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THERE
is a type of sacred picture, very
popular in the period of the Counter-
Reformation, which shows a saint ascending
to the foot of the Cross; and the Crucified
stooping to His servant and by one arm drawing
him to union with Himself. It is a symbolic representation
of the Anima Christi; that double movement
of desire and grace, which is the formula of
the spiritual life. The steps on which the saint
ascends to that share in the divine self-giving which
is the fulfilment of joy, are variously regarded.
St. Francis stands secure on the great unriven
rock of perfect charity, and finds that he can reach
his Master there. St. Ignatius climbs more gradually,
by the successive steps of obedience, patience,
humility and love. But it is the same arduous
ascent and the same attainment, whatever the
path which is taken by the soul. The Christian
mystic conceives this pictorially, as a share in the
Cross: the entry of the human spirit into the
redemptive order of the Holy, achieved partly by
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its own deliberate upward struggle and partly by
the generous stooping down of the Divine. And
these two movements of created and Creative love
are the causes of that double purification at once
active and passive which is the condition of the
soul's entry into, and persistence in, the spiritual
life.
'Set love in order, thou that lovest Me.'
And this setting in order of our undisciplined desires,
this hard climb-up from the instinctive life of
'nature' to the transformed life of
'grace', could
never be undertaken without a certain humble
self-revelation of the Perfect, attracting to Itself
our adoring love and awakening our sense of imperfection
and our zest. All the apparatus of religion
is meant to make us accessible to that revelation,
and stimulate our response: in other words, to
awaken and feed our charity.
'A man', says Ruysbroeck,
'should always, in
all his works, stretch towards God with love;
Whom, above all things, he aims at and loves.'
But this requires the drastic elimination of all those
desires and repulsions which side-track the will, and
conflict with the total inclination of our personality
towards God; and the deliberate direction of the
great drive of our nature—its love and will, its
passions and energies—to that supreme attraction
and demand. Only thus can we achieve that
entire fulfilment of the First Commandment which
is the substance of a life of prayer.
'A soul
enslaved by anything less than God', says St. John
of the Cross,
'becomes by this fact incapable of
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union with Him.' Though the life of the senses
may seem the most obvious sphere of disorder, it
is at a deeper level that the real purgation of selflove
must take place. The soul, our total invisible
being with a range of experience and possibility
stretching from a total response to the world of the
senses to a total concentration on intellectual or
spiritual good is required to withdraw from its
unreal correspondences, turn its emotional drive
in a new direction, and subordinate its sacred
powers of knowing and of loving to the overruling
claim and invitation of Reality. All pouring out
of will and desire towards lesser objects, unless
Spirit remains the ultimate aim, breaks up the
unity of the soul's life and wastes its powers. This
stern truth, indeed, rules all levels of our existence;
and requires of us the normal restraints of common
sense, as well as the absolute self-stripping of
sanctity.
Too often, the passive and active aspects of the
one living and mysterious process of purification
the deep action of Spirit on spirit, at once attracting,
penetrating and abasing us, and our deliberate
costly effort of self-conquest and response- are
treated as if they were distinct. But in reality
they cannot be divided. Within the soul's actual
life, it is impossible to separate with a sure hand
the work of God from that of the surrendered will;
whether in mortification or in prayer. It is true
that the self's own action at first appears most
vigorous and obvious, and then may seem to fade
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away. But this appearance is deceptive. From
the very beginning, the active and passive adjustments
of the spirit to the ever-deepening demands
of the Holy go on simultaneously. The immanent
Power works ceaselessly on the half-made creature ;
yet always by way of an incitement, a secret
revision of standards, a stirring of love, which by
turns attracts and shames us and calls forth our
full power of response.
We are apt to think of
'mortification' as a
codified moral discipline, imposed from without on
the soul; whereas it really arises from the very
character of the spiritual life, and is above all an
evidence of growth. It is the name of those
inevitable changes which the psyche must undergo,
in the transfer of interest from self to God. Active
purification represents the simple effort of our
embryonic faith, hope and charity—three aspects
and expressions of one state, or tendency to God,
as realized by understanding will and heart—to
capture and rule the house of the soul, and vanquish
all hostile powers. Passive purification is best
understood as a part of the Spirit's general creative
action on us; given through circumstances and
interior movements, and felt specially in the
pressure of His demands on our innate self-will and
self-love.
'It is one and the same flame of love',
says St. John of the Cross,
'which will one day
unite itself to the soul to glorify it, and which now
invades it to purify it.' And whilst our own ascetic
action, and a conviction of its reality and impor-
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tance, is essential to our spiritual health, it is through
this penetrating and rectifying action of Spirit, moving all things to their appointed end, and in
all its operations gratefully received by us, that the
real transformation of the soul is worked.
Lava quod est sordidum,
Riga quod est aridum,
Sana quod est saucium.
Flecte quod est rigidum,
Fove quod est frigidum,
Rege quod est devium.
