THIS
little book is in no sense a literary
work. It merely consists of the notes of
a series of informal addresses which were
given to a small group of like-minded people;
and is intended rather to stimulate meditation
than to give information. Its readers are asked
of their charity to judge it from this point of
view.
E. U.
Feast of St. Mary Magdalen, 1929
I
page 65
WHEN St. Paul described our mysterious human nature
as a 'Temple of the Holy Spirit' a created dwelling-place
or sanctuary of the uncreated and invisible Divine
Life he was stating in the strongest possible terms a
view of our status, our relation to God, which has always
been present in Christianity; and is indeed implicit in
the Christian view of Reality. But that statement as
it stands seems far too strong for most of us. We do not
feel in the very least like the temples of Creative Love.
We are more at ease with St. Teresa, when she describes
the soul as an 'interior castle' a roomy mansion, with
various floors and apartments from the basement upwards;
not all devoted to exalted uses, not always in a satisfactory
state. And when, in a more homely mood, she speaks
of her own spiritual life as 'becoming solid like a house',
we at last get something we can grasp.
The soul's house, that interior dwelling-place which
we all possess, for the upkeep of which we are responsible
a place in which we can meet God, or from which in
a sense we can exclude God—that is not too big an idea
for us. Though no imagery drawn from the life of
sense can ever be adequate to the strange and delicate
contacts, tensions, demands and benedictions of the
life that lies beyond sense: though the important part of
every parable is that which it fails to express: still, here
is a conception which can be made to cover many of
the truths that govern the interior life of prayer.
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First, we are led to consider the position of the house.
However interesting and important its peculiarities may
seem to the tenant, it is not as a matter of fact an unusually
picturesque and interesting mansion made to an original
design, and set in its own grounds with no other building
in sight. Christian spirituality knows nothing of this sort of
individualism. It insists that we do not inhabit detached
residences, but are parts of a vast spiritual organism;
that even the most hidden life is never lived for itself
alone. Our soul's house forms part of the vast City of
God. Though it may not be an important mansion with
a frontage on the main street, nevertheless it shares all
the obligations and advantages belonging to the city as
a whole. It gets its water from the main, and its light
from the general supply. The way we maintain and use
it must have reference to our civic responsibilities.
It is true that God creates souls in a marvellous liberty
and variety. The ideals of the building-estate tell us
nothing about the Kingdom of Heaven. It is true also,
that the furnishing of our rooms and cultivation of our
garden is largely left to our personal industry and good
taste. Still, in a general way, we must fall in with the
city's plan; and consider, when we hang some new
and startling curtains, how they will look from the street.
However intense the personal life of each soul may be,
that personal life has got out of proportion, if it makes us
forget our municipal obligations and advantages; for
our true significance is more than personal, it is bound
up with the fact of our status as members of a supernatural
society. So into all the affairs of the little house
there should enter a certain sense of the city, and beyond
this of the infinite world in which the city stands: some
awe-struck memory of our double situation, at once so
homely and so mysterious. We must each maintain
unimpaired our unique relation with God; yet without
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forgetting our intimate contact with the rest of the city,
or the mesh of invisible life which binds all the inhabitants
in one.
For it is on the unchanging Life of God, as on a rock,
that the whole city is founded. That august and cherishing
Spirit is the atmosphere which bathes it, and fills
each room of every little house—quickening, feeding and
sustaining. He is the one Reality which makes us real;
and, equally, the other houses too. 'If I am not in Thee,'
said St. Augustine, 'then I am not at all.' We are often
urged to think of the spiritual life as a personal adventure,
a ceaseless hustle forward; with all its meaning condensed
in the 'perfection' of the last stage. But though progress,
or rather growth, is truly in it, such growth in so far as it
is real can only arise from, and be conditioned by, a far
more fundamental relation—the growing soul's abidingness
in God.
Next, what type of house does the soul live in? It is a
two-storey house. The psychologist too often assumes
that it is a one-roomed cottage with a mud floor; and
never even attempts to go upstairs. The extreme transcendentalist
sometimes talks as though it were perched
in the air, like the lake dwellings of our primitive ancestors,
and had no ground floor at all. A more humble attention
to facts suggests that neither of these simplifications is
true. We know that we have a ground floor, a natural
life biologically conditioned, with animal instincts and
affinities; and that this life is very important, for it is the
product of the divine creativity—its builder and maker is God. But we know too that we have an upper floor,
a supernatural life, with supernatural possibilities, a
capacity for God; and that this, man's peculiar prerogative,
is more important still. If we try to live on one floor
alone we destroy the mysterious beauty of our human
vocation; so utterly a part of the fugitive and creaturely
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life of this planet and yet so deeply coloured by Eternity;
so entirely one with the world of nature, and yet, 'in
the Spirit', a habitation of God. 'Thou madest him
lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and
worship.' We are created both in Time and in Eternity,
not truly one but truly two; and every thought, word and
act must be subdued to the dignity of that double situation
in which Almighty God has placed and companions the
childish spirit of man.
Therefore a full and wholesome spiritual life can never
consist in living upstairs, and forgetting to consider the
ground floor and its homely uses and needs; thus ignoring
the humbling fact that those upper rooms are entirely
supported by it. Nor does it consist in the constant,
exasperated investigation of the shortcomings of the
basement. When St. Teresa said that her prayer had
become 'solid like a house'
, she meant that its foundations
now went down into the lowly but firm ground of human
nature, the concrete actualities of the natural life: and
on those solid foundations, its walls rose up towards
heaven. The strength of the house consisted in that
intimate welding together of the divine and the human,
which she found in its perfection in the humanity of
Christ. There, in the common stuff of human life which
He blessed by His presence, the saints have ever seen the
homely foundations of holiness. Since we are two-storey
creatures, called to a natural and a supernatural status,
both sense and spirit must be rightly maintained, kept
in order, consecrated to the purposes of the city, if our
full obligations are to be fulfilled. The house is built
for God; to reflect, on each level, something of His
unlimited Perfection. Downstairs that general rightness
of adjustment to all this-world obligations, which the
ancients called the quality of Justice; and the homely
virtues of Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude reminding
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us of our creatureliness, our limitations, and so humbling
and disciplining us. Upstairs, the heavenly powers of
Faith, Hope and Charity; tending towards the Eternal,
nourishing our life towards God, and having no meaning
apart from God.
But the soul's house will never be a real home, unless
the ground floor is as cared for and as habitable as the
beautiful rooms upstairs. We are required to live in the
whole of our premises, and are responsible for the condition
of the whole of our premises. It is useless to repaper
the drawing-room, if what we really need is a new
sink. In that secret Divine purpose which is drawing all
life towards perfection, the whole house is meant to be
beautiful and ought to be beautiful; for it comes from
God, and was made to His design. Christ's soul when
on earth lived in one of these houses; had to use
the same fitments, make the same arrangements do.
We cannot excuse our own failures by attributing them
to the inconvenience of the premises, and the fact that
some very old-fashioned bits of apparatus survive.
Most of us have inherited some ugly bits of furniture, or
unfortunate family portraits which we can't get rid of,
and which prevent our rooms being quite a success.
Nevertheless the soul does not grow strong merely by
enjoying its upstairs privileges, and ignoring downstairs
disadvantages, problems and responsibilities; but only
by tackling its real task of total transformation. It is
called to maintain a house which shall be in its completeness
'a habitation of God in the Spirit'; subdued to His
purposes on all levels, manifesting His glory in what we
call natural life, as well as in what we call spiritual life.
For man is the link between these two orders; truly
created a little lower than the angels, yet truly crowned
with glory and worship, because in this unperfected human
nature the Absolute Life itself has deigned to dwell.
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That means, reduced to practice, that the whole house
with its manifold and graded activities must be a house
of prayer. It does not mean keeping a Quiet Room to
which we can retreat, with mystical pictures on the walls,
and curtains over the windows to temper the disconcerting
intensity of the light; a room where we can forget the
fact that there are black beetles in the kitchen, and that
the range is not working very well. Once we admit any
violent contrast between the upper and lower floor, the
'instinctive' and 'spiritual' life, or feel a reluctance to
investigate the humbling realities of the basement, our
life becomes less, not more, than human; and our
position is unsafe. Are we capable of the adventure of
courage which inspires the great prayer of St. Augustine:
'The house of my soul is narrow; do Thou enter in and
enlarge it! It is ruinous; do Thou repair it?' Can we
risk the visitation of the mysterious Power that will go
through all our untidy rooms, showing up their shortcomings
and their possibilities; reproving by the tranquillity
of order the waste and muddle of our inner life?
The mere hoarded rubbish that ought to go into the dustbin;
the things that want mending and washing; the
possessions we have never taken the trouble to use? Yet
this is the only condition on which man can participate
in that fullness of life for which he is made.
The Lord's Prayer, in which St. Teresa said that she
found the whole art of contemplation from its simple
beginning to its transcendent goal, witnesses with a
wonderful beauty and completeness to this two-storey
character of the soul's house; and yet its absolute unity.
It begins at the top, in the watch tower of faith, with the
sublime assertion of our supernatural status the one
relation, intimate yet inconceivable, that governs all the
rest—'Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy
name." Whatever the downstairs muddle and tension
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we have to deal with, however great the difficulty of
adjusting the claims of the instincts that live in the basement
and the interests that clamour at the door, all these
demands, all this rich and testing experience, is enfolded
and transfused by the cherishing, over-ruling life and
power of God. We are lifted clear of the psychological
tangle in which the life of our spirit too often seems enmeshed,
into the pure, serene light of Eternity; and
shown the whole various and disconcerting pageant of
creation as proceeding from God, and existing only that
it may glorify His name. Childlike dependence and joyful
adoration are placed together as the twin characters
of the soul's relation to God.
Thence, step by step, this prayer brings us downstairs,
goes with us through the whole house; bringing the
supernatural into the natural, blessing and sanctifying,
cleansing and rectifying every aspect of the home. 'Thy Kingdom come!
' Hope—trustful expectation. 'Thy will be done !
'
Charity—the loving union of our wills
with the Infinite Will. Then the ground floor. 'Give
us this day' that food from beyond ourselves which
nourishes and sustains our life. Forgive all our little
failures and excesses, neutralize the corroding power of
our conflicts, disharmonies, rebellions, sins. We can't
deal with them alone. Teach us, as towards our fellow
citizens, to share that generous tolerance of God. Lead
us not into situations where we are tried beyond our
strength ; but meet us on the battlefield of personality,
and protect the weakness of the adolescent spirit against
the downward pull of the inhabitants of the lower floor.
And then, the reason of all this ; bringing together, in
one supreme declaration ofjoy and confidence, the soul's
sense of that supporting, holy, and eternal Reality who
is the Ruler and the Light of the city, and of every room
in every little house. Thine is the Kingdom,
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the Power
and the Glory. If our interior life be subdued to the
spirit of this prayer, with its rich sense of our mighty
heritage and child-like status, our total dependence on
the Reality of God, then the soul's house is truly running
well. Its action is transfused by contemplation. The
door is open between the upper and the lower floor;
the life of spirit and life of sense.
'Two cities,' said St. Augustine, 'have been created
by two loves: the earthly city by love of self even to
contempt of God, the heavenly city by love of God even
to contempt of self. The one city glories in itself; the
other city glories in the Lord. The one city glories in
its own strength; the other city says to its God, '"I will
love Thee, O Lord my strength."'
Perhaps there has
never been a time in Christian history when that contrast
has been more sharply felt than it is now—the contrast
between that view of man's situation and meaning, in
which the emphasis falls on humanity, its vast desires
and wonderful achievements, even to contempt of God;
and the view in which the emphasis falls on God's transcendent
action and over-ruling will, even to contempt
of self. St. Augustine saw, and still would see, mankind
ever at work building those two cities; and every human
soul as a potential citizen of one or the other. And from
this point of view, that which we call the 'interior life'
is just the home life of those who inhabit the invisible
City of God: realistically taking up their municipal
privileges and duties, and pursuing them 'even to contempt
of self'. It is the obligation and the art of keeping
the premises entrusted to us in good order; having ever
in view the welfare of the city as a whole.
Some souls, like some people, can be slummy anywhere.
There is always a raucous and uncontrolled voice ascending
from the basement, and a pail of dirty water at the
foot of the stairs. Others can achieve in the most
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impossible situation a simple and beautiful life. The
good citizen must be able without reluctance to open the
door at all times, not only at the week-end; must keep
the windows clean and taps running properly, that the
light and living water may come in. These free gifts of
the supernatural are offered to each house; and only as
free gifts can they be had. Our noisy little engine will
not produce the true light; nor our most desperate digging
a proper water supply. Recognition of this fact, this
entire dependence of the creature, is essential if the full
benefits of our mysterious citizenship are ever to be
enjoyed by us. 'I saw,' said the poet of the Apocalypse,
'the holy city coming down from God out of heaven . . .
the glory of God lit it ... the water of life proceeded out
of the throne of God. All is the free gift of the supernatural;
not the result of human growth and effort.
God's generous and life-giving work in the world of souls
ever goes before man's work in God. So the main thing
about the Invisible City is not the industry and good
character of the inhabitants : they do not make it shine.
It is the tranquil operation of that perpetual providence,
which incites and supports their small activities; the
direct and child-like relation in which they stand to
the city's Ruler ; the generous light and air that bathe the
little houses; the unchanging rock of Eternity on which
their foundations stand.
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II
WE come back to examine more closely our domestic
responsibilities: the two floors of the soul's house. We
begin on the ground floor; for until that is in decent
order, it is useless to go upstairs. A well-ordered natural
life is the only safe basis of our supernatural life: Christianity,
which brought the ground floor, with its powerful
but unruly impulses, within the area of God's grace,
demands its sublimation and dedication to His purposes.
We are required to live in the whole of our house, learning
to go freely and constantly up and down stairs,
backwards and forwards, easily and willingly, from one
kind of life to the other; weaving together the higher
and lower powers of the soul, and using both for the
glory of God. No exclusive spirituality will serve the
purposes of man, called to be a link between two worlds.
There are days, months for some there will be years
when we look out of the window of faith, and find that
the view is hidden in a mantle of fog : when we turn to
the workshop of hope, and find the fog has made that
chill and gloomy too: when we resort to the central
heating, and find that is not working very well. Then
when Faith, Hope and Charity all seem to fail us is the
time to remember the excellent advice which Mrs. Berry
gave to Richard Feverel's bride: 'When the parlour fire
burns low, put on coals in the kitchen.' Accept your
limitations, go downstairs, and attend to the life of the
lower floor. Our vocation requires of us an equal
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alertness with the censer and the scrubbing brush.
When the door between the two storeys is open, a flood
of disconcerting light is shed upon that lower floor and
its condition; and our feeble excuses for its muddled
state fade into silence. But if we face the facts in the
right spirit we shall find, like St. Teresa, the Presence we
lost upstairs walking among the pots and pans.
