IF
the first term of our inquiry,
'God is Spirit',
requires of us the most awestruck and unearthly
conception of God, and opens the door to the
fullest supernaturalism, the second term,
'Heavenly
Father', is found to bring Spirit within reach of
sense; the spaceless into space. It qualifies the
dreadful vision of the numinous by the soul's own
experience of ultimate dependence on a creative and
cherishing power. It guarantees the inexhaustibly
deep and mysterious doctrines of Providence and
Divine Love—those dearest treasures of faith. It
opens the door alike to mystical and to sacramental
religion: the humble self-giving of God Present
along the tortuous paths of the created mind, and
through the consecration of homely created things.
'It is clear', says St. John of the Cross,
'that
God, in order to set a soul in movement, and raise
it from one extreme, the abjection of the creature,
to the opposite extreme, that is to the infinite height
of the divine union, must act gradually, gently, and
in accordance with the nature of the soul. Now
the ordinary mode of knowledge proper to the soul
requires the use of the forms and images of created
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things; for we can know and savour nothing without
the stimulation of the senses. Hence God, to
raise the soul to supreme knowledge and do it with
gentleness, must begin to touch her in her lowest
extremity, that of the senses, in order to raise her
gradually and in accordance with her proper nature
to her other extremity—that spiritual wisdom which
is independent of the senses. . . . God works man's
perfection according to man's nature. He begins
with that which is lowest and most external, and
ends with that which is highest and most interior.'
In this great passage St. John is speaking of a
far richer, more precise and more penetrating disclosure
of Spirit, than that general discovery of
God in Nature which is sometimes gratified with
the name of Nature Mysticism. He is laying down
a principle, at once metaphysical and psychological,
by means of which we may hope to reduce to some
kind of order the tangled witness of
'religious experience'; and sift out the facts which its phantasies
veil and reveal. For now, having abandoned
all demand for a clear-cut definition of the word
'
Spirit ', and accepted instead its concrete and
mysterious presence and our own fragmentary, uneven
experience and response, we are brought to a
further problem How has man, a sense-conditioned
creature committed to succession, come to be aware
of this supersensual and unchanging Reality? And
we have already replied that this knowledge comes
not by our own explorations but by the prevenient
action and incitement of God-Spirit, by the entry
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of the Spaceless into space—in a broad sense, by
revelation. Reality must stir and touch its halfmade
creature, before it can be desired. God must
reach in to us, before we can reach out to Him.
And St. John's doctrine gives us the path which
we may expect that revelation to take.
In order to move the human soul with gentleness,
Spirit makes Its approach, in a way at once majestic
and humble, through the ' forms and images
'
of
that sensible world to which we are adjusted and
in which we are bathed. These forms, these
creatures—just because they possess their own
finite independence and reality, because they are
true creations and not dreams—are capable of carrying
the reality of the Infinite; providing, as it were,
points of insertion for the self-giving energies of the
all-enfolding supernatural world. Without some
admixture of sense, like dust in sunny air, we are,
says St. John again, almost incapable of perceiving
the spiritual light. And were it not for this stooping
down of the Infinite to the finite, this mingling of
Spirit with sense, the direct impact of the Absolute
might well shatter us.
'It is a dreadful thing to
fall into the hands of the Living God.' Those veils
and obscurities at which we sometimes cavil are the
garments of mercy upon the Spirit of Holiness.
Looking with reverence on the human scene, and
seeking to realize our situation, conditioned by the
senses and yet susceptible to the deep currents of the
spiritual world, we begin to perceive how wide is
the field within which this principle of Spirit's
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penetration of our spirits by way of the objects of
sense can interpret our baffling glimpses and experiences
of Reality. In the light of this principle, it is
easy to recognize in the most deeply valued practices
and hallowed objects of organized religion, points of
insertion through which the quickening action of the
Spirit can reach the faithful and receptive soul.
And though this may not 'explain' the mysterious
communications we call sacramental grace, at least
we obtain a formula within which to place them.
As a vast area of supernatural truth, still unexhausted
by us, is condensed, focused, and flooded
upon the natural world through the person of Christ—so, limited incarnations of Spirit take place
through the symbolic and sacramental acts of
religion. Récéjac's definition of mysticism as 'the
tendency to approach the Absolute morally and by
means of symbols' told only half the truth. It is
also through and in symbols, bridging the chasm
between sense and spirit, that the Absolute—without
any reduction of an utter transcendence and otherness—makes Its merciful approach to the spirit of
man, 'When that supernatural Light of which
we speak', says St. John of the Cross, 'enters the
soul in its simple purity, independent of all those
intelligible things which are proportioned to our
understanding, the understanding is not irradiated
and sees nothing.' Hence the wise tenacity with
which historical Christianity has clung to liturgic
and sacramental embodiments of the Holy, and surrounded
them with mystery and awe, is justified.