We must think of the pressure and penetration
of God, on and through His many-levelled living
Universe, as steady and continuous. This discovery
of the ceaseless Divine action, perhaps the most
crucial experience of life, is the clue to the
mysterious facts of purification and prayer. Once
recognized and trusted, it emancipates us from
all slavery to particular methods and guides. We
now realize ourselves to be directly moved and led
by Spirit; always equally sanctifying, whether its
cleansing action reach us by outward events, duty,
suffering, mental life, or prayer. We, at each point,
are more or less susceptible to that purifying action,
according to the way in which we use our limited
freedom; our capacity for docility, effort, suffering
and love. This susceptibility will normally be
manifested in our response to the stimulus of
events ; and more profoundly, in the movements
of the soul in prayer. The bracing, bending,
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softening and reordering which the alertly loving
spirit then desires and asks, are commonly given
to it through the homely frictions and demands of
daily life; sweetened and sanctified, because
through and in them are discerned the personal
touch and Presence of the Spirit, Who alone knows
the path of every creature and is for that creature
at once Way, Truth and Life.
So it is, that there is no parity whatever between
the intensity of those external, or even internal
trials which discipline us, and their purifying
result. The dripping tap or barking dog which
teaches patience is as much an instrument of God
as the shattering blow which tears two souls apart.
A soul in the sphere of purification may receive
the maximum of suffering—and, if abandoned to
God, the maximum of cleansing—through an apparently
inadequate event; if the response which that
event demands be of such a nature as to mortify
the root of self-regard. Even the outward incidents
of the Passion were not proportioned to the dread
suffering and victory of which they were the proximate
cause. One and the same event may be
charged for this soul with the purifying call to an
utter self-abandonment; and merely incite that
soul to a sterile resentment. The cleansing and
transforming power of suffering abides not in the
degree of pain experienced, but in the degree of
acceptance achieved; the Fiat voluntas tua with
which the soul meets the action of God-Spirit in
and through events.
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Thus we see that the common notion of the
'purgative way' as merely the equivalent of moral
self-conquest, is not adequate to the deep facts of
the spiritual life. Though it is true that the
opening phase of that life will commonly involve
direct conflict with obvious faults, the real purification
of the soul is not an unpleasant experience
of limited duration—a drastic supernatural' cure'—to which we must submit ourselves in order to
be
'disinfected of egoism', and released from the
tyranny of the instinctive life. Those who prefer
the neatness of the museum label to the disconcerting
actuality of the living soul, always tend to
describe as successive experiences which are really
simultaneous; and sometimes they become the
dupes of their own tidiness. They like to arrange
the inner life in a series of stages, each to be completed
and left behind. But this convenient
diagram has only a symbolic relation to the real facts. That strange necessity of love which we
know and experience within the time-series as
'purification', is really an effect of the eternal
action of the Divine Charity; reaching and touching
our souls through events. That touch and
action must mean suffering, till our disharmony
with God is done away; but takes an ever more
subtle and interior form as our life develops, and
its centre of interest passes from the sensible to
the intellectual, and at last to the spiritual
sphere. Thus the purifying demand seems to us
to proceed step by step with the growth of that
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life; till the whole of the intellectual and spiritual
being, no less than the instinctive nature, is
simplified, cleansed of self-interest, and transformed
in God.
Moreover, as the growing spirit comes to realize
this process as an essential and permanent strand
in its true life, so its own acts of humble and
loving correspondence, its secret renunciations and
faithful acceptance, will grow in purity and depth.
Then the very discipline of purification becomes a
means of communion, and deepens into prayer;
more and more laying open the soul to the flood
of the Spirit's unmeasured life. For the purifying
worth of prayer consists in the increasing contrast
which it sets up between the holy God and the
creature; subordinating that creature's fugitive
activities and desires to the standard set by this
solemn apprehension of Reality. Hence in practice,
prayer or attention to God, and purification
or self-adjustment to and with Him, must
proceed together. Prayer tends directly to God;
mortification removes the de-ordination of desire,
and concentrates our will and love on Him
alone. These are the two completing aspects
of one undivided life; and if we think of them
separately, it is merely for the sake of convenience.
This twofold progress, to and in God, is what St.
John of the Cross means by the 'ascent of Mount
Carmel'. And Mount Carmel is like one of those
mountains which have many summits; so that each
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time we think we have reached our limit, we see a
new height beyond us, more beautiful and more
absolute in its demand; and again the glimmering
Presence, the same yet ever-changing, beckons us
on. Two by-paths accompany and constantly
entice the mountaineer. One offers the natural
life in all its fullness and charm; the other offers
spiritual consolations and experiences. Both are
to be avoided by the instructed climber: for at
best they lead to the pleasant lower pastures of
faith. The ascent to which he has been called is
to the unseen summits of the Spirit; and that
means the narrow way, the rock, the rope, the
guide, and such a denudation of all preference and
comfort, all softness, unreality and excess, as leaves
him at last capable of giving all that Spirit asks,
and receiving all that Spirit gives.
First the field of normal consciousness and conduct,
where the 'I'
lives in contact with the world
of sense, and under the constant stimulus of desire,
must be submitted to the purifying power; reordered
in accordance with the standards of reality.
Next the intellectual region, where the mind is
always at work analysing and interpreting, must
subordinate the separate findings of reason to the
overwhelming certitudes of faith; and the psychic
world of memory and imagination in which so
much of our waking life is passed, must disclose
its fugitive and approximate character over against
God. Last, the will, the principle of action, and
the very expression of our personal love and life,
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is to be cleansed of self-interest by the action of
Divine Love; that the whole unified being
'reformed'
in faith, hope and charity, may tend to
its one objective, the incomprehensible Being of
God.
