supernatural; if all that has been revealed to
it is to be expressed. And even the wholly natural,
seen in spiritual regard, reveals in ever-deepening
page 31
degrees a quality which points beyond itself. Thus
Gerard Hopkins:
'The World is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed ...
. . .
Nature is never spent ;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things ;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright
wings.'
The warm breast, fount of creative and cherishing
life, is turned earthwards : the bright wings, spread
out upon another, a transcendent, free, and perfect
order of existence, reflect the radiance of Eternity.
Surely a wonderful image of the Divine double
action, and the Divine double love.