The disciplined use of the lower floor and all the rich
material it offers is therefore essential to the peace and
prosperity of the upper floor; we cannot merely shut the
door at the top of the basement stairs and hope for the
best. The loud voices of unmortified nature, saying
'I
want! I will! I won't!' rising up from the kitchen
premises, will ruin the delicate music of the upstairs
wireless. Here is the source of all the worst distractions
in prayer, and the lair of all the devils that tempt us
most: our inclinations to selfish choices, inordinate enjoyments,
claimful affection, self-centred worry, instinctive
avoidance of sacrifice and pain—all the downward drag
of animal life. Here, as St. Teresa says in The Interior
Castle, we are likely to find damp unpleasant corners;
and reptiles and other horrors lurking in them. If the
house is to be well run, we must begin by cleaning the
kitchen and the scullery; and giving their energetic but
unruly inhabitants their jobs. The human power of
choice must be submitted to the rule of Prudence;
human impulse and desire to the rule of Temperance;
our self-protecting mechanisms, sloth, softness, nervous
fears, to the bracing touch of Fortitude. That threefold
reordering and sublimation of the ground floor—drastic
but unsensational—will test and purify the soul's realism,
humility and love, far more fully, will subdue it to the
mysterious Divine action far more completely, than any
hasty retreat upstairs can do. 'Not only a good way, but
the best of ways,' says St. Teresa, 'is to strive to enter
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first by the room where humility is practised, which is
far better than at once rushing on to the others.'
It was no mere upstairs mystic, exclusively absorbed
in spiritual things, who uttered the mysterious and haunting
words 'To me, to live is Christ'. It was St. Paul,
wrestling with his own difficult nature, and perpetually
conscious of the conflict between sense and spirit as he
lived towards God. Here and now, on the ground floor,
to live with Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude in the
circumstances given me, and with the temperament and
furniture given me because that ground floor is crowned
and blessed by the life of Faith, Hope and Charity
tending towards God—this 'is Christ'. There is not one
landlord for the lower floor, and another for the upstairs
flat.
Every soul, says that true psychologist Augustine Baker,
has two internal lights or guides, the spirit of Nature and
the Spirit of God: and besides these 'we neither have nor
can have, any other within us'. We are reminded of
that familiar picture of the old-fashioned nursery—the
child with a good angel at the right hand and a bad
angel at the left. Like many other bits of childish
mythology, that picture points beyond itself to a deep
truth. The good angel is really there: Anima—the soul's
being when it ascends to its apex, as the mystics say,
stands in the watch tower of faith, opens the window
towards Eternity, beholds the Light that is God. 'The
Supream part of the Soul,' says Peter Sterry, 'which is
above Sensible Things, ever living in the midst of Invisible
Things—this is each Man's Angel.' And the bad
angel is really there too—this same complex and variable
soul, when it capitulates to the unfortunate influences
of the scullery. We know too well that, like the dog
who has been trained to the drawing-room, there still
remains something in us which takes a sneaking interest
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in the dustbin and will drift off in that direction if given
a chance. The first thing we realize when we achieve
any genuine self-knowledge, is the existence of those two
levels or aspects of the soul's life: the natural self subject
to mutability, the secret and essential self capable of
reality, tending to God. They often seem to pull different
ways; the unstable will can hardly keep its feet between
them. If we consider in this light the last unfortunate
episode which showed us up to ourselves; when we made
the second-best choice, when a sudden tug at our elbow
assured us that this particular bit of magnanimity, that
renunciation, was really too much to expect even though
it shone with an unearthly radiance, though Anima said
'Follow me!' then the force of the ancient Advent
prayer comes home to us. 'O Wisdom proceeding out
of the mouth of the Most High, come and teach me the
way of Prudence ' between the two conflicting aspects of
my double life.
Prudence, on the natural level so suggestive of a selfcentred
carefulness, the miserable policy of 'safety first',
only achieves dignity and beauty when thus raised to the
spiritual status, and related to our life in God. Then it
is revealed as the virtue which governs and sublimates
all behaviour; as Temperance is the virtue which governs
and sublimates desire. We owe to St. Thomas the noblest
and deepest of all definitions of Prudence. For him, all
virtues, all the soul's sources of energy, are forms and
expressions of one thing Love, the self's will and desire,
in the ascending degrees of preference, interest, longing
and devotedness, set towards God and the will of God.
And conversely, all sin is due to something gone wrong
with that same sacred power of energetic love; its direction
to wrong objectives. Sin is 'a withdrawal from the art
of Divine Wisdom and the order of Divine Love': a
wilful setting of our own small lives, hopes and loves out
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of line with the vast purposes of God. The right ordering
of its innate powers of love and will is therefore all the
soul has to do to actualize its inheritance, make it fit
for God. Ordina quest' amore, o tu che m'ami. Then, the
soul's house is ready for its guest. And Prudence, says
St. Thomas again, is this Love, 'choosing between what
helps and what hinders'—choosing what helps the fulfilment
of God's will, and leaving what hinders the fulfilment
of that will; because He is the soul's love. It is
the dedicated use of the great human power of choice, its
subjection to the rule of charity: the right ordering of
the natural life in the interests, not of one's own preference
or advancement, but of the city and the city's King.
Thus Prudence is like a good housekeeper; not very
attractive at first sight, but a valuable sort of woman to
put in charge if you want your soul's house to be well
run. With her eye on efficiency, but always for love's
sake, she will use her resources in the best way, keep up
the premises, provide regular and suitable meals. She
will not serve devotional meringues for breakfast, or try
to make beautiful fluffy omelettes full of fervour just when
eggs are scarce. Dealing with her situation as it really
is, and not proceeding on the assumption that it really
ought to be something else, more interesting, exalted and
flattering to self-love, she will be provident: not using
up all her resources at the beginning of the week, or making
plans she cannot carry out. She will refuse to translate
the words 'called to be saints' into 'called to behave
as if we were already saints'. She will balance prayer
and action, never giving out beyond her power, or forgetting
to get in fresh supplies: so that her spiritual
store cupboard is never bare. How mortified, free from
all spiritual fancifulness and extravagance, is a life over
which Prudence presides; love of God, even to contempt
of self, determining all choices, purifying all motives,
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and maintaining an orderly, disciplined life in the
soul.
We find this science of behaviour operative in both
the great aspects of our human experience, the outward
and the inward: our behaviour towards other souls,
our behaviour to ourselves. As regards others, it will
mean the loving and careful choice of all that helps and
does not hinder them. In the life of action, the mortified
use of our rightful initiative. In the life of feeling, the
custody of the heart, in the interests of our neighbour's
peace as well as our own. In the life of thought, a
humble avoidance of comments on the crude and childish
nature of the symbols through which other souls reach
out to God; a discreet suppression of that clever and
interesting bit of up-to-date theology, those startling
ethical ideas, which flatter our intelligence but may
disturb more tender-minded souls. Nothing is more
marked in the Gospels than the prudence with which
Christ gave spiritual truths from His infinite store: always
enlightening, but never overwhelming the homely, sense-conditioned
human creatures to whom He was sent. The
Mind which saw God, and all things displayed in the
light of the Divine Wisdom, and which longed to give all
men that great vision which is beatitude, came down from
nights of communion with that Reality upon the mountain,
to teach with Prudence. 'Without a parable spake
He not' and those parables were made of the homeliest
materials, with little to attract a fastidious spirituality.
Yet in them the secret of the Kingdom was hid, so
that only those who were ready for the teaching received
it. Perfect Wisdom came with kindergarten methods to
men's kindergarten souls.
The mind awakened to spiritual reality often needs
much self-control, much prudence, if it is to put the
truth it has acquired—usually very little—so generally
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and so genially that there is no risk of giving anyone a
spiritual shock, or the chance of spiritual gastritis. All
teachers have to learn with St. Paul to subordinate their
own vision to their pupils' needs; feeding babies with
milk because they need milk, whilst suppressing the
disheartening information that there is a more complete
diet in the cupboard. Prudence proves her love as much
by what she withholds as by what she gives: humbly and
patiently adapting her method to the capacity of each.
She never bewilders, dazzles, little growing souls; never
over-feeds or drags them out of their depth. The cakes upon
her tea-table are suited to the digestion of the guests.
Prudence further requires the careful handling of our
own lives and capacities; instruments given us by God,
and destined to be mirrors of His skill. It means choosing
what helps, and rejecting what hinders, the fulfilment
of that design, that vocation, which is already present
in embryo in our souls. This subjection of behaviour
to the ultimate purpose of God may mean on one hand
conduct which seems absurdly over-careful; or on the
other, conduct which seems imprudent to the last degree.
The truly prudent, love-impelled choices of the saints, are
often in the eyes of the world the extreme of foolishness. St. Simon Stylites, making his pillar higher and higher
in his quest of that solitude to which he knew that he
was called ; St. Francis stripping off all that impeded his
love, even to his very clothes, and going out to destitution ;
St. Catherine of Genoa, forcing herself to repulsive duties
because they helped to kill fastidiousness, and make her
self-oblivious love more complete; Father Damien,
choosing the certitude of a leper's death ; Father Wainwright,
deliberately going without a midday meal for
years, because love made him want to share the privations
of those he served all these are the actions of celestial
prudence. Prudence, not preference, took St. Teresa to
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the convent. She did not like the cloister, but she knew
herself called by God ; and chose that which helped to
fulfil His will for her soul. Prudence locked the door of
Lady Julian's cell, but sent Mary Slessor from the Scottish
mill to the African jungle; took Foucauld to the solitude
of the Sahara, Livingstone to Africa, Grenfell to Labrador.
Love chooses the work it can do, not the work that it
likes. Prudent love took St. Thomas from contemplation,
and made him the teacher of the schools, Prudent love
does not insist on being a philanthropist when it lacks
the warm outgoing temperament that is needed, and is
decisively called to the more lonely but not less essential
vocation of studying the deep things of God. It uses the
material given it in the best possible way ; and thus doing,
makes its appointed contribution to that eternal plan
which requires the perfect active surrender of the willing
creature, the making of all choices and performance of
all tasks in subservience to that God Who is Pure Act—the total consecration of natural life. 'We are always,'
says De Caussade, 'running after some chimerical perfection,
and losing sight of the only rule of real perfection,
which is the will of God that infinitely wise and infinitely
gentle will, which if we make it our guide, will show us
near at hand at any moment, that which we vainly and
laboriously seek elsewhere.'
In the Paradiso Dante, with his usual acuteness, makes
Prudence love choosing rightly the boundary between
perfect and imperfect beatitude. The Heaven of those
active saints through whom the Divine Wisdom is
imparted to men, is the Heaven of Prudence. Minds
widely separated in temper and outlook, but united by
their loving choice of God Anselm and Chrysostom,
Francis and Dominic, Hugh of St. Victor and Thomas
Aquinas there dwell together. It is there that the
music of eternity first becomes audible by human ears.
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And this is surely right; for it is only by means of those
costly, love-impelled choices which are the essence of
heavenly Prudence, that the natural creature can enter
more and more fully into the rhythm of the supernatural
life.
For in the governance of our natural lives, a genuine
choice is left to us. We are neither dummies, nor the
slaves of circumstance. We are living creatures possessed
of a limited freedom, a power of initiative, which increases
every time we use it the right way; we are trained and
developed by being confronted with alternatives, on which
tremendous issues hang. It is typical of the completeness
with which each essential factor of our human experience
finds its rule and pattern in the Gospels, that this free
choice between possible courses should form our Lord's
actual preparation for His public ministry. Enlightened
at baptism as to His divine Sonship, His unique commission,
He did not at once rush off 'in the power of the
Spirit' to preach the good news. 'He who believeth
shall not make haste.' Real power is the result of inner
harmony, and requires perfect accord between the upper
and the lower floors; impulse harnessed to obedience.
Therefore the Spirit of Wisdom drove Him into the wilderness,
to come to terms with His own human nature.
More than one path lay open before Him. He might
claim the privileges of an exceptional spirit, in the midst
of a world which is not exceptional at all: turn the
material world to His own purpose, transcend the common
laws of nature, assume the position of the Father's
pet child. He might follow the path disclosed by spiritual
ambition, leading to obvious power and success: the most
insidious of the three temptations, because it suggested
that His mission of redemption and enlightenment could
be fulfilled on a great scale, by entering into alliance with
the spirit and methods of the world. People who think
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in numbers always mistake this for a call from God.
Love, choosing what helped, rejected all these opportunities,
and elected the humble career of a local prophet
and evangelist: a limited scope, unrewarded service, an
unappreciative public, a narrow path leading to the
Cross.
The spiritual life constantly offers its neophytes the
equivalent of all these temptations. There are those
who think first of their own spiritual hunger, and the
imperative duty of feeding their own souls: those for
whom the spiritual life means spiritual privilege—who
defy common sense, take foolish risks, and call the
proceeding trust in God: those who accept methods of
recommending religion which are something less than
spiritual, and call this 'dealing with the conditions of
modern life'. All these courses in their different ways
may seem prudent; and all wilt away before the selfless
prudence of Christ. That picture, in its austere majesty
and loneliness, forces the soul to consider how much
disguised self-interest, how much irresponsibility, how
much inclination to compromise, hang about its ground
floor and impede the purity of its choice for God. For
the inner spring which governs all truly prudent choice
is such a generous, general and self-oblivious surrender
as over-rules mere personal preference, can envisage with
equal calmness apparent failure and apparent success,
and ignores even its own spiritual advantage. The New
Testament contains no single instance in which our
Lord sought or obtained a private spiritual advantage:
and the devout persons who do so are at best only vegetable-fibre saints. Like artificial silk, they look very
glossy, but do not stand much wear and tear.
Now Prudence is a positive, not a negative, principle
of action. It requires behaviour, not abstention from
behaviour. It rejects the lower, in order that it may be
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free to accept the higher choice. Thus our dominant
attraction is in the eyes of Prudence as important as our
dominant temptation: it may be the magnet by which
we are being drawn to the place we have to fill. The
creative method completes detachment by attachment:
'Leave all' requires as its corollary 'Follow me'. It may
therefore be a work of Prudence to make tentative
advances along a path which attracts us; whether of
prayer, study, active work, human love or renunciation.
But when God, speaking through circumstances, says
'That way is not open'; then it is for us humbly to
acquiesce, whatever the cost. Love must learn by experience
to recognize when the secret inward pressure
comes from God, and when it really comes from self-will,
and we persuade ourselves that it is the push
of God. Nothing is more important than that we
should faithfully follow our own true spiritual attraction;
develop and use the talent given into our care.
But it needs a humble and a prudent spirit to discover
what that is, and distinguish it from the other more
exciting kind of attraction which is really rooted in self-love.
To do this is the work of Discretion, the handmaid of
Prudence: and the test that she proposes is simple enough.
'If God be thy love and thy meaning, the choice and point
of thy heart,' says the author of The Cloud of Unknowing,
'it sufficeth to thee in this life.' There, in a phrase, is the
heart of Heavenly Prudence. It requires a total transformation
of our attitude towards existence; because the
choice and point of our heart is set towards the Eternal,
our love and our meaning is God, and we are running
our house for Him. If we test by this standard the
dubious choices we have made, the chances we have
missed, the responsibilities we have dodged, we shall
perceive in each of them a virtual confession that the
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Living Perfect and its interests were not really the
choice and point of our heart. Easy paths taken, awkward
paths left; a cowardly inclination to take shelter
behind circumstances. In personal relationships, a quiet
avoidance of the uncongenial, a certain blindness to
opportunities for exercising generous love. In religion,
perverse insistence on particular notions and practices;
self-chosen adventures in devotional regions to which we
were not decisively called. Prudence, remembering the
modest size of her own premises and the sublimity of
those experiences of God which the mystics try with
stammering tongues to suggest, will always choose a
simple type of prayer suited to her capacity, and never
attempt that which is beyond her powers; for she has no
spiritual ambition, beyond faithful correspondence with God. How sober, mortified, truly discreet is the prayer
of the saints; faithful, loyal, free from self-chosen peculiarities,
keeping steadily on through darkness and through
light.