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Hence too the inevitable impoverishment which
follows their neglect or repudiation. How tiny,
even at the best, these points of insertion must be,
and how limited the communication in comparison
with the Reality conveyed, will be apparent to all
in whom arrogance has not reached the dimensions
of disease. For they are adapted to the narrow
capacity of the creature; and the communication
received, though its substance be always whole and
unchanging, will vary in its richness according to
the heart to which it comes.
Christians must regard the historical Incarnation
as the greatest of all such insertions of Spirit into
history; and the transfigured lives of the Saints as
guaranteeing its continuance in the world. Jesus
Himself is
'incarnate by the Spirit': a metaphysical
truth to which we sometimes fail to give full weight,
for indeed there lies behind it the full pressure of the
supernatural world. In His earthly life we see
Spirit's action, in and through a human personality
entirely God-possessed; the Absolute Life mingled
with the sensible and contingent, and only in rare
moments revealing Its presence and power. We see
the rich and inexhaustible significance of actions
and events which might never, without this relationship,
have emerged from the flux of use and wont;
but, seized upon as the stuff of revelation, now glow
and deepen like an opal, which rewards our steadfast
contemplation with new colour and new light.
'God the incomprehensible makes Himself comprehensible
in this humanity,' says Berulle,
' God the
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ineffable becomes audible in the voice of His Word
incarnate, and God the invisible is seen, in the flesh which He has united with the very nature of His
Eternity.'
And thus, the lowly birth, the call and preaching
of a local prophet, His communion with God and
compassionate ministry among men, His conflicts
with ecclesiastical authority, each detail of His
betrayal and death—all this historical material,
which is the substance of the plain narratives of the
Synoptics, is lifted to a fresh order of significance.
The events of Christ's life are well named 'mysteries'
for their meaning transcends the historical accidents
and occasions which condition their outward form,
and has an immortal relation with the interior life
of men. There is a mounting revelation of the
Spirit, in and through this uttered Thought, the
incarnate Word. The point of insertion has behind
it the wealth and pressure of the Infinite Life. So
we should not accept the fragmentary narratives and
simple insights of the New Testament writers as
telling all the truth; or reject as unhistorical the
discoveries and interpretations of the saints. Centuries
of meditation have widened and deepened the
channel of revelation. The procession of the Spirit
takes place in the Eternal order; and through
Bethlehem and Calvary, Hermon and the Upper
Room, a wealth of life and light which is not yet
exhausted comes to wide-open, self-oblivious souls.
'All these events', says Berulle, 'took place in
certain circumstances ; but they endure, and are
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become present and perpetual, in another manner.
They are past as regards their execution, but they
are present as regards their power . . . the Spirit
of God, whereby the Mystery was worked, is the
abiding fact of which it is the outer vesture. His
efficacy and power make the mystery operative in
us, and He is ever living, actual, and present in it.
This compels us to treat the things and mysteries
of the Gospel, not as things past and dead, but as
things living and present, and even eternal, from
which we also must gather a present and eternal
fruit.'
The principle here laid down—one aspect of that
great law of the creative penetration of Spirit into
sense on which all Christian philosophy is built—operates over the whole of the historical and institutional
material of religion; indeed, over its literary
and artistic material as well. All this, used with
simplicity and meekness, can become the medium
of spiritual communications which may far transcend
the insights or intentions of those by whom it was
first devised. The simplest facts of historical
religion, or the commonplaces of devotional literature,
subject to the penetrative action of Spirit, can
thus acquire a transcendental reference ; and enter
the sacramental economy. Not merely the common
experience of a constant new discovery of deep
meaning in familiar acts and words, but that large
range of phenomena which we are inclined to set
aside because of their comparative rarity, fall under
the general method by which, as St. John says, God
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'sets a soul in movement' towards that centre which
is Himself. Here we get a clue and can give a
meaning to those 'openings' as the Quakers so
excellently called them, well known to all who are
accustomed to the meditative reading of Scripture
and other spiritual books; when our 'condition'
is directly met by way of words long familiar, but
now suddenly lit up from within, transformed and
enriched by the living Spirit which enters through
this loophole our closely-shuttered minds. In such
moments, a real communication of the Infinite to
the finite takes place.
' There is in books', said
the Divine voice to Thomas à Kempis,
'one voice
and one letter that is read, but it informeth not all
alike. For I am within secretly hidden in the letter,
the Teacher of truth, the Searcher of man's heart.'
Few persons possessed of religious sensitiveness
pass through life without experiencing such abrupt
illuminations; which, transcending any psychological
explanation, must be reckoned—however
little we understand them—among the mysterious
facts of the spiritual life. And it is, I think, by
an extension of this same principle that we arrive
at the interpretation of the more abnormal forms
of religious experience. All those psychic automatisms
which are loosely described as
'mystical
phenomena voices, visions, the 'sense of Presence', the profound monoideism of the contemplative
are certainly susceptible of psychological
explanation; and may witness to nothing more
than the vigour of the subject's own fantasy-life.
