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'LOVE', says St. John of the Cross,
'is an inclination of the soul: an outgoing force
or faculty, which makes it capable of
ascending towards God.' Its true nature is not
touched by any description which stresses its
emotional quality. It is the whole thrust and drive
of a conscious selfhood towards a desired object and
end. Love then, says St. John again,
'is the
medium which unites the soul to God. Thus love
is the substance of a spiritual life. The higher the
soul mounts in the degrees of love, the more profoundly
she enters into God and identifies herself
with Him. So, each stage in the soul's growth in
love represents a fresh centre, each more interior
than the last, wherein she can dwell in God. It is
thus we can interpret the words "In my Father's
house are many mansions"
in their relation to the
life of prayer'.
Hence, the soul which is fully given to the spiritual
life, whatever her stage of growth and liability to
fluctuation, has contracted as it were a 'habitude
of love'. God has become for her the business of
businesses; the focus of interest. She possesses
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at least in germ a permanent disposition or inclination,
away from self-interest and towards self-abandonment
to Him; an inclination which is comparable
to the moral man's inclination to right
conduct, or the artist's inclination to creativity.
No one of these types is fully harmonized or fully
alive, save when conformed to the demands of the
ruling habitus. Nor does the Christian know that
active peace which is the cause of happiness, until
he is surrendered to that habitude of love, which
constitutes in its perfection the supernatural charity
of saints. For this habitude of love, the secret
spring of all real prayer, is the same thing as that
'
recollection
'
of which contemplatives speak as the
temper of their whole existence and implied basis
of their art.
'
'If', says Osuna,
'we accustomed ourselves to
turn with intense love directly to the Divinity,
attending to nothing else, and regulating our likings
wisely, our love would penetrate all else until it
reached Him, turning neither to the right nor to
the left . . . this is true recollection, for the powers
of the soul collect together and help one another,
so that they may devote themselves unwearyingly
to the work.' Such recollected love places the soul
at the disposal of the 'rapting Spirit', directs its whole will along one channel; subordinates its
being, wide-open and desirous, to the transforming
penetration of the supernatural life, the golden
shower. All the apparatus of devotion, in so far
as it concerns the nurture of the individual spirit
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tends to increase in it this habitude of humble self-abandoned
love—'the affectionate and orderly
direction of the will to the supreme Good', says
Osuna again,
'so that the whole heart and feelings
rush towards Him more swiftly than a stone descends
to the centre of the earth'. And growth in the
spiritual life is perhaps best measured by the degree
in which it opens up human personality to this all-penetrating
divine action, places the created spirit
more and more at the disposal of the Immanent
Spirit; so that the self's separate activity is more
and more absorbed, transfused and possessed by
God. And this is surely what we must expect, if
the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit—the indwelling
of the creature by the Godhead, under Its
attribute of purposive love—be true.
The mind and soul of a mature man of prayer
has simplified its gaze, and deepened and broadened
its correspondences with Reality; and the result
is seen in a peculiar confidence in the universe, a
profound and peaceful acceptance of experience in
its wholeness, and not only in purely religious
regard. Such a soul—though it may and commonly
does remain inarticulate as regards its deepest
findings—is aware of the mysterious movements and
pressures of the Spirit, and knows existence in a
way others do not. Because of its humble and disciplined
communion with that immanent Spirit, it
has achieved a flexibility which can move to and
fro between the inward and the outward finding
in both in the most actual sense, and ever more
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and more in proportion to its self-abandonment,
the presence of a living, acting God. It is this
loving discernment of Reality through and in
prayer, this ever-expanding experience of God,
which is meant by the phrase
'mystical theology'
as employed by the great Christian masters of the
spiritual life. For the treasure of God is not what
we call
'simple'; given, and possessed by the soul,
in a single act. There is a new gift, and a new
revelation of reality each time the soul reaches a
new centre of love. Yet each new centre seems to
that loving soul to possess an ultimate quality:
to be the fruition of all it is able to desire and
receive.
And the transforming Divine influence, quickening
and moulding the surrendered spirit, gradually produces
within it certain characters which already
belong to the transcendent order, and shall enable
it for the living of the spiritual life. When theology
speaks, in its special language, of the 'gifts' of the
Spirit, as the essential marks of the spiritual man,
the reference seems to be to the emergence of these
peculiar qualities in those in whom there is established
the habitude of other-worldly love. They
are qualities so alien to the normal temper of the
sense-conditioned creature, that they seem indeed
to be gifts infused from another level of reality;
involving correspondence with another kind of life.