So too the detachment to which Prudence will urge us,
will not merely consist in cutting out those things and
persons which attract us, and are occasions of temptation
and unrest: thus eliminating the very material of self-discipline
from life. It will rather require the practice
of detachment in attachment; using with love the educational
toys in our cupboard, but refusing to make them
into idols or break into angry howls when they are taken
away. Prudence requires love without claimfulness, and
service without self-will; cherishing and studying the
people placed within our radius, but even here, never
seeking our own along the subtle paths of spiritual friendship.
She demands a life that is both world-embracing
and world-renouncing in its amplitude of surrendered
love. This means a constant and difficult tension;
many falls, perhaps continuous suffering, perpetual slaps
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to affection and pride. Again and again the unruly
lower nature seems to be conquered; again and again it
catches us out. It is one thing to make Love's choice, and
quite another to stick to it. Nevertheless this is the right
way to handle the ground floor life; not eliminating its
frictions, but using its capacities, and gradually purifying
the use of them from self-love. We can afford to have a
warm and well-furnished kitchen, and even to take pride
in it, so long as we remember that it is a kitchen; and that
all its activities must be subservient to the interests of the
whole house, and its observance of the city's law.
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III
IF it is the special work of Prudence to manage our basement
premises, so run the domestic life of the soul that
all its willed choices, the trend of its behaviour, subserve
the purposes of God; it is the special work of Temperance
to harness and control the natural instincts, and subdue
them to the same end. Temperance, says St. Thomas,
is the Virtue of the Beautiful, the virtue which tempers
and orders our vehement desires, and subjects even our
apparently spiritual cravings to the mortifying action of
love: for moderation, proportion, reverence for conditions,
is the very secret of a lasting beauty. To worship the
Lord in the beauty of holiness does not mean the unbridled
enthusiasm of the dervish, but the quiet and
steadfast loyalty of the saint.
Temperance, then, must preside over the furnishing of
the soul's house, if it is to be the setting of a useful, ordered,
peaceful interior life. Much discipline, moderation,
actual self-denial are involved in wise furnishing. No
hurried purchase of the cheap or attractive, without
considering the size and shape of our rooms; no copying
of our neighbour's interesting new curtains, oblivious
of the fact that they will never live with our dear old rugs;
no frenzied efforts to get a grand piano into a two-roomed
flat. If the house is to be a success, what we leave out
will be quite as important as what we put in. Abstine
ft sustine. At every turn we are required to reconsider
our first notions, accept our limitations, mortify our
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desires. It is useless to begin in a style that we cannot
keep up; or, when we see what it involves, will want to
keep up. We all know rooms full of little vases, faded
photographs, plush elephants, and shabby books of verse;
relics of the owners' transient and uncontrolled impulses.
Those rooms lack all sense of space, tranquillity and dignity;
because Temperance, the strong virtue of the
Beautiful, has not been called in. So too the furnishing
of the soul's house depends for its success on a wise
austerity. It requires a spirit of renunciation; checking
that love of what is new, odd or startling, which so easily
kills the taste for quiet colour and simple things, that
tendency to accumulate odds and ends—which swamps our
few real treasures in a dusty crowd of devotional nicknacks.
The inner life does not consist in the abundance
and peculiarity of our spiritual possessions. There is
nothing so foolish, snobbish, and in the end so disastrous
as trying to furnish beyond our means; forgetting our
creaturely status, and the very moderate position which
our small house occupies in the City of God.
Again, Temperance will lay a restraining hand on the
speculative instinct, when it is tempted to rush off to the
horizons of thought or make fatuous efforts to achieve a
'concept of God'; forgetting, in its immoderate craving
for sharper outlines or more light, the awful disparity
between the infinite mystery and the useful but limited
human mind, and the fact that it is under human conditions,
in a human world, that God desires to maintain
and transfigure the soul. 'The angels feed on Thee
fully,' says the ancient prayer of the priest before Mass :
'Let pilgrim man feed on Thee according to his measure.'
Christianity insists that all we need and can assimilate
will be given to us at home; the Light of the human
world coming to us here and now, as the Bread of Life.
But it takes a temperate soul to savour all that lies hidden
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in this saying its moderation, homeliness, perfect
adaptation to our creaturely needs. True, the heavens
declare the glory of the Lord ; but we, whirling along on
our tiny bit of heaven, are more overwhelmed than illuminated
by that majestic revelation. We remain merely
dazzled and bewildered till we consent to come off our
high horse, get our feet firmly on the earth, and look
here and now for the life-giving Reality mediated through
earthly things.
'I am the Son of man, that two-storeyed,
half-made creature. I do not despise the ground floor
and its needs. I am the Bread of his little life, the Light
of his little world: yet I and my Father are one.'
Thus the characteristic mode of God's self-giving to the
human soul is declared to be something which we can
best compare to our ordinary necessary daily food ; given
to us right down in the common life, and satisfying a
fundamental need which is independent of feeling and
taste. Man lives on God, is 'renewed day by day by the
Spirit'; by regular plain meals, offered and deliberately
taken here and now, not by occasional moments of ecstatic
communion. By solid food, not spiritual sweets. 'He
gave them bread from Heaven to eat.' Only a soul
disciplined to temperance can relish all that there is to
be found in bread. Its excursions and aspirations, its
delighted ascents to God, if legitimate and wholesome,
must always bring it back to discover more savour and
meaning in this plain, homely Bread of Life.
'You seek,' says De Caussade, 'the secret of union with God. There is no other secret but to make use of
the material God gives us.' That material is mixed, like
the environment in which we find ourselves. Temperance
will teach us to accept it as it comes to us—not
arrogantly ignoring the visible in our search for the
invisible, but remembering that the life of the city enfolds
and penetrates both. Here the greatest mystics have been
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the most temperate, and so most closely in touch with
the spirit of the New Testament. St. Francis finds in
the difficulties and humiliations of normal existence the
essence of perfect joy. St. Teresa 'desires no other prayer
than that which makes her a better woman'. The latest
in time of her daughters, St. Therese of Lisieux, esteems
'one sacrifice better than any ecstasy'. Brother Lawrence
is content to do his cooking in the Presence of God. St.
Francois de Sales, when St. Chantal tries to turn the
conversation to spiritual channels, directs her attention
to the little tune the footman is singing outside the door.
For all of these the landlord of the upper floor is the
landlord of the ground floor too.
Temperance, then, is the teacher of that genial humility
which is an essential of spiritual health. It makes us
realize that the normal and moderate course is the only
one we can handle successfully in our own power: that
extraordinary practices, penances, spiritual efforts, with
their corresponding graces, must never be deliberately
sought. Some people appear to think that the 'spiritual
life' is a peculiar condition mainly supported by cream
ices and corrected by powders. But the solid norm of
the spiritual life should be like that of the natural life: a matter of porridge, bread and butter, and a cut off the
joint. The extremes of joy, discipline, vision, are not
in our hands, but in the Hand of God. We can maintain
the soul's house in order without any of these. It is
not the best housekeeper who has the most ferocious
spring-clean, or gets in things from the confectioner when
she is expecting guests.
'If any man open the door, I
will come in to him'; share his ordinary meal, and irradiate
his ordinary life. The demand for temperance of
soul, for an acknowledgement of the sacred character of
the normal, is based on that fact the central Christian
fact of the humble entrance of God into our common
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human life. The supernatural can and does seek and
find us, in and through our daily normal experience:
the invisible in the visible. There is no need to be
peculiar in order to find God. The Magi were taught
by the heavens to follow a star; and it brought them, not
to a paralysing disclosure of the Transcendent, but to a
little Boy on His mother's knee.
So too we observe how moderate, humble, attuned to
the scale of our daily life are all the crucial events of the
New Testament. Seen from the outside, none could have
guessed their shattering and transfiguring power. The
apocalyptists looked for a superhuman being
'coming
in the clouds'—they could not escape from the idea of
the abnormal—but the real events which transformed the
spiritual history of man were startling only in their
simplicity. The quiet routine of a childhood and working
life in Nazareth; the wandering ministry of teaching and
compassion, with the least possible stress laid on supernatural
powers; the homely little triumph of Palm Sunday;
the pitiful sufferings of an arrest and execution too
commonplace to disturb the city's life. Christ never based
His claim on strangeness: it is by what He is, rather than
by what He does, that He awes, attracts, amazes.
In spite of its contrasts between the stern and tender,
how steadily temperate and central in its emphasis is all
His teaching : full of the colour and quality of real life
free from the merely startling, ever keeping close to our
normal experience. Sowing, reaping, bread-making,
keeping sheep; in these the secrets of the Kingdom are
hid. He does not ask His disciples to speculate on the
Divine Nature, but to consider the lilies ; it comes to the
same thing and is more suited to our powers. He looks
at and studies these simple and natural things with the
eyes of sympathetic love; because for Him the supernatural
indwells and supports all natural things, not
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merely abnormal or 'religious' things. Therefore each
and all of these natural things, made by God and kept
by God, can become supernatural revelations of His
Spirit. We feel our Lord's complete understanding of
the thing-world in all its richness, beauty and pathos,
His careful, reverent, tender observation of animals,
birds and plants : yet, His entire aloofness from its clutch,
the deep harmony of His Spirit with the very Spirit of
Creative Love. No cleavage here between the two
levels of man's life: the spirit of the upper floor penetrates
to every corner, and transfuses alike the most sacred and
homely activities.
The discourse in the 12th chapter of St. Luke is full of
this temperate genial attitude to the natural, in its contrast
with that intemperance of soul which alternates
between an absolute and inhuman detachment and using
the world of things in a childish grasping way. It is a
long varied lesson in the true realism. Consider that
wonderful world of life in which you are placed, and
observe that its great rhythms of birth, growth and death
all the things that really matter are not in your control.
That unhurried process will go forward in its stately
beauty, little affected by your anxious fuss. Find out,
then, where your treasure really is. Discern substance
from accident. Don't confuse your meals with your life,
and your clothes with your body. Don't lose your head
over what perishes. Nearly everything does perish: so
face the facts, don't rush after the transient and unreal.
Maintain your soul in tranquil dependence on God;
don't worry; don't mistake what you possess for what
you are. Accumulating things is useless. Both mental
and material avarice are merely silly in view of the dread
facts of life and death. The White Knight would have
done better had he left his luggage at home. The simpler
your house, the easier it will be to run. The fewer
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the
things and the people you
'simply must have', the nearer
you will be to the ideal of happiness 'as having nothing,
to possess all'. We observe how exquisitely the whole
doctrine is kept within the boundaries of our natural
experience : how it tends to deepen this given experience
rather than escape from it. Man is being taught how
to run that ground-floor life which he cannot get rid of
and must not ignore; yet taught by one in whom the
other life shines with unmatched perfection, whose whole
personality radiates God.
If now we consider how we ourselves stand in respect
of this virtue of Temperance, we discover that it must
bring its sobering realism into our social, personal, and
spiritual life. Its peaceful acceptance of facts must colour
all our relations with others, all our dealings with ourselves,
all our responses to God.
First, in relation to others Temperance requires a quiet
refusal to capitulate to feverish and distracting emotions;
intense attractions and intense hostilities. It means a
tempering of ground-floor passions to the needs of the
upstairs life; that check upon vehement impulse, that
ordering of love, which involves its absolute dissociation from claimfulness, clutch and excess. The love which
the Saints pour out is a gentle and genial sunshine;
never fierce, concentrated, intemperate. Those who
come to the soul's house should find it nicely warmed all
over; its inner chamber must not be like one of those
rooms which have a fierce little gas stove in one corner,
and a deadly chill everywhere else. Custodia cordis,
the secret of an ordered life, involves the maintenance
of an even temperature; and a refusal to rush out upon
a flood of inordinate feeling towards certain persons,
deeds and things, instead of taking what comes to us
tranquilly, with a light hand.
Again, theological views, and political loyalties, must
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all be subject to the rule of temperance; killing presumption,
intolerance and the spirit of controversy,
acknowledging at each point the fragmentary and
relative character of all human knowledge and therefore
the peril and absurdity of absolute judgements and scornful
criticisms of the opinions of other men. So too the restless,
energetic desire to get things done, the impetuous
determination to remodel the world nearer to our own
hearts' desire, the exaggerated importance we attribute
to our own action, the emphasis placed on doing, to the
detriment of being—all this must be mortified if calm and
order are to rule the lower floor. We shall never create a
home-like atmosphere unless we consent to spend some
time in our own home ; and, were a better balance struck
between our inward life and our outward activities, the
result would at once be seen in the improved quality of
that outward work. Like Peter's wife's mother, while the
fever is on us we cannot really serve our fellow men.
I often think that when St. Paul wrote his classic list
of the fruits of the Spirit, he gave us unconsciously a
wonderful account of his own growth in this spiritual
realism. We should hardly think of the virtue of Temperance
as specially characteristic of St. Paul, and even to
the end of his days he probably found it difficult; yet in
this he discovers the final proof of the working of Creative
Spirit in his soul. He begins upon a note of convinced
fervour. 'The fruit the harvest of the Spirit is Love,
Joy, Peace.' No three words could better express that
rich beatitude which, in his holiest moments, has flooded
his soul. Then he pauses. We seem to see him thinking,
'After all, I don't always feel like that. Things are often
very trying. I don't seem able to love; peace and joy
are unobtainable; I feel another law in my members
warring against the law of my mind. Yet the indwelling
Spirit is still there: to live is Christ. How does that
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Spirit act on my troubled spirit in those less expansive
moments? Surely in the long-suffering, gentleness and
kindness which I know must control all my reactions to
the world of men.' They were not the reactions which
St. Paul found specially easy. We see the yoke being laid
on his stormy instinctive nature: the love that is easy on
the upper floor being brought downstairs, to prove itself
in the common life.
At last, at the very end, we reach those unexpected
characters which are the earnest of his total transformation
in the Spirit. Fidelity, Meekness, Moderation: an
unsensational but unbroken loyalty to the infinite life
and purpose which had made him its own, an acceptance of its gradual pace, a refusal to hurry, a restraining of the
impetuous desire to get everything possible out of those
new converts who were only babies still, and tell the
candid truth to those who had let him down these are
the real fruits of his subjection to God. Paul, whose first
idea had been to breathe fire and slaughter upon the
Christians, and whose second idea had been to be 'all
out' for Christ—who was quite as obsessed as we are by
the vision of all that there was to do, and the sense that
he was called upon to do it—learns that the final gift of the
Spirit is not intensity of life, but Temperance. 'The
servant of the Lord must not strive.' Hurry, bustle,
anxiety to get things done; an immoderate demand for
perfection and consequent nervous wear and tear; the
wasteful use of the premises given us by God, are all
condemned.
Next, we are called to be temperate as regards the
standard by which we estimate ourselves; which must
neither be too degraded nor too exalted for our status.
We are neither angels nor devils, but half-achieved,
unstable creatures; alternately pulled towards the higher
and the lower life. Temperance, therefore, will not take
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too ferocious a view of our inevitable fluctuations. It
will not judge the state of our house by its ground floor
alone or its upper rooms alone; but by both. The ground
floor, to the very end, will partake of the imperfection
of nature. It is good and humbling that this should
be so: and we should bring a certain genial patience to
acceptance of the facts, bearing evenly our own uneven
performances. Our part is to manage the household
wisely, without overstraining its resources; if we do,
it
will have its revenge. So we are required to be reasonable
both in what we refuse to nature and what we
demand from it; temperate in renunciation as well as
enjoyment, in supersensible as well as sensible activities.
