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THE
notion that the world in which we find
ourselves is really very nice, and that those
impressions of the dread reality and penetrative
power of sin which haunt awakened spirits,
are merely due to ignorance, atavism or ill-adjustment,
is not truly adequate to the facts of our
situation. It has never satisfied mature souls.
The saints, whose whole lives consist in a loyal and
delighted response to God Present, are seldom easygoing
optimists. Their humble steady consciousness
of the reality of Spirit seems to bring a compensating
sense of the real dangers among which we
live; and of great spiritual energies which are hostile
to the attainment of God. Christ never represented
salvation as something to be attained easily. Few,
He thought, find the steep and narrow path which
leads away from the ever-burning rubbish dump,
and towards the austere victory of the Cross.
Many are called, few chosen. Those who seem first,
are often last. This is a strand in His teaching which
we prefer to minimize or forget; but it stares at us
from the Gospels, and is endorsed by the experience
of the soul. The ancient prayer of the Church, for
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the souls of the dead, sums up her consciousness of
those possibilities other than beatitude which always
wait for our unstable human personality, and may
snatch their victory even at the very end: as if,
emerging from bodily life, yet charged with all the
dispositions it had fostered, an awful choice of direction
did really lie before each spirit. Libera eas from
the mouth of the lion, from all the untamed violence
latent in life, the devouring element; that they may
not sink with the decay of nature into the deep lake
of darkness, never to emerge again. Ne absorbeat
eas tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum.
And this choice, this risk, vividly felt in that
decisive moment, recurs at every stage of the interior
life; which is constantly solicited from those two
directions which we roughly distinguish as the
spheres of sense and of spirit, of nature and of grace.
For the soul, as St. Teresa saw, is one and indivisible.
It is the whole invisible reality of our being;
the immaterial self which informs and uses the total
mechanism of body and mind, and by means of
that mechanism responds to the various attractions
and demands of our mixed environment. And the
question for man is, where shall the centre of its
energies be placed? In that vigorous, instinctive
life we share with the animals; which is rooted in
the time-series, and totally concerned with the satisfaction
of desire and the maintaining of our foothold
in the physical world? Or in that 'fine point of the
spirit' which is turned towards God and craves for
God? The problem is not to be solved by the mere
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rejection or repression of
'sensitive nature'; for,
there is no watertight bulkhead between the sensitive
and spiritual levels of the soul. It is an aspect of our
amphibious situation, that one part of our being can
never be purified apart from the other. They flow
into and affect one another. There is no desire
which belongs so entirely to the senses that it leaves
the spirit untouched; whilst in the best and purest
of our supposed
'spiritual'
experiences, there is
always some admixture of sense. Even our final
beatitude is held by Christian theology to depend
somehow on the continued possession of
'body'
as
well as
'soul'.
So our biological inheritance must be the first
matter of purification, because it cannot be left
behind without tearing our very selves in two.
The great energies of
'nature' must be transformed
and brought into line, if human personality is fully
to serve the purposes of
'grace'. Hence the conflict
which is an inevitable part of all spiritual growth.
For the deepest soul, the most interior self, since it
is spirit, must always when awakened say to the
indwelling and enveloping Presence which is creating
it
'Strip me, scourge me, cleanse me, take me and
subdue me to Thy purpose. Lo! I come to do
Thy will.'
Indeed, there is nothing else for it to
do. It achieves its fullest life by an utter self loss:
at these deep levels, where Spirit and spirit meet,
sacrifice and ecstasy are one. When we remember
our real situation, our entire and child-like
dependence on the Spirit of God penetrating and
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supporting us, and the centrality of this relation for
our whole existence : then, the enslavement of will
and emotion to anything that deflects or impairs the
purity of this unceasing correspondence with God,
is seen to cripple our true lives, and twist our souls
out of shape. And the unmortified, unchecked
response of will and feeling to the attraction of any
objective which is less than God does this.
But sensitive nature, in and through which the
spirit must support itself in the time-series, and there
receive and manifest the Divine Action, rebels against
this austere demand for the ordering of its love.
It desires its own satisfactions, clings to its own
universe, plays for its own hand. Even when the
crude egoistic impulses to self-assertion and greed
have been subdued upon the physical level—those
acquisitive, lustful, combative tempers which the
race carries forward as untransformed energy from its
sub-human past—they merely transfer their energies
to the spiritual sphere. A selfish, greedy and acquisitive
attitude towards the attractions of spirit replaces
a selfish, greedy and acquisitive attitude towards the
attractions of sense. Spiritual pride, spiritual envy,
and spiritual gluttony are not less hostile to God than
their carnal counterparts; for they mean that the
soul's true life is still turned inwards on itself. The
stain of self-interest lies on its prayer and dries up
its adoration, the poison of spiritual egoism saps its
health. And only the purging action of Spirit,
humbly asked and bravely endured, can set this
situation right.
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Lava quod est sordidum,
Riga quod est aridum,
Sana quod est saucium.
