SO
now we turn from these scattered and tentative
thoughts of God, the Absolute Spirit
distinct and all-holy ; standing over against
His human creatures, yet intimately present in
every fibre of the soul. And we enter on a fuller
consideration of our own case.
'My God and all!
What art thou and what am I?'
said St. Francis.
What is man, the derived, created spirit? In what
sense is that mysterious word to be applied to our
strangely compounded human personality?
It is a platitude that man is amphibious, a creature
of the borderland 'set between the unseen and the
seen'. He cannot be explained in physical terms
alone, or spiritual terms alone; but partakes of
both worlds. But, like many other so-called platitudes,
this one conveys a stupendous truth which is
seldom fully realized by us: the truth of our unique
status, our mysterious capacity for God. Man's
relation to the animal world needs no demonstration.
A stroll round the Zoo reveals plenty of disconcerting
family likenesses. A very little introspection dis-
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covers animal instincts, politely disguised, in control
of our normal behaviour. In moments of passion,
the standards of the jungle still make an irresistible
appeal. Physically we rank as a part of that rich
and varied natural order, which is brought forth and
maintained by the Divine Immanence. Yet on the
other hand, we are called to witness to the Divine
Transcendence. There is in us a ground and knowledge
of Eternity, a thirst for ultimates, a penetrating
sense of incompleteness which is the true cause of our
secret unrest; whatever the disguises it may assume.
A certitude, a dim but real experience of another
world and level of life, in contact with our deepest
selves, grows with our interior growth.
'So foolish
was I and ignorant, I was as a beast before Thee;
and yet, I am continually with Thee. Beyond and
within the web of temporal circumstance which
seems to shut us in, is that steadfast brooding
Presence, the Fact of all facts, Who is making us for
Himself. Natural man may be subject to contingency,
metaphysical man is in the Hand of God :
and knowledge of this situation and all it must imply
for us, deepens with our increase in spiritual sensitiveness.
Anchored to this planet, with our obvious
animal affinities and more obvious spiritual obscurities
and limitations, we cannot describe ourselves or
account for our mysterious situation, without recourse
to other-worldly categories. When we penetrate
beyond the sensible, we discover in ourselves
a substantial life which is non-successive, nonextended
; we perceive ourselves to be derived
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spirits, somehow akin to the holy Spirit of all spirits,
God. There is within us at least a crumb, a seed,
which belongs already to the order of the timeless;
yet cannot achieve its destiny, become fully real,
without a gift from beyond itself. And here we
find the basis in experience for all that religion
means by prayer and grace—prayer, the Godward
movement of the soul; and grace, the manward
movement of God's Love.'
'Man', says Lionel Thornton,
'cannot evade the
ultimate conviction that his true home is in the
eternal order; and that his individuality was meant
to reach its fulfilment through the transforming
activity of that order on his life.' And the first
meaning of a spiritual life is, that in it man accepts
this marvellous intercourse as the ruling fact of his
existence. He ceases to give exclusive attention to
the passing, to pour himself out in response to the
invitations of sense, and looks towards this, his true
being on one hand quietly receiving in his ground
the action of God, on the other freely seeking to
conform to the eternal order, instead of to the
natural series alone. No psychology which ignores
this double status and double response of the
unstable psyche, poised between eternity and time,
can give any intelligible explanation of human
action and human desire.
Certainly our conscious hold on this spiritual
heritage is still far less clear and certain than our
hold on our physical heritage. Our powers have
been developed in close contact with the senses, and
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by the pressure of the physical world, with its constant
stimulation of the instinctive life. Clear
correspondence with the other order must be the
prerogative of a minority of souls, acting in the
interests of the race. We may note certain facts,
certain recurrent experiences, though we know little
about them ; and may seek to combine and present
them under images. But we do this, not because we
have any hope of reaching ultimate truth in these
matters, but in order to tell souls how to act. All
descriptions of the spiritual life are thus tentative
and symbolic. They are road maps, not representations
of reality. We move with comparative safety
step by step; but we risk mountain sickness, if we
raise our eyes too often to the awful landscape that
surrounds us.
For our minds are so made that we can only realize
Spirit vaguely and in patches; and only by the
deliberate use of symbolic speech can give precision
to our awareness. When we ascend in prayer to the
soul's summit, we find we have come up to the
frontiers of another life, in respect of which we are
dependent, needy, dumb and dim of sight. Yet this
abjection and this poverty are the very conditions
of our happiness and wealth.