The spiritual life constantly draws upon the resources of
the natural life ; much nervous energy is used in prayer,
especially absorbed or difficult prayer. Therefore we
should treat our limited powers with reverence, avoiding
wasteful overstrain. Further, we should arrange our
housework on a reasonable plan: not letting ourselves in
for a whole day's scrubbing, and then in our desperation
resorting to strong soda and harsh soap. After all, the
interior life needs no sensational measures. It requires
only our gentle and faithful collaboration with God, in
fitting the human nature He has given us for Him;
gradually making the whole house ready for that Spirit
which is tranquillity and peace.
Thus temperance in regard to ourselves involves
temperance as towards God; an avoidance of the devotional
strain and clutch we sometimes mistake for fervour;
a humble recognition of our limits in respect of that
communion with Him which we can enjoy. The beginning
of all spiritual wisdom is a realization of the moderate
character of our situation—the vast distance between
even the most illuminated soul and those mysteries of the
Being of God on which the seraphs did not dare to look.
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Temperance suggests to us how awe-struck and humble,
how full of adoration our demeanour should be, over
against that unsearchable Reality; how moderate and
child-like our choice of religious objectives and practices.
We are not to 'ransack the Divine Majesty' as the old
mystics had it, but meekly accept the revelation of Himself
that He gives us; never arrogantly seeking more light
than we can bear, or more food than we can digest.
'Well, Sadie,' said an American mother to her little
girl, who was devouring everything within reach, 'I
reckon you won't long have the use of that breakfast.'
There are intemperate devotional meals to which the
same risk is attached. It is left to us to feed our souls
wisely and carefully not too many spiritual sweets, not
too much effervescent emotion. We are to be content
with the food we find suits us strengthens us, makes us
grow—not make wild efforts to get the food we like best.
Nor are we to be fastidious in our rejection of everything
we do not think 'essential', until we reach what we
choose to regard as a 'purely spiritual' type of prayer.
Our ghostly insides are much like our natural insides;
they need a certain amount of what doctors call 'roughage',
and seldom thrive on too refined a diet.
The homely mixed food, the routine meals, of institutional
religion, keep our digestions in good order.
Particularly at times when we are drawn to fervour, or
our spiritual sensibility seems to transcend the average
level, we need the wholesome corrective of the common
religious diet, the average practice, with its rough and
ready adaptation to ordinary needs and limitations, to
remind us that we are not pure spirits yet. In that
excellent parable, The History of Sir John Sparrow, a logical
insistence on the reduction of his food to its essential
constituents at last left the hero face to face with a saucer of canary seed. He had proved that it contained all
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the human body needed; but somehow the position was
not a satisfactory one. Therefore Temperance will
restrain us from simplifying or etherealizing our religious
diet over-much. We are mixed feeders, and must do
as our fellows. Fastidious choices, special paths, look
rather ridiculous in the 'perpetual bright clearness of
Eternity'.
The light which bathes the paintings of the Umbrian
masters, and gives them their profound tranquillity, is
not a vivid illumination. It reveals no distant detail,
creates no violent contrasts. Yet we feel that its gentle
radiance, softening all harsh outlines, comes from beyond
the world in its unearthly beauty; and quietens everything
on which it falls. It stills all passion and intensity, reproves
all haste: gives the calm beauty of holiness even
to the anguish of the Cross. That is the light in which
the soul's life, world, prayer, should be bathed: harmonizing
nature and spirit in its lovely, temperate radiance.
The Heaven of Temperance, says Dante, is the home of
the contemplative saints. In its soil the ladder is planted
on which they ascend to the Vision of God. For Temperance,
stilling those excesses of desire, those self-actuated
struggles, which hinder the silent working of Creative
Spirit in the soul, finds its perfect work in that quietude,
humility and suppleness which are the only preparation
of prayer.
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IV
WHAT is the final need of our ground-floor premises, if
they are to bear the weight of the upper storey; the thrust
and pressure of the supernatural life? The Saints reply,
with one voice: Fortitude, strength, staying-power! To
be 'stablished, strengthened, settled' not etherealized,
exalted, illuminated is St. Peter's supreme desire for
his converts. It is the sober ambition of a realist who
has known in his own person the disasters that await a
fervour based on feeling rather than will. The perfect
work of Prudence and Temperance is to make our natural
humanity 'strong in the Lord'; so establish the soul's
house on the rock, and make its walls solid, that it can
carry those strange upper works which are part of the
builder's design.
The ground floor, rising up from the natural order, is
subject to its law of consequence; all the vicissitudes
of circumstance, health, opportunity, the ebb and flow
of energy and inclination, the temperamental reaction of
the souls with whom we must live. Through these, God
reaches us, deals with us, trains us; and to the uttermost.
That living Spirit pressing so insistently on our spirits,
filling with its spaceless presence every room of the soul's
house, yet comes to us in and through natural circumstance; and makes of this circumstance, however homely,
the instrument of its purifying power. The touch of the
eternal reaches us most often through the things of sense.
We are called to endure this ceaseless divine action; not
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with a sullen stoicism, but with a living grateful patience.
The events by which we are thus shaped and disciplined
are often as much as the natural creature can bear. God
comes to the soul in His working clothes, and brings His
tools with Him. We need fortitude if we are to accept
with quietness the sharp blows and persistent sandpapering
which bring our half-finished fitments up to the standard required by the city's plan. But it is this steady
endurance, born of the humble sense that everything
which happens matters, yet only matters because it
mediates God, and offers a never to be repeated opportunity
of improving our correspondence with God, which
more and more makes the house fit to be a habitation of
the Spirit. It is not a week-end cottage. It must be
planned and organized for life, the whole of life, not for
fine weather alone. Hence strong walls and dry cellars
matter more than many balconies or interesting garden
design.
The winds will blow and the floods come to the very
end; overwhelming events, wild gales of feeling and
impulse, will sweep round the walls. The doors will
bang and windows rattle. The bitter, cold and penetrating
waters of disappointment and grief will rise. But
the little house will stand firm, if it is established on the
solid rock of spiritual realism; not the soft easily-dug
ground of spiritual sentiment. Its foundations must go
down into the invisible world of prayer : something of
the steadfastness of the Unchanging must underlie our
human changefulness. The balance between the different
parts, with their compensating thrusts and strains, must
keep the walls true. If one becomes excessive, and pushes
too much, the house may fall.
That the soul's self-giving prayer and work should be
really costly and difficult, should call for the putting
out of a definite degree of effort, should involve a certain
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tension and even pain all this is surely good. The job
that is done quite easily is seldom done quite well.
However we conceive it—whether as pilgrimage, or
growth—the spiritual life of man is never without an
element of conflict. Effort and endurance must enter
deeply into the process by which our mixed being is
harmonized, simplified, expanded, and made fit to be
the instrument of God. For those in whom there is a
pronounced disharmony between natural temperament
and supernatural call, the struggle may be bitter until
the very end; and it is better that it should so continue,
than that we should harmonize ideal and achievement
on a lower level than the best possible, and so false to
the city's building-law. We are not to yield an inch to
the bungalow-ideal of human character. But this rightful
interior tension should never threaten our spiritual
equilibrium. When Fortitude begins to be coloured by
strain, and action tends to become agitation, we are
approaching the danger zone of the soul's life. That
soul is required to be a 'fixed abode for God through the
Spirit'; and for this, something of the still peace of the
Eternal, 'never changing state into the contrary' must
toughen its fragility, temper its restlessness. The paradox
of peaceful striving runs right through the New Testament.
Fortitude means the achievement, even on the
natural level, of an inward stability which transcends the
world of change. The small size of our premises matters
little, if the walls are weather-proof and stand firm.
Such fortitude is not the virtue of the dashing soldier.
It means rather the virtue of the keeper of the fortress;
the inconspicuous heroism that sits tight. And in the
life of the spirit there is a great deal of sitting tight; of
refusing to be frightened out of it or decoyed away from
it; of refusing to despair, waiting till the weather improves,
till business gets brisker, day breaks, the shadows lift.
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We must endure a mysterious pressure, which operates
more often and more purely in darkness than in light.
We cannot take up the soul's privileges and responsibilities
as a householder of the Spiritual City, merely by paying
one instalment and getting immediate delivery of all the
goods we desire, with an insurance policy protecting us
from risk; so that there is nothing to do but settle down
cosily in our freshly furnished rooms. That citizenship
is the beginning of a new life; a total sublimation of
experience, in which all life's tensions and possibilities
are raised to a higher term. More demand on prudence
and initiative, keener struggle than before; a new capacity
for joy, but also a new capacity for pain. It means
incorporation in that Mystical Body, through which the
awful saving power of God is poured out on the world:
and taking our small share in filling up the measure of
those sufferings by which alone redeeming work is done.
The Holy City stands on a rock; but in the midst of a
world of sin and pain. And the price of citizenship, as
regards contact with that world, is likely to include
suffering and loneliness, much misunderstanding, much
self-giving with little apparent result. It may go further,
and require that entire and pure act of resignation, that
self-oblation even to the uttermost, which was once
accomplished in Gethsemane, and remains the clue to
the whole redeeming and creative life. The soul needs
Fortitude, if it is to take up that great vocation.
Baron von Hügel speaks gratefully in one of his letters
of "My little old life which God has deigned to train by
not a few trials'. It is this deeply grateful recognition
of the Divine action, as specially discovered in those disciples
and sufferings which teach Fortitude to the soul,
and toughen it to take its share in the sacrificial action of
the Body of Christ, which distinguishes from the devotee
the truly awakened spirit, the living acting member of
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the Communion of Saints. An uncalculating surrender
of our own premises to the general purpose, losing all
individual preferences and reluctances in the vast outlines
of God's mysterious design, is the condition of that
membership: and to be able to make this willed surrender,
is the most solemn dignity of the human soul. It means
a sober willingness to renounce all spiritual enjoyments,
in order to take up the burden of the world's wrongness ;
put up in our own persons with the results. All must
suffer; the lesson of Christianity is what can be done
with suffering, when it is met with self-oblivious courage
and love.
'To him that overcometh is promised Angels' Food:
and to him that is overcome, much misery,' says Thomas
a Kempis. The breaking of bread, without the cup of
the Passion, is only half the Eucharistic secret. We do
not understand that secret till we see the Eucharist and
the Cross as two aspects of one indivisible act. The
communicant is merely what St. John of the Cross
roughly calls a 'spiritual glutton' unless this rich mysterious
action involves for him a complete and sacrificial self-giving
for the saving purposes of God; unless he makes his
tiny contribution to that perfect work of charity, which is
the eternal act of Christ.
The supernatural food is given, the little separate life
fed and enhanced, that it may be gathered, itself a lively
sacrifice, into the great sacrificial movement of the Divine
life. 'He that eateth dwelleth in Me, and I in him.'
But the energy thus received from beyond the world,
must be met by the soul's self-oblivious fortitude, its spirit of steadfast endurance, staying power. Fervour
is not enough. We need the grit that puts things through
in spite of apparent failure, or the shrinking horror of the
flesh: that achieves its victory by way of the lonely
darkness of the Garden, the more lonely and terrible
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darkness which fell at midday upon the Cross. Those
whose courage and fidelity failed at the first withering
touch of the Passion had just experienced in their own
persons the solemn and touching mystery on which the
Church lives still. By it their spirits were made willing;
but their flesh was weak. And however great the peace
and joy that welcome the soul when it elects for the
spiritual life, it will not be long before it, too, experiences
the fundamental need of Fortitude if it is to be faithful
to the supernatural call. Its true initiation into the
realities of that call, comes with the first secret stand-up
fight with a temptation, desire, or attachment that truly
attracts it; the first deliberate sacrificial death to sin and
self. That means deep suffering, whatever form it takes:
and included in it, is the temptation to abandon a job
that seems beyond our feeble powers.
The soul, said Coventry Patmore,
'dies upon the Cross
every time it resists interior temptation even to despair'.
We must be crucified to the world, the downward pull,
not once, but again and again; because the conflict
between the two lives persists in us till holiness is reached.
The Cross stands on the frontier between the natural and
supernatural worlds. Thus the bracing of natural
character is essential if we are to bear the tensions of the supernatural life. It is a stern business. It enters into
conflict, it goes on being in conflict, with all in us that is
turned towards the world. The principles of Christianity
are absolute; they reflect Eternity. The principles of
the world may be judicious, amiable, beneficent. But
they are contingent: they arise from, and are adapted to
a world of change. Christianity looks beyond the world's
flux to God, the unchanging Reality. It seeks the increasing
incarnation of His Spirit; and for that sake
accepts a standard of purity, renunciation and forgiveness
alien to the interests of the world. Thus, to live in the
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world and not of it and this is the situation for which
our house is made requires much fortitude, a love that
is loyal and courageous rather than demonstrative: 'not
worn out with labours, not daunted with any difficulties.'
We are committed to a swaying battle, not an easy
victory ; and our worst enemies are those of our own house.
Again and again our temperamental devils will be too
much for us; ingrained habits, inherited tendencies, will
fling us into the dungeon of impotent despair. It is with
our spiritual as with our physical maladies. When we
have faithfully used all rightful means of healing, a certain
residuum may remain; some humiliating weakness, or
chronic malformation we cannot cure, but can make an
occasion of patience, courage, surrender. 'Fear none of
those things thou shalt suffer.' If our first experience of
the life of spirit comes with the lovely glow of victory
which rewards a bit of costly self-conquest; perhaps the
second, and more real experience comes when we attempt
a further struggle with our unfortunate ground-floor
conditions in our own strength, and fail abjectly. For
then we are thrown back upon God, the only source of
strength; and abruptly reminded that contempt of self
is said to be the city's law. 'When I am weak, then I
am strong.' The Miserere, the classic poem of penitence,
is all about this paradoxical power of the soul which
abides in its own nothingness; the abandonment as it
were of all trust in its own poor individualized bit of
moral energy, and the receiving instead of a mysterious
participation in the Spirit of living strength.
Certainly our own preliminary effort and struggle are
needed. Fortitude does not merely consist in waiting
about; but in a real bracing of the will to courageous
action. It is to him that overcometh, that the fruit of
the Tree of Life is given.
'Will and grace rise and fall
together.' Ghostly strength is like one of those funds to
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which the Government adds £1 for every pound subscribed
voluntarily. It is the reward of really trying to
do or bear something for God; not of wanting to do or
bear something. As even the most impressive view from
the hotel terrace tells nothing of the real secret of the
mountains, which is only imparted to those who will
turn their backs on comfort, take the risks; so the passive
appreciation of the spiritual landscape, the agreeable
reading of mystical books—fruit of the courage and love
of other souls, but making no demand on ours—gives us
no genuine contact with the things of God We must
put on our own boots, face the early start and long slow
plod through the lower pastures, where the mountains
are seldom in view—make a rule of life, and practise it
in the teeth of reluctance and discouragement if we
want to share the life of the mountaineer; know the
strange rapture of communion with the everlasting hills.
'No one can come to the sublime heights of the
Divinity,' said the voice of the Eternal Wisdom to Suso,
'if they have not experienced the bitterness and lowliness
of My humanity.' That is the soul's testing ground. It
is there, under ordinary human conditions and subject
to their humbling limitations, that it gets its training for
the heights; purges its love of comfort, learns patience,
shows its grit. There it discovers that fortitude does not
mean any spectacular display of gallantry; but sticking
it out in fog and storm, loneliness and disillusion going
on and on, in spite of the cuts and bruises to affection,
dignity and self-esteem, never unnerved by the endless
tumbles, the dull fatigue, through which it must ascend
in heart and mind, accomplish the work of sacrifice and
prayer. Fortitude means the courage of the lonely
soldier in an isolated corner; the courage of one whose
friends deserted Him in the crisis; the courage of the
naked will alone with the Will of God. Manhood is
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incomplete till it has known the agony of spiritual isolation
in a crowded world: endured with fortitude the
desolation and helplessness of the soul over against
surrounding mystery. According to tradition our Lord
fell three times under the weight of the Cross; but rose
and went on, with full knowledge that worse suffering,
more bitter humiliation, lay before Him.