Da tuis fidelibus,
In te confidentibus,
Sacrum septenarium
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With the soul's growth in docility and in courage,
the enlargement of its interior life, the increase of
its sensitiveness, its faithful submission to the
cleansing power of events, it becomes ever more
capable of receiving from the supernatural order
these characters; enduing with the quality and
colour of eternity the daily life of men. Every
time a fresh centre is reached in that gradual
journey to the depths of loving self-abasement,
which is the only safe pathway to the heights of
the Divine, a fresh emission of these transforming
characters into the soul takes place and must take
place: enhancing its delighted adoration, its
devotedness, its strength, its supernatural lights.
For growth in the spiritual life consists solely in an
increase of God and decrease of self; becoming at
its term a pure capacity for Him. Therefore the
inflow of the 'gifts', the qualities of the supernatural
life, keeps pace with the soul's increase in
love. For God in His substantial Being indwells
from the first her very substance, and the pressure
of His Thought and Love will penetrate and transform
her, in proportion to the active and loving
abandonment, the self-forgetful willingness to suffer,
which opens up her most secret recesses to His fire
and light: the humble and desirous courage with
which she says
'Come!'
We observe that these gifts those ingredients of
the spiritual creature, which shall make it like to
God are, as disclosed by their action on the psyche,
quiet and steady things. They work in it a deepen-
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ing and enrichment which are marked, not by any
violent and emotional reactions, not by abnormal
experiences, but by an increase in awe and devotedness
; in knowledge, wisdom, insight, strength.
They do not come to destroy human nature, but to
fulfil it ; lifting it to fresh levels of reality and power.
And this is achieved not by the abrupt insertion
of the unnatural ; but by the touch of a transforming
grace on the natural. So humbly is the hand
of God subdued to the material in which He works.
Fear of the Lord, Awe, that initial step in religious
realism which puts the imperfect spirit into right
relation with the Transcendent Perfect: this, the
first gift of the Spirit, is in truth the sublimation
and direction to God of man's creaturely sense. To
know our own place over against the Holy, the
utter contrast between the beauty of the Perfect and
our natural state, our dependence and our nothingness
before God, is the beginning of that Wisdom which
shall be perfected on the heights of the contemplative
life. For the first daunting revelation of Spirit, as
wholly other than anything the creature can conceive
or understand, kills at their root all the amiable
sentimentalisms and shallow rationalisms of this-world
religion; and prepares the ground in which
the supernatural virtue of humility, the very, stuff
of holiness, can grow. '. . . The Presence of God ',
says Huvelin, 'is proved by the confusion of the
creature; and by the desire that she has, tiny though
she be, to do something for Him who has done all.'
Thus the soul's most perfect prayer, over against
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that Absolute, is always Nescevi! nescevi! It is
not the sinner but the saint, whose eyes have been
opened on the world of spirit, who really knows
himself 'carnal, sold under sin'. He has received
the primal gift of Fear; and in the light of the
Eternal sees things as they are, and the nothingness
of all man's theological constructions and spiritual
experiences over against the splendour of God.
Here the deepest abasement and most delighted
adoration are one.
And this habitude of awe, this creaturely sense,
is balanced and completed by the beautiful temper
of Piety; the darling grace of the religious soul,
the expression of its perfect filial relationship, the
transformation of our tender emotion in God.
'Pono pietas cultus Dei est, nee colitus ille nisi
amando', says St. Augustine. If awe be the soul's
natural gesture over against the unmeasured majesty
of Spirit, the solemn stillness of Eternity, Piety
represents its childlike affection; its delighted
recognition of the fatherhood of the God whom it
adores. Ruysbroeck, in his account of the '
gifts
'
which transform the Godward-tending spirit, says
that Piety gives to us a steadfast gentleness of heart.
It means the docile acceptance and loyal application
of the family point of view. So does the human
spirit achieve a small share in the immense charity
of God, poured out upon just and unjust, and an
affectionate subordination to His purposes ; thus
becoming more full of the Divine life-giving life,
and more like God, as it broadens and deepens in
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self-spending love. So the habitude of awe and
the habitude of pietas expand the growing spirit in
two directions ; up to God Pure in humblest worship,
and out in loving compassion towards His
self-revelation in men. If total abasement before
the Transcendent Perfect be ever one essential of
man's spiritual life, an actual adoption into the
order of supernatural charity is its completion.
And both must go on increasing; ever more fully
given within the growing soul. Piety is the spirit
in which the Christian gives the cup of cold water,
and so endues altruism with worship and turns it
towards God. These tempers of the soul complete
each other, like the vertical and horizontal arms of the Cross: and since in both spirit tends toward
Spirit, they are infinite in their reach.