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But this does not invalidate them as possible points
of insertion, through which Spirit acts on the soul.
It is easy enough to adopt the lowest possible explanation
of observed events; but when these events are placed in their context, the inadequacy of this
proceeding becomes plain. The significant fact is
not that certain types of religious hallucination
occur; but that they can and sometimes do mediate
the Transcendent. Thus any one who is inclined
to mystical audition, even in the slight degree which
precludes real hallucination, will recognize two facts.
First, the immense authority that is felt to inhere in
the message; which is always abrupt and unexpected,
and comes charged with a weight of significance
out of all proportion to the simplicity of its
form. Secondly, the close union between this
entirely spiritual communication and the verbal
formula in which it is received; and which ever
afterwards carries a certain sacramental reference.
There seems to be a difference of degree, rather than
of kind, between such an experience as this and the
apparent reception of an other-worldly truth and
light by Scripture
'openings'. When St. Francis,
in absorbed contemplation of the Crucifix, heard the
words 'Repair My Church', we may surely believe
that here the guiding energy of Spirit touched and
moved him, even though the form of the communication
was supplied by his own sensory memories.
But was this message more supernatural than that
which he received when he sought to verify the
vocation of Bernard of Quintavalle by the opening
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of the Missal, and there found an equally clear command? Both are impressive examples of the
apparent action of Spirit in and through the channels
of sense: a judgement that is supported by the series
of events which they set in movement. They only
differ by the fact that in the first case the sensory
medium is provided by the experient's own mind;
while in the second it has objective existence.
And the same gradation can surely be observed
in those apprehensions which use the machinery of
sight. The glimmering Presence, deeply felt and
almost seen, may be caught and held in the mesh
of a pictured thought: whilst on the other hand,
the sacred act or object which conveys
'otherness'
cannot be distinguished in principle from the image
which is projected from the mind of the visionary
to become a focus of transcendental feeling. Sometimes
indeed the actual distinction between the
contributions of Spirit and of sense becomes very
thin; and we realize how slight is its importance for
us. Thus for St. Gregory or St. Thomas saying Mass,
the material veil becomes transparent; and within
and beyond it they gaze entranced on the eternal
Act, perceived under an image which is either
visualized or apprehended without sight. And this
double experience of the fusion of outward act and
inward revelation is surely a typical instance of that
general method, by which Spirit moves and teaches
spirit:
'working man's perfection according to
man's nature'
through the machinery of sense.
Here the soul trembles on the edge of something
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it can never formulate. Sacred acts and phrases
become charged with a supersensual light, in which
at last they are lost. But it is because the act and
the phrase have become condensers of the mysterious
energy of Spirit, that the soul achieves by their help
the subsequent transcendence of all apparent form.
Nor need the poor quality of the condenser affect
the experience it mediates. God-Spirit, Who is the
indwelling principle of the outward mystery, acts
through the form and image ; subduing to His purpose
the adequate and the inadequate alike. The
hymn which the highbrow rejects may yet become a
channel of adoration ; and celestial love be recognized
through the most deplorable efforts of religious
art. The poorest picture, the crudest aspiration,
then as it were becomes flood-lit from within;
charged with an unspeakable holiness. The sick
man gazing hour after hour at and through a badly
modelled Crucifix, and thus entering ever more
deeply into the mystery of love and pain, has an
experience of Spirit denied to the exquisite taste
which rejects all images except the very best. The
insistence of all contemplatives on a secret Divine
teacher as Bremond puts it,
'the fundamental
and exclusively divine experience from which all
else radiates'
helps us to a fuller understanding of
all that is implied in this, and teaches us the justice
of Bérulle's observation:
'Who would hold anything
mean where all is so great, and where each
thing, however small it may be, yet touches so
closely Divinity Itself?'
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Nor does the origin, first meaning, or historic
sanction of the conveying image matter very much.
Those Psalms in which the soul finds mirrored its
own intense experience, bore a wholly different
meaning sometimes more barbarous than religious
for those who used them first. Humble tunnelling
will discover beneath the most unpromising landscape
the spiritual gold. Many a dubious devotion
has contributed to the formation of a saint. Our
fastidious discriminations fade to insignificance
before the overwhelming majesty of that generous
Life and Love, which enters by these narrow portals
the sense-conditioned life of men.
O Lux beatissima,
Reple cordis intima
Tuorum fidelium.
Sine tuo numine,
Nihil est in homine,
Nihil est innoxium.
What is the human creature, that it should make its
little terms, either logical or aesthetic, in a bargain
so wholly one-sided as this ?
