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THE
alert understanding, responding at all
points to its environment, and always
ready to interpret in accordance with its
own diagrams and notions the messages which it
receives, is yet only one part or aspect of that total
psychic life which must be submitted to the purifying
action of prayer. Great tracts of mental territory
remain, which need to be cleansed from egoism, and
redeemed from unreality, if all the powers of the
self are to be 'gathered into the unity of the Spirit'
and transformed into a single instrument; supple
to the incitements and demands of God.
If our 'reasonable power'
of knowing, analysing
and conceiving was required to acknowledge its own
limitations over against the Infinite, and accept that
humbling discipline of ignorance which is the
foundation of faith; still more, our mental stock
in trade, all that mixed material of apperception
which we use without ceasing and mostly without
thinking in the ordinary business of everyday life,
must be exposed to the cleansing rays of supersensual
truth.
Lava quod est sordidum.
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That psychic storehouse, with its accumulation
of remembered experience—pains and pleasures,
repulsions and attractions, images and notions—colours all our reactions to reality, and enchains us
to our past. Still more disastrous is the constant
presence and penetrating odour of the psychic
rubbish-heap; with its smouldering resentments,
griefs and cravings, the empty shells that once held
living passions, the tight hard balls of prejudice,
the devitalizing regrets. All this ceaselessly tempts
us to a sterile self-occupation, destructive of that
simplicity which is the condition of a self-abandoned
love. It reminds us of past sensible and emotional
experiences, brings back into consciousness the old
wounds to our self-love, old conflicts born of pride,
anger, or self-will, and throws up distracting images
whenever our minds are quiet.
Especially on our life towards Spirit, the insistent
presence of this great well of memories, inclinations,
images and dreams, exercises a constant and
damaging influence : chaining us to the time-series,
and giving past events, griefs and loves an immortal
power. For here, God only must be sought, in and
for Himself, in a pure and trustful streaming out of
will and desire, a single undemanding flight ; without
the backward glance towards anything already
known, relinquished, longed for, or possessed. This
entirely confident casting of the little spirit on the
great Spirit of God, as birds on the supporting
air—in spite of all the drag of the past, and
suggestions of the untrustful mind—is that which
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theology means by the state of Hope. By it the
memory whether of sins, fears or sorrows, is purified
and sweetened. It is the soul's growing point, and
the very means of its self-anchoring in God.
La petite Espérance
Est celle qui toujours commence.
The Bible is drenched in this spirit of unconquered
Hope, a strange, other-worldly certitude shining
through hours of destruction and grief; the upward
confident look, out of the confused misery of human
existence, towards an unfailing Power. In the
Psalms which the Church recites on the days that
lead to the Passion, the exquisite paradox of Hope
achieved in suffering mounts up to its completion
in the Cross. For only suffering can give this
mysterious Hope to the spirit, teach it to throw
the whole weight of its trust forwards upon God.
'Thou art my strong rock and my castle: be thou
also my guide and lead me for thy Name's sake.'
It is not only the dreadful pull of self-occupation,
the ingrained tendency of the psyche to turn backwards,
rummage among its hoarded experiences,
and reflect upon its own ideas, which deflects the
undivided movement of the spirit towards God.
The uncleansed memory operates disastrously within
the very sanctuary of the devotional life. The total
uncriticized content of our religious store-cupboard
all its phrases, images and symbols entering into
our apperceptive mass, brings many confusions in
its train. We easily become the dupes of our own
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imaginative and psychological processes (and much
of that which passes for
'religious experience'
falls
under this head); taking that which is less than
Spirit for a direct intimation of the spaceless and
eternal God. Thus we are led to suppose that we
know Him, when as a matter of fact we only know
our own ideas and feelings about Him; and content
ourselves with turning over these unworthy notions
and pictures of an unpicturable Reality.
The whole of popular religious art, and much
religious literature too, witnesses to the deplorable
result of identifying our dim yet deep intuition of
God with its sensible embodiments; and to the fact
that many so-called
'theological problems'
really
arise from the confusion of our imaginative
machinery with that which it mediates. On the
other hand, in the dangerous realm of supposed
'mystical'
experience—which is most often psychosensual
experience—the confusion of religious fantasy
with religious fact is one of the most common
traps awaiting fervent souls. The masters of
prayer are untiring in their warnings upon this
subject; and indeed any real apprehension of God's
action, however faint and obscure, must sweep from
the mind all images and all notions, and bring it to
a state of pure receptivity. Nevertheless the lives
of the saints, and of many who are far less than
saints, are full of holy, poignant, or attractive daydreams,
projected images, interior conversations;
which are the clear product of memory and imagination,
but accepted without criticism as direct
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revelations of the supernatural world. Even so
deeply spiritual a work as the Revelations of Julian
of Norwich shows the influence of religious imagination
on every page.