Because the awe and filial action of the creature
must constantly come into play, and that within
the concrete and confusing circumstances of life, a
certain road-sense, a knowledge which is of the
Spirit and casts the light of eternity on the problems
of the temporal order, becomes essential to our
spiritual health. For we have somehow to discern
the true way of the Lord from among the tangled
lanes and the arterial highways which run in every
direction or none : must learn to distinguish the
enduring reality from the spiritual sham. This deep
experimental knowledge of the things of God—at
the opposite pole from all notional spirituality, all
religious cleverness—develops and becomes more precise as we seek to apply it. Thus the third
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change worked by creative Spirit in the creature
given to prayer, is a gradual clarification of the
judgement, an opening of the eyes upon Eternity—so that man begins to see the things that really
belong to his blessedness, and separate the solid
food of the spirit from the mere confectionery of
faith.
Yet this enlightening alone—this knowledge of
what to do and what to leave undone—is not enough
for us. When the soul gets to grips with its vocation,
it finds that self-transcendence is a hard and
a heroic job. It is true that much work is done
on and in it; but always by way of a co-operation
with its own effort, which demands the exercise
up to the limit of its courage, endurance and love.
Always, too, in the open under conditions of varying
weather—dark wintry days, dry seasons, gales and
fog. And the calm and selfless steadiness
'deflected
neither by gladness nor by grief', which must now
be produced in us; accepting in tranquillity those
alternations of joy and grief, hope and fear, profit
and loss, good weather and bad, by which the soul is
tempered—this belongs to God and is the answering
gift to a maturing love. The mere habit of fortitude,
the virtue of the hiker, slogging on after the first
freshness is spent—even this essential disposition
will hardly be established without the stimulus and the support of grace: still less, that ghostly strength
which must carry the spirit safely over the most
lonely and terrible stretches of the way. For here
the small, bewildered and half-conscious soul—a
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little scrap of creation, inexplicable to itself
realizes its position among the dim and terrible
mysteries of a universe that goes marching on, hard,
cold, inexorable, unexplained. The valley of the
shadow of spiritual death closes in on it, the conscious
experience of faith is withdrawn. Man the
spiritual creature is hemmed in by the natural;
and cannot for the time escape its iron conditions.
In his tiny way, he shares the blackest experience
of the Cross. That pain and darkness, the whole
mystery of the world's helplessness and sin, stands
ever over against Holiness; its dread pressure is
felt more and more, with the spirit's growth in
purity and love. Thus the strength of the Transcendent
must invade Its creature, if that creature
is to bear the stresses of its great task, and operate
as a tool of the Perfect in the warfare against evil
in the world.
So even from its inception, man's spiritual life
will be coloured by an awe-struck reverence and a
filial love, as turn by turn he gazes out in contemplation
of the Holy Reality, and returns to a humble
but actual co-operation with that Spirit who is
Father and Keeper of his soul. And with the growth
of this habitude of adoration and of tender loyalty,
there grows also a deepening insight, and an otherworldly
strength. The human mind is purged, the
human will is braced, by the tonic energies of love.
These are the 'ordinary'
gifts of Spirit to spirit.
Beyond them lie those three great characters which
form the triple crown of an established holiness.
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That sure intuition of the saints, who have learned
the art of listening to the whisper of the Spirit in
Whom they live, and in Whom all things are one:
who are counselled by God in every circumstance,
never at a loss, because entirely docile to the inner
guidance. That ghostly understanding, undeceived
by appearance, which pierces to the reality of every
situation, shares ever more fully the Divine point
of view, God's wide and loving understanding of
all life. Last, the gift of Wisdom, that 'touch or
stirring of God'
says Ruysbroeck, which is the
very substance of contemplation; tasting Him,
savouring as it were the very flavour of Reality,
and gradually spreading its mysterious influence
over all the activities of the soul.
'God', says
Ruysbroeck again,
'works this spiritual touching
within us first, before all gifts; and yet it is known
and tasted by us last of all. For only when we
have sought God in love in all our practices, even
to the inward deeps of our ground, do we first feel
the inpouring of all the graces and gifts of God.'
These are the gifts, the habitudes, the characters,
with which Infinite Spirit enhances Its finite and
surrendered creature ; expanding, pacifying and
ennobling the narrow and unresting soul, and imparting
to it a character which is deep and calm and
selfless, like a share in a vast life. And all these
are but the exercise or the effect of one love; poured
out in the soul's very ground from Spirit to spirit,
that it may return to Spirit again. For beyond all we can see, feel, think, or bear there ever awaits us
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God, the Fact of all facts, perfect and complete.
And the human soul, subject to succession, not
perfect, not complete, finds its true life and full
power only in an ever-growing surrender to that
rich and living Reality.