Thus one and the same law of tranquil self-oblivion
must be applied to the whole house of the soul; not
only to the lower storey, but to the upper as well—that region of spiritual desire, where our secret self-love
so often finds a lair. For only in the tranquillity
which is achieved by the death of all personal demand
can the delicate impulsions of the Spirit be discerned.
And this we can only win by turning the whole of
our instinctive life in a new direction, away from
self-fulfilment however noble, and towards entire
self-mergence in God; setting its vigorous love in
order, giving it without reserve to the purposes of the
Will. Here psychology and religion go hand in
hand. Each recommends the drastic re-ordering
and sublimation of desire, its redemption from self-interest,
as the pathway to interior peace: and this
redeeming of desire contains in itself that whole
purification of the sensitive life, which St. John of
the Cross calls the first of the three nights through
which the Godward tending soul is called to pass.
First on the natural level and then on the spiritual
level,
'appetite'
in the sense of undisciplined and
egoistic choice must be renounced. For all the
scattered cravings, illusory ambitions and emotional
inclinations of the 'I'
represent so much energy
subtracted, so much interest deflected, from the
great drive of the 'Me' towards God.
Thus it sometimes seems as though the whole life
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of faith were contained in the continual battle with
our instinctive desire for personal satisfactions,
possessions or success, material, emotional, and
spiritual: that a ceaseless agere contra must be the
law of spiritual growth. But things are not really
quite so grim as this. From another angle, the life
of the spirit is seen to consist on one hand in its
active loving movement often checked and baffled
but faithfully renewed towards an ever-closer
correspondence with achieved Perfection: on the
other, in the ceaseless purifying action of the Divine
Life present in circumstance upon our unstable and
unfinished being, and the soul's humble, grateful
and passive acceptance of this. As the souls in the
Purgatorio ran eagerly to the cleansing Mountain, and
climbed from terrace to terrace, not urged by God's
justice but drawn by His love; so vigorous effort
is one side of the purifying process, but only one side—it is a preparation of the matter of the sacrament.
The essential change is worked, we know not how,
by the cleansing action of the Spirit working in the
hidden deeps, bending the rigid will to suppleness
and melting the ice about the frozen heart. For the
goal to which our spirits move is that life-giving
state of active union in which, knowing that we
abide in God, we are really at home; feeding on
Him, are satisfied; and lost in Him, fulfil our life.
There is a marvellous moment at the end of
the Purgatorio, in which a tremor passes through
the Holy Mountain; and all the souls on all the
terraces, forgetting their own pains, rise to their feet
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in joy and sing the Gloria. And when Dante asks
what has happened, he is told that one soul, casting
off the last fetters of selfish desire, has risen and gone
forward in freedom to God. In that one act, which
turns the whole of the self's will towards the Universal
Will, purification is complete. But so tough
are the attachments of the senses, so inveterate is
the creature's frenzied clutch on fugitive possessions
and delights, that many minor operations are necessary
before all the adhesions are cleared away.
Thus it follows that everything must go from the
soul in whom the thirst for God has been awakened
which competes with the one overruling attraction
of Spirit. All clutch and grab, ill-will and turbulence; all those primitive exhausting passions and
absorbing childish ambitions, all the vestigial relics
of the cave and jungle, which civilized society
disguises but does not suppress. But the purity
which is to be achieved is not the sterile safety of
something that is kept in the refrigerator. Within
Spirit's sphere of influence, and capable of its transforming
power, there is offered to the soul an infinity
of lesser generous loves. The over-ruling Love of
God in its quickening and penetrating beauty will
give all these a certain purifying and sacrificial
character; purging them of violence and self-regard,
and replacing the concentrated fevers of desire by
the generous glow of a wide-spreading charity.
'When we are masters of ourselves', says Gerlac
Petersen,
'our footsteps will not be straitened;
but freely and liberally shall we walk with our Lord,
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looking at all things with Him.' This is the formula
of that sanctity at once so divine and so human
which makes of human personality, in all its richness
and emotional beauty, a channel of the Love of God.
And it is surely just because the senses are so
mysterious and so holy, that these senses must be
cleansed, re-ordered and unselfed. We cannot, in
fact, really split ourselves up into
'sensual' and
'spiritual'
. man; but in all our varied power of
love and suffering, must accept the contributions
and the limitations of sense. The Christian cannot
avoid the fact that he finds himself within a sacramental
order; and cannot correspond with that
sacramental order on the level of spirit alone. Sense
must intervene in our responses to reality; and
cannot, unless docile to the over-ruling Spirit and
purged of the infection of desire. This means a
steady and courageous shifting of the soul's centre
of action from the circumference inwards to its true
centre, the deep where it abides in God; and thence
a rich and selfless expansion, which is the reward of
that preliminary stripping and retreat. Thus it is
not a harsh dualism but a profound incarnationalism
which requires us to set in order our physical and
emotional life, and subordinate all vagrant longings
to the single passion for God. 'A heart filled with
desires', says St. John of the Cross,
'knows nothing
of liberty.'