We see again and again in the lives of the Saints how
constant and definite is the demand made on this courage
and endurance ; which is the natural expression of their
heroic, unlimited, supernatural love. It is by way of the
difficulties, sufferings and humiliations of the natural life
that they cure the soft human horror of the austere side
of the spiritual life, test and brace their growing spirits,
make them capable of its full privileges and responsibilities.
Little quarter is given to those in whom this total transformation
is begun. 'His Majesty' says the ever-valiant
Teresa, 'loves a courageous soul'; and, old and very ill,
struggling in the teeth of circumstance to make her last
foundation at Burgos, she hears the inner voice which
has been the support of all her labours, saying 'Now
Teresa, be strong!' So too the angel who visited Suso
in the hour of his utmost trial, did not offer him a devotional
aspirin; but merely made the astringent remark
'Behave like a man!' That was Suso's immediate task;
the way in which his soul was cleansed and strengthened,
and brought to 'the Upper School of Perfect Self-
Abandonment'.
So our survey of the ground floor of the soul's house
brings us to the acceptance of this ideal of a disciplined
normal humanity, deepened and organized, 'stablished,
strengthened, settled' as the true basis of a spiritual life.
The peaceful, temperate and balanced employment in
God of those natural faculties and opportunities committed
to us, choosing with self-oblivious love what helps,
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remembering that excess most often hinders, bearing and
enduring all that the choice of His interests entails ; this
must bring order to our downstairs life, if the home is
ever to be fit for its guest. 'Peace,' says St. Thomas
Aquinas, 'is the tranquillity of order; disquiet diminishes
as sanctity increases.' And if there is one characteristic
which marks a genuine spiritual experience, that characteristic
is surely the deep peace in which it places the soul.
Thus a certain slowing down and spacing out of our
ceaseless clockwork activities is a necessary condition of
the deepening and enrichment of life. The spirit of
Joy and the spirit of Hurry cannot live in the same house.
But Joy, not Hurry, is an earnest of the Presence of God;
an attribute of the creative life.
Without the steadying influences of Prudence, Temperance
and Fortitude, without the wise austerity of feeling,
thought and will which these require, who can hope to
be quiet, and so prepare a habitation for that serene
Spirit of Joy which is God? Without these, we are perpetually
tormented by indecision, weakened by excesses,
discouraged by failures; the trials and darkness which
form part of the life of prayer defeat instead of bracing
us, the very richness of experience and opportunity
through which God moulds our characters, bewilders us.
It is not till the ground floor is in good order that we
acquire the priceless art of doing one thing at a time, and
doing it with total dedication, which is the foundation
of an ordered life. The sense of cleavage between the
duties of Mary and Martha, and a certain uneasy effort
to combine them, is responsible for much psychic untidiness,
tension and weakening fuss. When the whole house
is devoted to one interest, and a working harmony is
established between the upper and the lower floor, each
action, however homely, has the quality of prayer; since
every corner and all that is done in it is informed by God
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and tends to God. It is the work of Prudence to discern
and accept all that He proposes ; because however odd it
seems, it is the apt means of the soul's contact with Him.
It is the work of Temperance to resist the temptation to
bring in other things, crowd the soul's life with loves,
labours, or devotions not truly proposed to it by God.
It is the work of Fortitude to endure His moulding action
with tranquillity, and maintain our steadfast correspondence
with His will. In the secret world of self-conquest,
in all dealings with circumstance—people, opportunities,
trials, tasks—and in the most hidden experiences of the
spirit, it is on this triple foundation that the soul's deep
action must rest. Here is the solid basis of that truly
mortified and tranquil character which can bear the
stress and burden of the supernatural life.
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V
WE go on to consider the upper floor of the soul's house;
the home of those faculties which point beyond our here
and now existence, which are capable of God, tend towards
God, and only find their full meaning in God.
We have seen what we have to do in the way of transmuting
the powers and instincts which rule the natural
life. Behaviour, Impulse, Endurance—aspects of our
living correspondence with the natural order—must all
be purified, sublimated, if the house is to become a
solid habitation of the Spirit; if its walls are to bear the
thrust of the upper floor. But the life of nature, even
in its perfection, is not enough in itself. It makes an
admirable bungalow; but the City of Mansoul is not a
bungalow town. Though it is based on the purification,
the transmutation of our common earthborn nature,
more than morality is needed for the purposes of the
spiritual life. That life requires the transfiguration in
God of the upper floor and its special powers—the stuff
of personality, the 'superior faculties of the soul' as the
old psychologists say: and this is the peculiar work of
Faith, Hope and Charity, the three 'supernatural virtues'
which imply God, tend to God, and take the soul beyond
its own resources into Him. By Faith we mean the
lifting up into God of our natural human power of
understanding the world; by Hope, the state in which
our whole mental content, our 'apperceiving mass' is
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penetrated and transmuted by our confident expectation
of Him; by Charity, that glowing friendship between
Creator and created, which merges our will in His will.
Thus all three are forms of one thirst for ultimate Being,
the drive of personality towards God; and at their fullness
merge into one act or state, which lifts the soul up
and out beyond itself and the interests of its own small
house, and beyond all merely utilitarian and thisworld
notions of goodness, to something more a certain
loving participation in Eternal Life.
For this, to make a home for the soul's adoring vision,
confidence, and love, the house of humanity is built and
kept in order. The prudence, moderation, steadfast
endurance which control its domestic life, the constant
death to self which they entail, are worth while, simply
because they support this other life; the life that flowers
in Faith, Hope and Charity, and thus incarnates something
of the Eternal; the life which is in its fullest sense the life
of prayer. For real prayer is simply the expression and
the experience of Faith, Hope and Charity; each penetrating
and enhancing the other, and merging to form
in us that state of energetic and loving surrender, in
which our spirits have according to their measure
communion with the Spirit of God.
Thus an outlook upon the world controlled by Faith
is the privilege of every house that is established in the
City of God. It means the transcending of our limited
anthropocentric outlook; being lifted up to a certain
participation in the universal Divine outlook. Those
who 'in heart and mind thither ascend and with Him
continually dwell'
change their angle of vision; see the
world and all things in it from His point of view. A
tremendous change from our ordinary way of seeing and
thinking takes place then. We gaze with cleansed
sight on the world we are placed in, and the life we are
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privileged to lead in it; perceive its richness and
mystery, its utter dependence on God.
Faith—often so cheaply equated with mere belief —is
something far more than this. It is the soul's watchtower;
a solitary place at the top of a steep flight of stairs.
Those stairs, for some souls, have almost the character of
the Way of the Cross; so humbling are the falls, so disconcerting
the evidence of our human weakness, so absolute
the stripping, and so complete the sacrifice which is
asked as the price of the ascent. Bit by bit, all the wrappings
of sensitive nature must be left behind. And even
for those to whom the way lies open, and of whom this
utter denudation is not asked, it is sometimes a great
effort to go up. The stairs are steep; we are, or think
that we are, very busy. We know that if we do go, it
must be with purified sight, clear of prejudice and of
distracting passions, empty of our selves; for only in
emptiness of spirit, as Ruysbroeck says, can we receive
that Incomprehensible Light which is
'nothing else
but a fathomless gazing and seeing'. With so little
leisure and so languid an inclination, it seems better
to mutter a few prayers whilst we tidy the kitchen;
content ourselves with the basement view of the
world, and rationalize this interior laziness as humility
of soul.
But if we do make the effort needed for that ascent,
what a revelation! Busy on the ground floor, we never
realized that we had a place like this; that our small house shot up so high into Heaven. We find ourselves, as it
were, in a little room with a window on each side.
There is no guarantee as to what any one soul will see
out of those windows, for there is always far more to see
than we can apprehend. Nor is the view on any one day
equally good out of each window. Sometimes it is the
homely detail in the foreground that we notice; seen
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now in new proportion, from a fresh point of view.
Sometimes that is forgotten, and the eye is drawn to the
greatness and beauty of the distant hills. Sometimes
the country lies before us hard and clear as a map;
at others, a delicate haze gives mystery to the landscape
of faith. The light, too, is variable. Sometimes the
heavenly sunshine streams in with overwhelming splendour.
We are warmed, dazzled, delighted; though we
see nothing distinctly, the lovely radiance brings its own
assurance. Sometimes we go up, to find a grey day.
The view is there, but all seems cheerless; there is no joy
in our faith. This does not mean that we had better go
downstairs. The upper room is more than a devotional
sun-trap. Faith seeks the enlightenment of the understanding,
whatever pain comes with it; and shirks no
truth, however bewildering, which is shown to it by God.
It means a share in the outlook of one who rejoiced in
spirit, yet was sorrowful even unto death; whose rich
experience embraced spiritual vision and spiritual
darkness too. The variations of the weather, then,
should never control our faith.
Though the landscape in which our watch-tower stands
is really continuous, the two windows seem to us to look
out on different and contrasting worlds. The soul can
never peer round the corner, and see the point at which
they meet. Moreover, the windows themselves are not
always the same size. Some have a great casement
opening to the north, which reveals vast expanses of sky.
Others, as St. Bernard says, only have narrow slits
through which the rays of the Eternal Light come in;
but these may have a big bow window on the other side
of the tower.
The northward view is a view of infinite spaces—a
wild and solemn landscape over against us, which seems
without meaning for the little lives of men—a desert
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country full of strange beauty, which leads the eye outward
to the horizon; and shows it, at an awful distance,
the peaks of great mountains hanging in the air. Here
the soul looks out with adoration to the vast uncharted
continent of the Divine. For some, this is the window
that exercises a perpetual attraction; the view exhilarates
while it daunts them, the mystery in its incomparable
majesty is friendly though august. It is God Pure, the
soul's country, the Transcendent World in itself, that
they crave for; not the bit made over to the use of man.
This it is which wakes their awe-struck and delighted
adoration, nourishes their souls. The stellar radiance
in which they see it, is more desirable than the sunny
landscapes of earth. It lifts them beyond all conflict,
all self-occupation, and fills them with a solemn joy.
'Thou art!' cries St. Augustine as he gazes from this
window, 'and art God and Lord of all that Thou hast
created; and in Thy sight stand fast the causes of the
transient, and the fountains of the changeable abide
unchanged!'
Even though the revelation comes seldom, for this is
the outlook which is most often clouded, the souls who
are possessed by this thirst for the Unchanging are content
to kneel by the window, and know that the unspeakable
splendour of the Eternal is there. 'Here,' says Ruysbroeck,
'our reason abides with open eyes in the darkness;
that is, in an abysmal ignorance. And in this darkness,
the abysmal Splendour remains covered and hid from
us, for its unsearchable infinitude blinds our reason, but
its simplicity and self-hood enfold and transform us.'
Thus even those who have yet seen nothing from this
window, should resist the temptation to veil its gaunt
outline in curtains embroidered with symbolic designs.
As travellers who go up to Darjeeling and wait for many
days to see the majestic vision of the Himalaya at dawn,
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a moment will come when, if they wait long enough and
look high enough, they will see the mighty summits
hanging in the air; and after that, the world will never
be the same to them again. 'It is far better,' says
Spinoza, 'to know that God's Perfections are infinite,
than to persuade ourselves that we know what those
Perfections are.' It was surely for the refreshment of that
vision, a renewal of that still and joyous gazing on
Eternal Life, that our Lord went up alone into the
mountain to pray. Strength and patience, a renewed
sense of proportion, come from communion with that
wide horizon, that sky of uncounted stars: a wholesome
humbling sense of the contrast between our tiny house
and the life it shelters, and the steadfast mystery of the
heavens with their unknown worlds. 'The utmost that
we know of God,' says St. Thomas, 'is nothing in respect
of that which He is.'
Such an outlook on the Unchanging redeems our
prayer from pettiness, discounts our worries, brings a
solemn selfless peace. Everything drops away except
awe, longing, and humility. 'Whom have I in heaven
but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire
beside thee.' The soul stands over against the eternal
reality of the Universe, and finds there a friend and not
a void. Deus meus! My God! We have, in our creaturely
weakness, a personal hold upon Infinite Reality. The
Psalms are full of this exultant certitude. 'O God,
thou art my God! early will I seek thee!'
St. Augustine
is ever recurring to such thoughts: isolating, gazing at,
the Fact of God. Thus to dwell upon the great keywords
of religion gives depth and width to human prayer;
clarifies the sight with which we look out upon the sky.
We turn to the window on the other side of Faith's
tower. That looks out upon our homely, natural,
changeful world. It shows us human life, conditions,
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problems, from the angle of faith; and the mystery of
the Eternal self-revealed in human ways. That too is a
wonderful and inspiring sight, enlightening the understanding.
Though clouds pass over that landscape,
storms come, seasons change, it is yet seen to be full of
God's glory. The same unchanging light and life
bathes the world we see out of each window. Jungle
and city, church and market-place, the most homely
and the most mysterious aspects of creation, are equally known as works of the Wisdom of God.
From this window the earth with its intricate life is
perceived in the light of the Incarnation; God self-disclosed
in and with us, as well as God over against us.
The depth and mystery of Reality, its stern yet loving
action, are revealed within the limitations of history, and
in the here-and-now experience of men. We pierce the
disconcerting veil of appearance, and discern that Holy
Creativity, making, rectifying, and drawing all things to
itself. At times a lovely glint transfigures even the
smallest living things. We see the kitten play in Paradise.
The humble inhabitants of the hedgerows suddenly
reveal their origin, their kinship with God. At other
times a deeper secret, the little golden rill of Holiness
welling up from beyond the world of visible life, is glimpsed
by us in the most unexpected situations. Yet there is no
pink glass in this window. It blurs none of the dread
facts; the ever-present evil, the baffling pain, the conflict
and apparent failure and inequality of life. But from
the angle of Faith these are seen in proportion, as material
for the self-imparting of God; and for man's self-giving to
God truly tabernacled among us. Through the clatter
of the world, Faith hears an insistent call to purity and
sweetness ; and discerns in the tangle of life the perpetual
emergence of an other-worldly beauty, which has its
source and end in Him alone.
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Even from the ground-floor level, all persons of goodwill
can realize the moral beauty and deep human pathos of
the Gospels; the pattern of behaviour put before us in
Christ, and again and again incarnate in the Saints. But
Faith, ascending in heart and mind, sees here the Living
Real self-revealed in human ways to human creatures;
and in every scene and mystery of this life a natural and
a super-natural quality light cast on the meaning of
our strange human experience, as the medium of God's
secret moulding action, and on His way with the growing
souls of men. By this 'living way' as the writer of
Hebrews says, and through the veil of this humanity, we
penetrate to the Holiest. It is by going upstairs and
gazing out of that window that we regain poise, courage
and peace when our own human experience seems too
much for us; for there we see it lit by a supernatural light,
and one walking through that earthly landscape in all
things tempted as we are yet without sin, who humbles
and convicts us on the one hand strengthens and refreshes
us on the other hand. As a great artist, taking from the
natural world the form and raw material of his picture, is
loyal and reverent in accepting the limits of that material,
subordinating his freedom to the stuff in which he works,
and only thus conveys the message of his spirit; so God
here gives man a picture woven of the stuff of human
history and experience, which is a full and perfect revelation
of His eternal Spirit in human terms. Faith lifts us
to the level at which we can see this, and more and more
vividly as our eyes grow clearer: shows us the express
image of the Eternal Perfect revealed in a human life,
of which the various and serial action depends on an
unchanging contemplation of God. Above all in the
mysterious power and holiness of sacrifice, the Cross,
transfiguring and lifting up the created soul though in
utmost pain, darkness and confusion to a share in the
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creative work of God, it finds the one enduring link
between the natural and the supernatural life.