Veni, pater pauperum.
So here Religion is justified in her insistence on the
blessed state of the childlike and the humble: her
constant reminder that what matters supremely is
not our own exact degree of understanding, but the
page 49
hold which the spiritual order has on us, and the
power which flows from it through surrendered and self-oblivious personalities. In other words, in the
great strange work of man's spiritualization the
initiative ever lies with God and His Spirit, not with
us. His priority is absolute. We realize, then, why
the life of the spirit so often begins in a sense of
personal incompleteness, of dependence and need:
and why man's progress in spirituality, his interior
growth, is felt at its deepest far more as a response
to that Spirit's incitement than as a deliberate
ascent to new levels of life. It is, in fact, an opening
of the door of the finite to the Infinite Love, an
increasing surrender to the subtle pressure of that
Power 'which ever lifts and bears us'; not a self-actualized
adventure of the independent will and
heart, a pilgrim's steady progress from 'this world
to that which is to come'.
'Unto Him who is everywhere', says St.
Augustine,
'we come by love and not by navigation.'
Talk of the 'Mystic Way' and its stages, or
the 'degrees of love', may easily deceive us unless
the Divine immanence, priority, and freedom be ever
kept in mind. We may think of the soul's essential
being as ever lying within the thought of God; and,
equally, of His creative love as dwelling and acting
within that soul's ground. These are contrasting
glimpses of that total Truth 'of which no man may
think'. And the true life of the spirit requires such
a gradual self-abandonment to that prevenient and
all-penetrating Presence that we become at last its
page 50
unresisting agents; are formed and shaped under
its gradual pressure, and can receive from moment
to moment the needed impulsions and lights.
Veni, lumen cordium.
Here we find a place for that mysterious attraction
or compulsion which is perhaps the most striking of
the ordinary evidences of the Holy Spirit's action
on souls. The persistent inexplicable pressure
towards one course—the curious attraction to one
special kind of devotion or of service—the blocking of
the obvious path, and the opening of another undesired
path—all these witness to the compelling and
moulding power of the living Spirit; taking, and if
we respond, receiving the gift of our liberty and
our will.
This indeed is what the spiritual life has always
seemed to the greatest, humblest, and most enlightened
souls; whatever symbols they may use in their
efforts to communicate it. It is God, vividly and
intimately present in all things and in us, ever setting
the demand of His achieved Perfection over against
the seething energies of His creative love, Who works
in and through that world of things on us. And He
demands our entire subjection to His creative action,
our endurance of His secret chemistry; that He
may work through and in us on the world. We
matter and our transformation matters, only in so
far as we and it contribute to God's total purpose—the only thing that matters
at all. This is the double
truth which colours and harmonizes all the various
page 51
strands of man's religious life, and finds intimate and
detailed expression in the facts of conversion, vocation,
and guidance. For by this secret action, so
little understood, the fluid and changeable nature of
man, at first conformed to that natural series within
which our lives arise, is gradually subdued to the
purposes of the Unchanging; to become at last a
channel of Absolute Life, an agent of the Creative
Will. The Psalter and the Christian liturgy, in
which so much of that life is crystallized, and
which possess the deep and genuine realism of all
great works of art, are full of allusions to this
absolute dependence; this confident hold on the
Unseen, and its redeeming, cleansing action on the
soul.
'O God make speed to save us. Lord make
haste to help us. ... Prevent us Lord in all our
doings; further us with thy continual help. Raise
up, we pray thee, thy power and come among us
. . . that we may daily be renewed by thy Holy
Spirit . . . that so we may be made partakers of the
divine nature. . . . For with thee is the well of life
and in thy light, we see light;. . Cleanse the
thoughts of our hearts, by the inspiration of thy
Holy Spirit. . . . Without thee we are not able
to please thee. . . . Assist us with thy grace. . . .
what great troubles and adversities hast thou
shewed me! and yet didst thou turn and refresh
me; yea, and broughtest me from the deep of the
earth again.'
In these constantly repeated phrases, once their
page 52
profound realism is understood, we can hear the
authentic voice of the human spirit. Like a recurring
melody, they bind the Divine Office in one;
and make of it the supreme expression of the
Godward confidence of men.