Thus it is of first importance to realize at once
the uses, the limitations, and the dangers of this
strange imaginative power, so little understood by
us, which intervenes between our normal earthly
experience and the simple contacts of the spiritual
life. Most difficulties of adjustment between visible
and invisible religion are caused by this confusion
between our remembered images of God, and His
unmediated presence revealed in prayer. What is
here required is not an inhuman expulsion of all
image, but a careful recognition of the true character
of our religious furniture; and a simplifying
so far as is possible without real impoverishment
of the interior decorations of the soul. The religious
mind is often like a mid-Victorian drawing-room;
full of photographs, souvenirs, mirrors, superfluous
draperies and bits of cabinet-work, which merely
witness to our bourgeois fear of emptiness, and tend
to develop in us a spiritual class consciousness,
which colours our whole outlook on Reality.
'It
is deplorable', says Malaval,
'that among Christians
there is often more of what one might call images
and representations of piety, than the spirit of faith
which ought to live in them. We always want
to love and adore by figures, without going to the
substance of things, and we stop at the means without
going to the end.'
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Thus a clearing-up of the imaginative levels of
religion is an essential and difficult part of the
purification
of our interior life. For here, in this
stock-pot of the soul, primitive symbols, ancestral
memories, pagan fantasies, and natural cravings
decently disguised by the vestments of faith, all
simmer together with the most sacred facts, figures
and phrases : and when their confused results,
coloured with emotion, emerge into consciousness,
they are constantly accepted as
'religious experience'. Especially is this setting in order of
the psychic storehouse, and understanding of its
true nature, needed for any safe and fruitful use
of image and meditation in the earlier degrees of
prayer. For the haunting beauty of Christianity
abides in the tension and contrast between the
Absolute God and His self-revelation among men ;
the stooping-down of the Infinite to enter into
finite forms. Thus the imaginative contemplation
of these scenes through which Spirit is most richly
revealed to us—and especially the mysteries of the
earthly life of Christ—has always formed a valuable
part of the education and purgation of the Christian
consciousness. For here Spirit takes our mental
apparatus and teaches through it.
'Mira! mira!—Look! look!'
cried St. Ignatius, as he led his pupils
through those searching exercises which should
bring them at last to the contemplation of the Love
of God. And yet, that at which we look in awe and
devotion, is at least in great part a work of memory
and imagination ; through which the riches of the
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Spirit enter our field of perception, and are apprehended
by our little souls.
'After all', says Malaval
again, 'the body one imagines to oneself is not
that of Our Lord; it is an imaginary body, which
is as different in the imagination of each one, as the
different imaginations of each one who conjures up
the picture.' But so long as we recognize our
secret theatre for that which it really is, and do
not confuse the dramatic representation with the
unearthly poem that it conveys, we are safe.
So, whilst the absolute character of the contrast
between the Being of God and the imaginative
embodiments of men (however beautiful and holy)
must never be lost by us; yet here the arrogant and
total rejection of the helps of the imagination and
the senses is an equally dangerous excess. Each
soul must discover and control the degree of its own
dependence on the sensible: and, committed as
we are to the mixed life of sense and spirit, none of
us can strip our house of all its superfluous ornaments
without threatening its hidden structure as
well. The purification we are asked for is at once
more difficult and less drastic than this. For
Spirit, God, the substance of that which the soul
loves and longs for, is ever conveyed within the
image, form or figure that we contemplate; since
He penetrates all life. And that part of prayer
which matters most is the simple movement of the
soul towards Him, adherence in her ground. That
this most subtle encounter should be evoked,
expressed and enmeshed within sensible forms is a
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humbling necessity of our being; and would do
nothing but good to us, did we not tend to spoil everything by allowing sensitive nature to enter
into such active relation with the outward sign,
instead of waiting silently and faithfully on the
inward grace.
That which we are called upon to do, is to distinguish
as clearly as we may between the easy
device of resting in quasi-sensible religious consolations
or conceptions, and humble, unconsoled, selfnaughting
before God. We are to lean out towards
Him in a simple act of total confidence, without
pondering or analysing our 'experiences'; none
of which are worth the act of self-abandoned faith
in which we renounce them. As regards all such
distinct religious images or conceptions, we must
enter the 'cloud of forgetting', acknowledging their
approximate and imaginary character and passing
beyond them to a meek self-loss in God. Bathed
in mystery as we are, we easily take refuge in the
apparent and the attractive, and avoid the stern
discipline of ignorance. But 'the more we withdraw
from images and figures', says St. John of the
Cross,
'the nearer we draw to God, Who has neither
image, form, nor figure.' And though, literally
interpreted, this saying might seem to shut the
door on all visible and sacramental religion, it
remains true if we remember that the saint is really
reminding us of the ever-present danger of accepting
sign instead of thing. We achieve the true liberty
of detachment here, as in the instinctive life, by a
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plain recognition of imagination and memory as
servants but never revealers of Truth. Through their
disciplined use, the touch of God may be realized by
us; and our sense of the supernatural deepened and
enriched. Therefore the pure and supple mind will
receive with simplicity all that God-Spirit gives to
it by these strange channels, whilst refusing to rest
in the stimulation or the sign: never accepting the
photograph as a substitute for the living Presence,
or mistaking the best and most enchanting of records
for the Orphic song.