Thus, to the eye of Faith the common life of humanity,
not any abnormal or unusual experience, is material of
God's redeeming action. As ordinary food and water are
the stuff of the Christian sacraments, so it is in the ordinary
pain and joy, tension and self-oblivion, sin and heroism
of normal experience that His moulding and transfiguring
work is known. The Palestinian glow which irradiates
the homely mysteries of the Gospel, and gives to them
the quality of eternal life, lights up for Faith the slums and
suburbs, the bustle, games and industries, of the modern
world. Then the joys, sorrows, choices and renunciations,
the poor little efforts and tragedies, of the ground-floor
life, are seen to be shot through, dignified and transfigured
by the heavenly radiance, the self-oblivious heroism, of
the upstairs life. Nor can we exclude from a share in
this transforming glory the mystery and pathos of that
animal creation from which our natural lives emerge.
Faith shows us each tiny creature ringed round by the
celestial light. A deep reverence for our common
existence, with its struggles and faultiness, yet its solemn
implications, comes over us when we realize all this;
gratitude for the ceaseless tensions and opportunities
through which God comes to us and we can draw
a little nearer to Him a divine economy in which the
simplest and weakest are given their part and lot in
the holy redemptive sacrifice of humanity, and incorporated
in the Mystical Body which incarnates
Eternal Life.
So in this upper room, this 'spire-top of the soul' as
the mystics call it, we are offered a life of prayer so full
and rich that in it we can turn to and even combine both
the great aspects of God's self-disclosure to man.
If our prayer is to be adequate to our vision, there must
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be a place in it for the Transcendent Mystery and the
Incarnate Life; for adoration and sacrament, awe and
active love. But we have not finished yet with all that
the upper room has to give us. There are days when we
are not drawn to either window; when it is dark outside,
the stars are hidden, and the landscape loses all colour
and significance. What is then left for Faith? Perhaps
the best thing of all: as the best hours of human life are
often those when the home is closed from the outside
world, the curtains are drawn and the lamp lit.
When the curtains of Faith are drawn, we find that we
are not alone in the upper room. A companion is there
with us, and has always been with us; when we hardly
noticed—almost took for granted—when we were gazing
at the marvellous view. Now in the dimness we draw
near one another. As the mystics say, it is in the Night
of Faith that the soul draws nearest to God; and discovers
the indwelling Power whose presence docs not depend
on vision and feeling, but only on faithfulness. This is
the 'wondrous familiarity of the blessed Presence of
God' of which they often speak. Here, as Grou teaches,
is that place of prayer which can never fail us; the place
where our bare, naked being has contact in its ground
with the Being of God 'created intelligence with Increate
Intelligence, without intervention of imagination
or reason, or anything else but a very simple attention
of the mind and an equally simple application of the
will'. Here, where the mysterious Source of all beauty,
truth and love enters and obscurely touches our spirit,
the most secret and intimate experiences of religion take
place. Happy in her bareness and poverty, the soul sits
like the beggar maid at Cophetua's feet. She has no
desire to look out of the window then. She is absorbed
in that general loving attention which is the essence of
contemplative prayer; an attention sometimes full of
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peace and joy, at others without light or emotional gladness,
but always controlled by a gratitude, adoration,
humble affection, which exclude all thought even of the
needs of self. Such prayer, said one of the mystics,
'brings God and the soul into a little room, where they
speak much of love'.
Through Faith, then, the soul, shut in its little house,
can receive these three disclosures of God; and respond
by its adoration, adherence, humble collaboration with
Him. But not all three at once; or, as a rule, all three
with equal fullness and intensity. A baby may experience
the mother's breast, or from the cradle gaze up at
the mother's face, or clutch for safety at the mother's
dress. All three are distinct and complementary experiences
of the same mother; and in the dim yet vivid baby
mind, the great fact of the mother already exceeds and
unites all these separate experiences. So it is with Faith's
vivid yet obscure experience of God: the Transcendent
Mystery, the Manifest Life, the Indwelling Guest.
Ascending to the 'fine point of the spirit' the soul everywhere
finds Him, since there is no place where He is not;
and just because of her discovery of all that is given in
secret to the depths within, can dare to stretch out
towards the heights above. But she must divide her
experience, if she is ever to express even the fragment that
can be told of it : and even so the ultimate fact 'incomprehensible
yet comprehending all' escapes her. For the
Divine action exceeds, while it encloses and penetrates,
all the partial apprehensions of Faith. ' What shall any
man say,' cries St. Augustine, 'when he speaks of Thee?'
What then is this experience, in so far as the limited
mind of man can grasp it? It is an experience of Trinity
in Unity: of Eternal Father, Manifest Son and Indwelling
Spirit. Yet in this experience the three are known to
be one : the unmeasured Light of the Godhead is truly the
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Light of our world and the Inner Light of each soul.
Perhaps this approximation of theology and prayer will
give the traditional language of religion fresh depth,
quality, and meaning for us.
'I confess to God Almighty,
the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the sight of the whole
Company of Heaven!' How overwhelming is the meaning
carried by this familiar phrase, for those who stand
in the watch-tower of Faith. The self-contempt engendered
by our own dingy domesticities is unmeasurably
deepened and purified, when the soul thus finds itself
over against the living Perfection of God.
Thus Faith, and the prayer of Faith, as it becomes
more realistic, raises penitence to new levels of contrition
and love; and so doing, opens the door wider to God.
More than this, it operates a stern cleansing of our whole
understanding of existence; taking us backwards and
forwards from the surrounding mystery to the human
necessity, from the vast and dimly seen supernatural life
to the divinely supported natural life which trains us,
and inward to the soul's own secret life, divinely supported
too. Three in one, all controlled and used by God in
His transcendent Majesty and freedom, all subject to a
vast purpose which is far beyond our knowledge, and yet
in which we share. Queer little scraps of spirit, riding
with comparative ease on the bosom of Creativity, we
think seldom of the mysterious realities of our situation;
more seldom of that spiritual economy, of which our own
growing spirits must form part.
How then do we stand in respect of our use of the watchtower
of Faith? Are we so busy on the ground floor that
we take it for granted, and seldom go upstairs? It is
true that those stairs are dark and steep; but if we never
make the effort, never ascend to the soul's summit, we
remain something less than human. We miss our most
sacred privilege and source of life; and our understanding
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of existence, our reaction to circumstance, remain petty,
earthy, unpurified. Many things that look too hard to
be borne at the foot of the stairs are recognized in the
watch-tower as a privilege and a joy. So the first
movement of prayer should always be an ascent of that
staircase, a lifting up of the heart from basement levels ;
and the next should be an opening of the window. The
air that comes in may be sharp, but it is healthy and bracing.
The stuffiness and clatter ofthe kitchen, all Martha's
worried self-important fuss, fall away from us when we
breathe that air, look out on that landscape. We are
standing at the apex of our spirit; and the childish
absurdity of our normal troubles and pre-occupations
is made plain to us. Our understanding, usually pinned
down to the here-and-now, and beset by the ceaseless
succession of demands and events, is being steadied and
purified by contact with the Unchanging. We are lifted
above the level of sense to wide horizons; and see that
sense-life in new proportion, lit by a new compassion
and love. Faith simplifies our sight and pacifies our
minds, by subordinating all things to the Reality of God.
Certainly it may take years for our faith thus to become
truly realistic. At first, we do not understand that it is
not realistic. Like beginners in physical science, we live
happily among its symbols; unconscious of the hidden
universe with which these symbols deal. Only as we
emerge into realism do we see what regions of broadening
experience, of which we did not even suspect the existence,
still intervene between us and that which St. John of
the Cross calls the 'divine abyss of faith'. 'God,' says
De Caussade, 'is the Centre of Faith; and all His words
and works are like the dark rays of a sun which to our
sight is darker still.' Only those who live much in the
watch-tower can grasp the reality within such words as
these.
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Those who do, will realize how grotesque is any alliance
between spiritual self-occupation and faith : how absurd
is the situation of the small creature gazing from its
window at the majestic spectacle of the Universe, or
watching the searching drama of the Cross, or shut in
the dimness with that presence whose love and lowliness
so unmeasurably exceed its own whose only thought is:
How can this help me? We have to drop all that sort of
thing, kill the reflex action of our egoistic minds, achieve
a little loving self-oblivion, before we can look with purity
of sight upon the Real. Faith requires of the soul an
adoration of God, adherence to God, collaboration with
God, pursued even to forgetfulness of self. We climb the
stairs obsessed by our own difficulties, prejudices and
worries, weighing the pros and cons of our little affairs;
secretly hoping that some holy ointment may soothe the
wounds to self-importance, or repair a complexion
roughened by the friction of the world. And then we are
astonished because we find ourselves 'distracted', and
our eyes are not in focus for the view. But if we desire
to enter into our supernatural inheritance, the deep
tranquillity of Faith, coming unto God we must be
completely absorbed in the fact that He is; and rewards
in such ways as we can endure them and them only
that diligently seek Him for His own sake alone.
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VI
THERE is a story told of an old woman who went into a
shop and asked for a quarter of a pound of 2/- tea. The
grocer asked her what sort of tea she expected to get.
She replied that she hoped for the best, but was prepared
for the worst. This, of course, was not the virtue of
Hope.
Hope, the second of those spiritual powers in man
which tend towards God, is a completely confident
expectation; that sureness and certitude with which the
awakened soul aims at God and rests in God. It is the
source of that living peace, that zest and alertness, that
power of carrying on, which give its special colour to
the genuine Christian life. Hope brings the exalted
vision of Faith into the wear and tear of our daily life.
When we descend from the watch-tower, where we feel
that we can do all things or rather that in us all things
can be done and try to do the things, the first result is
usually disillusion. Unless Hope has come downstairs
with us to sweeten fortitude, permeate the content of
our minds, the last result may be apathy and
despair.
The old moralists said that Hope was the virtue which
purified the Memory and made it fit for God; and by
Memory they meant all our funded experience, that
hoarded past which we drag along with us, and which
conditions our whole outlook on life. In respect of all this,
Hope teaches us the art of wise forgetting; of dropping
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the superfluous, the outgrown, the trivial. It cleanses
the mind from all those half-realities which impede the
total concentration of our love and will on God; and lifts
up all the rest of our experience into the eternal light,
saying: 'Even though I do not see the meaning, yet I
know all this is conditioning my growth, purifying my
spirit, taking me towards You; and nothing matters but
that.'
Hope finds all life penetrated by a significance that
points beyond itself, and has a trustful expectation that
the ceaseless stream of events, thoughts, joys, trials—the
whole stuff of experience—means something, contributes
to something; and only has value because it points
beyond itself to God, is an earnest of rich fields of experience
awaiting the soul. Such Hope is the bright side of
self-abandonment. Much so-called self-abandonment is
conceived in the spirit of the 2/- tea; but that real self-abandonment
to God which is the supreme expression
of our human freedom, should be a delighted act of Hope.
'O God, my hope is in Thee,' does not mean, 'I have tried
everything else first.' It means that the final achievement
of His hidden purpose is what we really care about, and
that we entirely depend on Him for the power of achieving
our little bit of His plan.
Thus the pain and disappointment, the tragedy and
frustration of existence, are transfigured when Hope
purifies the mind. If Faith enlarges and illuminates the
understanding, shows it the fields of experience that lie
beyond its span, Hope integrates Faith's vision with the
very texture of our common thoughts, our mental life
as a whole; merging the interests of that little life in the
vast interests of the Divine love and will.
'When I am
in trouble, I will think upon God,' said the Psalmist; think
about that mysterious and living love pressing in on
human history, and here and there working through in the
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shimmer of holiness, the sharp glint of sacrifice. I will
forget my personal discomfort, my unsteadiness and
anxieties, and anchor myself there. It is true that my
little boat rolls heavily on the surface of the waves, and
often makes me feel very ill; but under those waves is
the firm ground of Reality, the Life of God. This sense
that beyond all appearance we depend utterly on the
Goodness of God, and can depend on it—this is Hope.
'Thy goodness,' says Thomas & Kempis,
'never ceases
to do well by me.'
Such Hope gives the spiritual life its staying power.
It is the necessary condition of keeping things going and
getting things done. The struggles to which the ground
floor of human nature commits us will never be maintained,
unless that living spirit presides upstairs. As
life goes on, nothing but Hope, its supernatural zest and
adventurous temper, will preserve us from the insidious
tendency to settle down into making religious pot-boilers;
reproducing our old designs, instead of moving on to the
things that are before. It is the very soul of the life of
prayer; whether that prayer be poured out for the world's
betterment, for the many shortcomings of our own
premises and performances, or directed beyond all thought
of self and world to God its Home: for it is the property
of Hope, says St. Thomas, 'to make us tend to God, both
as a good to be finally attained, and as a helper strong to
assist'.
Thus Hope is supremely the virtue of the incomplete ;
of the creature stretching out in love and prayer to the
complete Reality of God, the final object of Hope, In
this double, trustful tendency to Him, as at once our
Companion and our Goal, Faith achieves its perfect work.
God whose vast purposes may be veiled from us, but whose
personal, moulding, cherishing action, whose urgent and
demanding Spirit, is felt at work within our little homes.
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Such Hope inspires and upholds the prudence, temperance
and fortitude required of us in our dealings with
life and with the peculiarities of our own basement.
Even its many falls are like the falls of eager children.
They are dreadful at the moment, and often make us
bruised and muddy. But we pick ourselves up and go on;
forgetting that which is behind, reaching forward to that
which is before, because there is something more at stake
than 'Safety first'.
Even on the psychological level, we all experience the
creative power of Hope. Our minds are so made that
convinced assurance, trustful expectation, always tends
to realize itself. It concentrates energy on the matter in
hand, creates a favourable psychic atmosphere, encourages
the will to flow undivided along the path leading to
fulfilment, and sets going the appropriate mechanisms.
Hence those who ask with confidence are likely to receive,
and those who seek to find. Whether in that corporate
life of souls which we call history; in the personal work of
costly transformation to which each separate soul is
committed; or in that secret and most sacred flight to
God, in which the human spirit achieves its goal, Hope
is the living spirit of transcendence, the pathfinder of
life.
In history we see Hope as the spiritual preparation
of the future; and a preparation which is left entirely in
our hands. It is the way in which the corporate soul
of man stretches out to lay hold upon the gifts of God.
Did we look with more loving attention at God's work
in history, it would help us to discern His secret workings
in the soul. History, even that which we call secular
history, always shows us Hope going before, to make
plain the path along which the creative purpose shall move.
It is the growing point of life. Social justice, education, child welfare, women's freedom—all these were hoped
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for long before they were achieved. And now, looking
towards the future, it is the solemn duty of every awakened
spirit to enlarge, deepen and enrich this hope for mankind.
Every movement of pessimism is a betrayal of the
purposes of God; a short-circuiting of the spiritual energy
that flows from Him through living souls. The web of
life is infinitely sensitive to the morbid activity of each
of its cells. There can hardly be a more lethal weapon
than the mind of a nation filled with the thought that war
must come, or that society is running downhill; and some
responsibility for this corporate mind rests upon every
citizen. Thought is a great and sacred force given to us
by God; our share in the life that lies behind appearance.
It is a creative force when filled with Hope; a destructive
force when it concentrates on the ground floor and its
often deplorable state, and calls this
'facing reality'.
Hence the building up of a public opinion full of Hope,
because it tends with confidence to God and the things of
God, is a spiritual duty laid upon all Christians; who are
bound to believe in the continuous incarnation of His
Spirit in human life, and to make plain the paths along
which that Spirit can move. We do nothing for the
Kingdom by going into the garden to eat political or
ecclesiastical worms.
The whole of Christian history really turns upon the
power of human hope: this absolute hold upon the reality
of God, His supernatural energy and freedom, with the
corresponding conviction that He does and will act within the human arena, intervene to save. 'I am not a God
afar off: I am thy Maker and friend' a Maker who has
not finished His work, but is making us all the time, whose
capacity for loving action is inexhaustible. The psychological
landscape in which the greatest event in man's
spiritual history was prepared, was coloured by Expectation,
Hope. Christ was born among those who waited
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for the consolation of Israel; who were sure, in spite of
baffling appearance, that the purpose of God would be
fulfilled. The Blessed Virgin, standing at the budding-point
of Christian history, meets her strange destiny with
selfless confidence. The same necessary condition runs
through the Gospels, Those are healed that come
hopefully; their confident expectation is always approved.
We are to expect that God will give us good gifts, answer
our prayers, provide for our necessities. This note recurs
perpetually in all our Lord's teaching. If we ask we get,
if we seek we find, if we knock hopefully on the door it
will open. The unlimited world of eternal life is here on
the threshold with its riches; it is for us to stretch out to
it with confidence. If we are not more spiritually effective,
it is because of our low level of desire, our lack of initiative,
of courageous expectation. The Spirit of God
works in and with the faithful, hopeful will that expects,
and waits upon, the supernatural response. The lessons
of psychology are lifted up, and shown to us as shadows
cast by the laws of the spiritual world.
In His own prayer, our Lord rejoices because all happens
and must happen according to the mind of God;
even though that fulfilment is reached by paths which
cut across our human notions of success. In the events
of Holy Week He teaches by demonstration the lesson
of an unconquerable Hope; the anchoring of the soul's
trust, beyond all appearance, in the infinite Life of God.
From the poor little triumph of Palm Sunday, through
the gathering cloud of foreboding, to the stress and
agony of Gethsemane and Calvary with an ever-increasing
sense of isolation, forsakenness and darkness,
culminating in the utter helplessness and ignominy of
the Cross the soul of Christ moves with a steadiness
transcending human agony: sure that in spite of appearances
the Will of God is holy, and that along these dark
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paths, by utmost sacrifice and apparent failure, the
purposes of His Love must prevail. That supernatural
Hope transfigured even the awful moment of dereliction,
when He felt himself to be abandoned by God, and tasted
the horrors of spiritual death. It was through this
darkness that He rose to the heights of self-abandoned
trust. 'Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit'—the evening prayer of every Jewish child—'I do not ask,
know, or guess, what is going to happen; Thou art rny
Hope!'
'Christ,' said the poet Péguy,
'was the Man of Hope.'
He showed it in a heavenly splendour only possible to
those whose lives are lost in God. Here we leave human
fortitude and courage, the mere Stoic power of sticking
it out, far behind ; are caught in the mighty current which
sets from the natural to the supernatural life, and learn
that the very anguish of the soul on these frontiers of
experience is an earnest that the expectation of the
creature will be fulfilled. Devout persons speak much of
Easter Hope ; but it is surely the Good Friday hope, with
its lesson of self-oblivious confidence in life's blackest
moments, that speaks most clearly to the needs of men.
It is then that the Church, with true instinct, exclaims,
'Agios ischyros! Agios athanatos!' By that contemplation
we are lifted from all petty preoccupation with our own
reasons for despondency, taught to look on wide horizons,
depersonalize our prayer; confident that in suffering and
apparent failure we contribute to the mysterious purposes
of the God we love.
We come down from this tremendous revelation, to
look at something a little nearer to our average level,
and consider the work of Hope in the cleansing and reordering
of our own soul's life. We remember how Dante
places at the beginning of the Purgatorio a wonderful
picture of the ship of souls, driven towards the purifying
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mountain by the great wings of the Angel of Hope.
There they are, with all their human imperfections, stains
and limitations; and with their faces set towards the infinite
possibilities, the unspeakable perfections of God.
They know that much suffering and difficult purification
must be the path along which they will reach Him;
but Hope of God, thirst for God, overrules all fear of
pain. As the ship comes to shore, they fling themselves
on the land crying. 'Who will show us the way to the
cleansing mount?' There is no reluctance to face the
penalty of conduct, the working of that law of consequence
which burns out the very root of man's self-love.
They look beyond all that to God, the soul's Patria,
towards which they tend in hope.
We know, in our lucid moments, that we too are
committed to such a painful re-ordering of our love;
some cleansing discipline must set our muddled lives
in order, deal with the stains and excesses we have
accumulated during our tenancy, if the creature is to be
made fit for God its Home. When the radiance of the
Holy shines on our defenceless souls, we shall know ourselves
for what we are. 'Then said I, Woe is me! ... for
mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.' Then
the measure of our Faith, Hope and Charity will be the
gladness with which we welcome the humiliations which
must break our foolish pride, the lessons of patience that
must curb our childish anger, the deprivations that will
turn our possessive instincts from unreal to real objectives.
But if this be so, how artificial, how deficient in realistic
Hope, is that notion of God's action on and in our
spirits, which refers to an unknown future the opportunity
of purgation. The cleansing touch is already completely
present in all the ups and downs, the trials, sacrifices,
humiliations of our personal and professional life; in all
those inequalities of health, affection, opportunity, which
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mortify self-will and self-esteem. It is the business of
Hope, tending here and now to God, to recognize within
these baffling accidents the operations of Creative Love,
and its own duty of collaboration; looking fairly and
squarely at all that needs to be done to fit the soul
for its destiny, and then starting the work in perfect
confidence that the energy of God is with us from the
moment that we really take the scrubbing-brush into
our hands.
The house of the soul is properly furnished; the cleaning
materials are all there. The languors and difficulties of
ill-health, the friction of uncongenial temperaments, the
hard rubs of circumstance, can all leave us cleaner than
before. As there is nothing more destructive of serenity
than unwilling endurance of a spring-clean; so there is
nothing more exhilarating than the same process when
we do some of the work ourselves. If our own hands
carry the cherished bundle of rubbish to the dustbin,
if we acquiesce in the fact that the far too comfortable
sofa does crowd up our room too much, and has got
to go; if we put zest and hope into the struggle to efface
those black marks from walls that were meant to be
white then even the most painful effort is transformed by
the knowledge that we are working to make our house
what it is meant to be and can be: a habitation fit for
the Spirit now. We are creatures for whom the Beauty
of Holiness is a possibility; in so far as we place our
confidence in the perpetual operations of that Spirit
which 'has marvellously made our human nature, and
still more marvellously remakes it' and accept with love
and courage the method by which the work is done
centring our sense of reality there, and letting all the
rest drop away.
For the true basis of the soul's hope of God is God's
hope for the soul. His confident intention precedes and
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inspires ours, and gives all its significance to our lite.
God's hope for souls often seems to us to be thwarted; but it begins again in its power and freshness with every
baby born into the world. Each represents a hope of
God; a possibility of holiness, fullness of life. He has
made us for Himself; but the fulfilment of that hope is
partly in our own hands. It requires our generous and
courageous response to the secret Divine incentive, our
peaceful acceptance of purification, our active charity;
the full and dedicated use of all the resources of the upper
floor. Our own reluctance, cowardice, want of hope,
keep us back. 'The weakest of sinners,' said Peguy,
'can either frustrate or crown a hope of God.' When
we think of this aspect of our freedom, of our ever-growing
mobile, never-finished lives—that there is one fragment
of the Eternal purpose which no one else can fulfil, one
place in the world where we and none other are meant
to transmit God's life and love, and so fulfil His Hope—then even in our timid souls there is born a faint
desire to give ourselves without reserve to His purpose,
whatever the cost.
There is work which God requires to be done by each
one of us, and which no one else can do. Therefore our
business is to get down to it, checking the instinctive recoil
to the inferiority-complex, the easy resort to 'I'm not
up to it: there must be some mistake '; in sure and certain
hope that if we get the job, we shall get the authority it
requires. 'He gave power and authority to the twelve,'
says the Gospel; not merely to the most spiritual and enlightened.
It does not appear that the majority were
very spiritual or very enlightened; but they were free
from the introspective weakness which perpetually strokes
its own imperfections, and makes of them a reason for
its deprecating reluctance to serve. The Twelve must
have felt very odd when they were sent out alone to teach
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and heal; but they went with Hope, and they came back
with Joy. And the same thing has ever been true of
the Saints, and of countless souls far below the level of
the Saints, who have accepted in the spirit of Hope an
infinite variety of jobs. 'I said to God that it was His
business I was about, and after that I found it very well
performed,' said Brother Lawrence, when called from
contemplation to buy wine for his convent a business
for which he knew that he had no capacity.
Hope of that quality is the source of the gay courage
with which the real lover of God faces the apparently
impossible or the unknown: and we observe that it is
not merely an easy and comfortable optimism. It means
acting upon our assurance, taking risks for it; entering
upon a path of which we do not see the end. It means
'Go forward'; not 'Wait and see', or 'Safety first'.
Forgetting the things which are behind, this hope reaches
forth with confidence unto the things which are before;
stripping off all that impedes it, refusing to be clogged
by old fears and prejudices, moribund ideas. It believes
in the God of the future, as well as the God of the past.
It knows how to combine a living suppleness and freedom
with an utter self-abandonment, a humble self-knowledge
with a vigorous initiative. 'What is my hope? Even
Thou, O God! Though I lost my temper yesterday,
you can use me to help a soul to-day.'
'The self-satisfaction of the finite,' says Bernard Bosanquet,
'is the portal where Hope vanishes.' But once the
great principle of doing nothing in our own strength is
grasped, we shall find with surprise that our performance
is not much affected by our own dreadful mediocrity.
Something else, a stronger, richer, steadier life, supports,
controls and acts through us.
The guest for whom we
have made room is running the house. Hope means
being prepared for this, and trusting it, when we are
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134
definitely given a job, placed in a situation, which we
feel to be beyond our powers ; and which, for that very
reason, contributes to the soul's growth by throwing it
back upon God.
So Hope must preside over the soul's cleansing and reordering
of its premises, and the work it has to do. But
our supernatural Hope has a dignity and a sanction far
beyond these here-and-now objectives; and asks of the
creature a courage and sacrifice commensurate with its
transcendental goal. We find its true image in that
natural order, where the Saints have so often followed
their model in looking for the supernatural lessons of
God: in the autumn migrants, starting on their immense
journey along the invisible pathways of the air, towards
a summer home which they cannot see, yet which draws
them by an irresistible power. Migration is not an easy
or a pleasant thing for a tiny bird to face. It must turn
deliberately from solid land, from food, shelter, a certain
measure of security, and fly across an ocean unfriendly
to its life, destitute of everything it needs. We make much
of the heroism and endurance of our airmen and explorers.
Perhaps some day men will rival the adventurous hope of
the willow wren and the chiff-chaff; an ounce and a half
of living courage, launching out with amazing confidence
to a prospect of storms, hardship, exhaustion—perhaps
starvation and death. Careful minds would hardly
think the risk was worth taking. But the tiny bird,
before conditions force it—not driven by fear, but drawn
by Hope—commits itself with perfect confidence to that
infinite ocean of air; where all familiar landmarks will
vanish, and if its strength fails it must be lost. And the
bird's hope is justified. There is summer at the other
end of the perilous journey. The scrap of valiant life
obeys a true instinct, when it launches itself on
the air. It is urged from within towards a goal it
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can attain; and may reckon the suffering of the moment
not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be
revealed.
Our Lord found great significance in the life of birds;
in their freedom, their self-abandoned trust, their release
from mere carefulness. He held them precious to God,
and patterns for the faith and hope of man. I sometimes
think that the divine gift of Hope—that confident
tendency of the soul, that trust in the invisible, and in a
real goal, a Country, truly awaiting us—poured into man
by God to give meaning and buoyancy to his life: all
this was first, as it were, tried out in the birds. Long
ages before we appeared, the clouds of tiny migrants
swept over the face of this planet. Incarnate scraps of
hope, courage, determination, they were ready at a
given moment to leave all and follow the inward voice;
obeying the instinct that called them in the teeth of peril
and difficulty, giving themselves trustfully to the supporting
air.
Nor does this exhaust their likeness to the soul. If we
ask why the bird is so utterly at home—what is the
cause of this confidence, this buoyancy, this easy, steady
flight—science replies that it is itself partly a creature of
air. Its very bones are so made, that the air penetrates
and informs them. It is lifted from within, as well as
supported from without; the invisible Kingdom to which
it gives itself is inseparably a part of its own life. Even
so are we both penetrated and supported by an ocean of
Love and Life, an infinite yet indwelling Reality experienced
though unseen: 'God in Himself as He is everywhere
and at all times,' as St, Thomas has it. 'And
now what is my hope? surely my hope is in Thee'
as the bird in the air, so we in the Being of God. As
the bird, we are called to another country, a Patria.
The courage which can face long effort, vast and lonely
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distances, apparent emptiness, may be the testing condition
of our flight. Yet the loneliness and emptiness
are only apparent: for in Him we live and move and
have our being, even while to Him we tend. He inspires
and supports the adventure of which He is the goal.
For Hope is Love, tending to God at all costs; bearing
all things, believing all things, enduring all things,
because sure that He has made us for Himself, and our
hearts shall find their rest in Him alone.
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VII
WE have inspected both floors of the soul's house; stood
in its watch tower, and studied its domestic arrangements—the disadvantages and possibilities of the double
situation in which we are placed. Yet there still seems
something lacking; something which must fill the whole
house from basement to attic and bind in one both
levels of life, if its upkeep is to be worth while, if it is to
be anything more than a model dwelling without the
atmosphere of a home. What is it that is wanting?
Charity; the living Spirit of Creative Love. To be a
home, a dwelling-place in time for that Spirit, the house
has been swept and garnished, the best loved bits of
rubbish have been sacrificed, the windows have been
cleaned, the table set. It is not intended to be a showplace,
but a real ' habitation of God through the Spirit
';
and the name of the Spirit is Charity. If Faith opened
the eyes of the understanding on that threefold vision
in which we see that only God is fully real; and if Hope
so purified the mind's content that all dropped away
but its trustful tendency to that unchanging Reality;
then Charity transforms in God the very mainspring of
character, the active will, and thus completes the spiritualization
of man.
So Charity, when it enters the soul's house, swallows
up and irradiates its Faith and Hope. 'God is Charity,'
says St. John, 'who dwells in Charity dwells in God'—
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a saying which might deliver us from much anthropomorphic
pietism, did we realize its depth and sweep. It
means that the Spirit of Creative Love is the very character
of the Infinite God. There is no difference between
saying God 'comes' to the soul in Himself, or 'sends' His love; for in that love we receive, in a way that we can
bear, the impact of the ever-present Divine life upon the
creature it has made. When we depart from that love
we depart from Reality; leave the vivid world of spiritual
fact, and enter the museum-like atmosphere of theology,
full of stuffed birds that once were living bits of Faith and
Hope. For the Charity of God is, as it were, the air
that bathes the city, the sun that lights it, the heat that
warms it; and, as experienced in each little house, by
each separate soul, there is in it something of all these.
If a spark from that fire burns on the hearth of personality,
the soul has become to that extent a partaker of the Divine
nature. She shares in the very life of the Saints; receives
and distributes something of that radiant warmth which
fills the whole spiritual universe, the 'Love that makes
all things fair'. 'We have,' says St. Teresa, 'the Sun in
our house': that Sun which is not the soul's self, but is
the soul's life. Like central heating, its influence is
felt everywhere, upstairs and downstairs too; distributing
an equable fostering warmth to every corner, conditioning
our growth into fullness of personality.
Charity, then, means something which far exceeds
altruism. It is the human spirit's share of the Divine
life: there is, indeed, no other way in which it can share
that life. 'Who dwells in charity dwells in God'; is
united to God; partakes of the creative point of view.
We are looking with awe at the approach made by the
human soul to the burning heart of Reality—an approach
only made possible by the prevenient action of God and, turning to our own narrow hearts, our feverish and
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claimful desires, unreal objectives, and fluctuating love,
we ask: Can these things be? In our own strength, of
course, they could not be ; but they can be, because the
initiative lies with the Divine life As theology says:
'We love Him because He first loved us.' Before the
stellar universe, before the first mysterious beginnings of
creation, the fire of Charity was already lighted. Creation
is an act of love ; love, as Julian of Norwich was taught
in her vision, is its 'meaning* however much that meaning
has been overlaid and distorted by the sins and confusions
of life. No religious system is worth accepting
or imparting that is not in harmony with this mysterious
truth: for life, the 'more abundant life' of the Eternal
World which is offered by God to men, can only be
measured in terms of love.
'0 luce eterna piena d'amort!' cries Dante, caught for
one dazzling moment to a vision of the Real. Unless
our tendency to God brings us ever nearer the point at
which we see the world and all things in it in this generous
transfiguring light, it is not a reality; nor is any spiritual
experience valid, which fails to introduce us into that
Ocean of Creative Love. 'How could those books have
taught me Charity?' said St. Augustine, as he turned
from the alluring mysticism of the Neoplatonists, with its
tremendous appeal to his speculative intellect, and
capitulated to the Cross. That was the final question
for him; and still must be so, for all genuine seekers after
Reality. It marks the boundary between philosophy and
religion, between the objectives of the visionary and the
saint 'Without the exercise of love,' says Ruysbroeck,
'we can never possess God; and whosoever thinks or
feels otherwise is deceived.'
Charity is no easy emotion. It does not merely consist
in yielding to the unspeakable attraction of God.
We are often terrified and always shamed, when we see
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what its achievement involved for the Saints; what
steady endurance of darkness, what suffering and
courage, are the price of their love, joy and peace. The
fire of Charity, lit in the soul, needs careful tending. The
first tiny flame must not be allowed to die down for lack
of fuel; and we may have to feed it with things we
should prefer to keep for ourselves. It will only be
developed and kept burning in a life informed by prayer—faithful, steady, mortified, self-oblivious prayer, the
humble aspiration of the spirit to its Source: indeed, the
very object of prayer is to increase and maintain Charity,
the loving friendship of the soul with God.
All other aspects of the inner life are subsidiary to this:
and only of value in so far as they contribute to it.
For the prayer of Charity introduces us into the very
atmosphere and presence of God, that secret chamber
of the soul where He dwells; and shows us, obscurely
but intensely, God as the one object of this soul's love and
longing, and all struggles and sacrifices made in His
interests as forms of joy. It lifts the heavy cloud of self-occupation
from our spirits, transforms the mental and
moral problems that torture us; they all look different in
the light of that fire. 'Love,' says Thomas à Kempis,
'sees causes of fear and feareth not; but as a quick
brand or sparkle of fire flameth ever upward.' And it is
this constant desirous aspiration of the soul towards the
Beloved Perfection, with its utter forgetfulness of personal
dreads and risks, which delivers it from evil. 'Adam
sinned when he fell from contemplation' and the essence
of contemplation is the soul's loving attention to God.
'Were we always simple,' says Ruysbroeck, 'and could
we always contemplate with the same recollection, we
should always have that same experience, which is our
proper resting-place.'
Within the prayer of Charity, too, we catch a glimpse
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of our own small life in the light of God, and of our own
soul's house as it is meant to be a habitation of the
Creative Love. It is a bracing and a humbling vision.
We see our vocation then, however prosaic, as a form of
Charity ; simply a call to express the creative love infused
into us, in this or that way. For Charity introduces the
soul into a vast organism, built of all striving, loving
spirits ; an organism which is destined to be possessed and
used by God, for creative and redemptive work within
the world.
Hence the only active works worth doing or worth
having, are ultimately found to be those that proceed
from Charity: that are the work of a soul adhering to
God and acting as His tool. This gives them what
painters call 'quality'. We know how the Dutch artists
could give quality to a heap of vegetables, or a child's
toy. If the quality of charity is in our work, that work,
however modest, will suffice. If not, all its apparent
devotedness, efficiency and success will merely give out
the correct but unmusical noise of the gong, or the tinkle
of the bright and busy cymbal. Works of mercy done by
the Saints come out, as it were almost of themselves,
from a soul so utterly merged in the Love of God that
He acts through it. Thus they have an effect quite out
of proportion to their apparent scope. A real act of
Charity is the exact opposite of an act of philanthropy.
It is done wholly to, for and in God; for His sake, as a
contribution to His purpose, because we see the situation
from His point of view. It is born of the First, not the
Second Commandment: of supernatural, not of natural,
love. So too all religious acts and sacrifices more, all
sacred objects, symbols and devotions, even to the
loftiest degrees of mental prayer are only of spiritual
worth if soaked in Charity and used with Charity: with
a loving tendency of the naked will through them to God.
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'Unless,' says Maritain, 'we direct very purely to God alone our desire of contemplation itself and its joys, which
St. Bernard called "the paradise of interior delights',
we shall not truly advance in the way of the Spirit.'
All the exercises of the devotional life fall under this
law. The use of the Crucifix, meditation on Christ's
Life and Passion, are found to be of value to the soul
because they convey love and evoke love; and so feed the
fire at the heart of personality. The disciplines and
renunciations which give order and beauty to the soul's
house are only fruitful when undertaken for the sake of
Charity. The house is meant to radiate that; our business
is to take away everything which interferes. This is
the principle which gives all valid asceticism its meaning
and worth. So the spirit of poverty, deliberately loosening
its clutch on possessions; the spirit of chastity, calling
in all vagrant, immoderate and distracting desires; the
spirit of obedience, subduing its will to the over-ruling
Divine Will, give health, strength and order to the love
that is intended to find its goal in God: but only impoverish
or sterilize the soul that is seeking for self-fulfilment
by these paths. 'Charity,' says Augustine
Baker, 'lives and grows according to the measure that
self-love is abated, and no further.' We have reached the
'short point' as the lawyers say; the one thing needful,
the all-sufficing rule by which the house is to be run.
And we find it to be identical with the law of the city:
'Love of God even to contempt of self.'
Thus in the last resort Christian perfection, in fact
the whole course of the spiritual life, is found to be the
same thing as Charity the loving union of the human
spirit with the Eternal Spirit of God. Nothing but this
love will drive it to the heroic struggles, self-stripping
and purifications, maintain it through the long slow
climb with many humbling falls, whereby it is remade
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in the image of the Absolute Love. The soul that plays
for safety, even spiritual safety, never becomes perfect.
'Real Charity,' says St. John of the Cross, 'is not shown
merely by tender feelings, but by a strength, courage
and endurance unknown to other souls.' The true lover,
wholly given to God and His interests, is released from all
carefulness about his own interests, safety and comfort.
Thus not Faith and Hope alone, but Prudence, Temperance
and Fortitude too, are found in the last resort to
be swallowed up in Charity.
This, then, is the first point of Charity; that pure thirst
for God and complete self-giving to God—that return
movement of the soul to its origin which makes man a
spiritual creature, and is the very substance of his eternal
life. We go on to the second point. St. Thomas says,
'Charity includes not only love of God, but also a certain
friendship with Him. It is a sign of greater love if a man
devotes himself to others for his Friend's sake, than if he
be willing only to serve his Friend.' That opens up
another aspect of the life of Charity, and links the First
with the Second Commandment love of God Pure, and
love of His creation for His sake. Adoring love alone is
not enough. Charity requires us, beyond this, to place
our neighbours' rights and needs on an equality with
our own; because the generous love of God is poured
out upon the whole world, and our love too must be perfect, complete, as that of our Father and Origin is
perfect, complete.
The Cross is the supreme symbol of that double
movement of Charity; the pouring forth of self-oblivious
love, up towards God, outwards towards men, and surely
downwards too, to all the smaller children of God. Here
we are confronted by a Charity as rich, wide and deep
as Creation, entirely self-giving and entirely undemanding,
which loves God first, its fellows next, itself not at all;
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the consummation of a life in which prayer and work,
teaching and healing, joy and suffering, were simply the
different strings of an instrument on which was played
the only music of the Love of God. And in those Saints
who approach their model most nearly, as did St. Francis,
this widespreading love is the very substance of perfection,
and ultimate source of their life-giving power.
They are complete in their self-giving, like God. ' Because,'
says Ruysbroeck, 'the living fountain of the Holy
Spirit, which is their wealth, can never be spent,' they
are become distributors of His creative and redeeming
energy. Their passionate identification with His interests
flows out in an endless variety of expression to share His
love and care for other men: and it is this, more than any
moral correctness, any exemption from special faults or
failings, which is the earnest of their supernatural life.
So the soul's secret holy love for the One, its adoring
contemplation, will flow out if it be genuine on waves of
generous compassion to the Many; and especially to
those whom an exact standard of merit might find unworthy
of pity and care. 'To love the unlovely into
lovableness' has been called the perfect work of Charity;
for here we apply the Divine method to those bits of
His creation that most need it: share His redeeming
work.
Faith may release the mind from the tyranny of the
here-and-now, and Hope may seem to concentrate the
whole drive of our being upon the Reality of God. Only
Charity can thus weave together both worlds, both
levels of the soul's life; and, making our love of God and
of His creatures one, provides a habitation, a gathering
point for the Creative Love, and opens a channel through
which it can be applied to each detail of His unfinished
world. Thus it is, as the mystics say, that Charity makes
God and the soul 'one thing'. Some of the difficulties
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surrounding the life of prayer, and particularly of intercession,
might vanish, did we understand it as an application
to particular cases of the boundless Charity of God;
an application which is effected by means of our will and
love.
Science sees the universe in natural regard, as a
cosmic cloud of infinitely tenuous matter filling all
space; and the stars as special condensations of that
universal substance, able to radiate with peculiar intensity
the energy we know as light an energy which is
equally present throughout space, though there unseen.
An apt parable of that supernatural universe in which
we live and have our being; truly continuous too, and
delicately luminous with the Love of God. Within it
we may think of each separate soul as a special condensation
of spiritual life; able to receive and give again
that energetic Charity which is poured out on all creation
from the Heart of God. For each soul the final question
must be ; how much Charity can you receive and transmit?
The Saints glow like living suns. With every
aspiration towards God, the ardour of their charity
increases. Its radiance penetrates to every corner of
creation. It warms and vivifies the chillier worlds,
which equally depend on their share in this generous
and life-giving life: this one mighty movement of the
Divine generosity, running right through the spiritual
world, and using as its agents the loving and surrendered
souls of men.
Beyond time, God loves and gives, in the changeless
perfection of His Charity; and the terms on which His
creatures receive, is that they should give again, heedless
of self-interest and personal considerations. Thus all
prayers, all sufferings, all deeds from the loftiest to the
most homely, given in Charity to the purposes of God,
become charged with His energy of life and avail for the
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perfecting of the world. In this universal sense, Charity
puts us in line with all the noblest aspects of Creation
the generous outpouring of sunshine, the uncalculating
fertility of the earth, the great life-giving mantle of air;
all those undemanding gifts which condition our existence,
and are reflected fragments of that unlimited self-giving
which is the fundamental character of God.
The New Testament is full of reminders of the transcendent
worth, the life-giving quality, of this generous
unlimited love: the love that pours out the precious
ointment, and then breaks the vase and gives that too;
that throws in the second mite after the first; that sets
aside as equally irrelevant personal desires, personal
failings, and personal achievements. The Charity willing
to feed the sheep and lambs, and go on and on chopping
the turnips and tending the fold, for the sake of the
Beloved: adoration and penitence blossoming in homely
service. Not every one who says,
'Lord, Lord!' in accents
of devotion enters the supernatural world of Charity;
but only those self-given for love's sake to the purposes of
the Eternal Will. Even when that Will must be carried
through by means of dreary, exacting, and unrewarding
labour; even where it means unlimited sacrifice for
apparently unworthy ends—complete collaboration with
the Divine redemptive work.
The House of the Soul, then, must be an open house
for all who are sent to it; all for whom there are things
to be done; all who are proposed to its fostering care.
Its welcome must be as wide as that Poverty which, empty
of itself, has room for all. Upstairs and downstairs, in
work and in prayer, it must wholly serve the creative
purpose ; mortifying the desire of devotional sweetness,
ignoring the claims of spiritual comfort, and bringing all
the needs of the city, and of the vast desolate world
beyond the city, within the area of its widespreading
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love. There must be room for more than two chairs on
the hearthrug. The Love of God is a large generosity, not
a number of intense individual love affairs; and this is
the love which the living soul is called to pour out on
the world. Only when it is wholly made over to His
creative, saving and restoring purpose, when all that it
does is done in the power of supernatural Charity, is the
house indeed a habitation of the Spirit, and doing the
work for which it was made. This is that union with
God to which the mystics look; a union that is not consummated
in feeling, but in will and work.
The Parable of the Talents, into which we so easily
read a utilitarian meaning hardly accordant with the
mind of Christ, seems rather designed to enforce the
lesson of the soul's responsibility in respect of this mysterious
gift of Charity; its share of the riches of God. Those
riches are given into its care, that they may be increased
and made fruitful. We are not to wrap up our bit of
love, in case it might be lost or damaged; dig a hole
in the soul's garden and hide it away. We are to deal
with it in the world, with prudence and courage; risk
it, put it out. Those who venture their Charity down
in the rough and tumble of existence, submit it to the
alchemy of thought, work with it boldly, and thus increase
the living wealth of God these are approved.
The victims of a miserly, timid and unfruitful spirituality
are utterly condemned. At the end of the story, it is
to those who have most, that more is given: for these
alone are able to receive the riches of the Kingdom of
God.
'When the evening of this life comes,' says St. John
of the Cross, 'you will be judged on love.' The only
question asked about the soul's use of its two-storeyed
house and the gifts that were made to it, will be: 'Have
you loved well?' All else will be resumed in this; all
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thoughts, beliefs, desires, struggles and achievements,
all the complex activities of the upper and the lower
floor. For Faith is nothing unless it be the obscure vision
of a loved Reality; and Hope is nothing, unless it be the
confidence of perfect love. So too with all the persons,
events, opportunities, conflicts and choices proposed for
the soul's purification and growth. Was everything that
was done, done for love's sake? Were all the doors
opened, that the warmth of Charity might fill the whole
house; the windows cleaned, that they might more and
more radiate from within its mysterious divine light?
Is the separate life of the house more and more merged
in the mighty current of the city's life? Is it more and
more adapted to the city's sacred purpose—the saving
radiation of the Perfect within an imperfect world?
For this is Charity; the immense expansion of personality
effected by the love of God, weaving together the natural
and the supernatural powers of the soul, and filling them
with its abundant life. Overflowing the barriers of
preference, passing through all contrary appearance, it
mediates the Divine pity and generosity to every mesh
and corner of creation; and rests at last in God, Who is
the life and love of every soul.
