THE study of Prayer, its very existence over against the rich wonder of the universe—still more, perhaps, the concrete facts disclosed by our own tiny practice—these things force upon the mind in most vivid form the full paradox of the spiritual life. Why do the mighty supernatural forces, why does the personal yet ineffable Reality, thus seize here and there upon certain crumbs of creation, certain human spirits, and compel them while still immersed in succession to recognize and adore the Eternal? Why does this news, 'delight, and
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demand—reaching them through things and through thoughts, revealed to them in various degrees of fullness by historical or dream-like figures, in personal or impersonal ways—require of these its tiny initiates a more or less complete surrender of will, a more or less drastic purification of mind and heart?
Perhaps the answer is to be found in the last of those three characters which M. Olier declared to be essential to the life of prayer, and to which he gave the strange name of Co-operation. For that word means that man’s full relation to the Supernatural is a relation not only of patient, but also of agent. He is awakened, called, and trained, that he may work on spiritual levels with and for the purposes of God. We see the visible world filled with an endless variety of living growing creatures at every stage upon the ladder of being. Distinct yet interdependent, they act and react on one another in countless ways; and thus contribute to the glory and richness of the physical universe. Even so, we may think of the invisible world as filled with living intelligences, endless too in their variety of type and degree, their place on the ladder of life; but all acting and reacting on one another, and contributing to the richness of the glory of God. Within that world, so fully present with Nature yet distinct from it, every soul which has heard the supernatural call has a place to fill and work to do. Each is privileged and required to take a share in those labours and transformations which shall bring out the spiritual implicits of humanity. Each is to be transformed, not into a model devotee, but into a tool, a redeeming engine of the Holy; and only in so far as he accepts this exacting vocation, will the supernatural possibilities of his own emergent spirit be realized. That spirit is to grow by the faithful practice and interweaving of two movements. By deepening, and
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by expanding; by costly interior transformation, and by uncalculating consecration to the redemptive purposes of Eternal Life. Through this parallel series of disciplines and efforts, present in one form or another in the life of every healthy soul, God’s Spirit evokes in man’s spirit that degree of likeness to the Holy of which it is capable. Here is the assigned end of human prayer; and by his co-operation in this work man performs his little part in the mighty process of incarnating the Eternal within the world of time.
This conception of human existence has haunted the minds of the saints, and achieves classic expression in the Pauline vision of the ‘mystical Body of Christ'. A deep intuition prompts these saints to labours, renunciations and sufferings which seem meaningless to the ‘natural' man; but by which they are sure that genuine work is done. Though social Christianity is far from telling all the truth about the supernatural life, and must never be allowed to discredit the high calling to an exclusive adoration and contemplation of God, nevertheless no saint—even the loneliest—is merely a self-cultivator. He is always self-given to some objective beyond the boundary of his own soul, and lives because of this concentration upon spirit a wider, richer and more creative—not a more aloof and constricted—life than other men. Sanctification means the universalizing of the creature’s will and love; their dedication to the interests of Reality. Thus, if the prayer of adoration and communion brings man to an ever deeper consciousness of his own faulty nature—obliges him to work with God in the supernaturalizing of his own selfhood by the secret labours of self-conquest—this call to purgation of character is only the first point in the real sanctifying of personality. Sooner or later he will realize that this reformation is being effected
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for a purpose; in order that he may co-operate in the workings of the Supernatural on and in other souls.
The whole history of religious experience, as seen in the noblest spiritual personalities, makes it plain that the state of communion between the soul and the Transcendent Other is not in this life an end in itself; nor maintained for the sake of the rapturous joys which may accompany it. It is maintained in order that the little creature, through this faithful intercourse, may be woven into the organism by which the Eternal Spirit acts within the historic scene. Each soul completely given over to the interests of God is, in little, such an organism, more or less powerful, according to the purity and intensity of its invisible attachments. The society of all such souls—deeply interconnected, and devoted to the interests of one indwelling Life—is a great organism of many cells; a true ‘mystical body' of the incarnate Reality.
Here we surely touch the deepest truth known to us concerning the mystery of man’s supernatural life: his redemptive and creative power. We see that the very existence of this power requires of the awakened soul, if it is to grow to its full stature, not only penitence but also intercessory action: and not only an individual, but also a social relation with the supernatural world. That soul has a double obligation; to a total and solitary response to God, however felt, and to a share in the common life and mutual service of the Body which His Spirit indwells within the temporal world. Hence not only ‘Prayer' but also ‘Church'—not only secret adoration, but also corporate worship—is necessary to the full expression of its life. The invisible, but most actual, incorporation of all such awakened souls in one Supernatural Society embracing life and death, past and present, in its span: this is what Christianity means by the
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Communion of Saints. Of that vast Supernatural Society, with its countless types of soul and of vocation—active, intellectual, mystical, speculative, intercessory, sacrificial—co-operating for one great end, the visible Church is or should be a sacramental expression. That Church draws vitality and spiritual wisdom from many sources. It is subject to succession, and partakes of the frailty and stupidity of men. Yet so deeply is it tinctured with Eternity and here, among all the hoarded and uncriticized accumulations of symbols, rite and story, men of good-will can hardly miss the savour of the Ultimate. The Church, then, is an effectual sign of the embodiment of the Supernatural in a social organism; and this although the greatest single achievements of that Supernatural man’s purest acts of heroic love, may often be found outside its walls. Thus the co-operation with the Eternal to which the awakened spirit of man is called can be thought of under three heads: Personal Transformation, Intercession, Incorporation. Through the constant interaction of these three factors, the differing contributions made by each different soul to each, the Communion of Saints is created, maintained, and does its work. One character runs through all three, everywhere latent, but for the Christian theist patent; namely, the principle of costly redemption. The first point has as its assigned end the sanctifying of character, the production of a full-grown, fully supernaturalized, creative personality capable of redeeming work. Here the human will co-operates with the energy of God in the work of transmuting human nature; remoulding the plastic psyche nearer to the heart’s desire. On the degree in which this transmutation is effected ineach individual depends the worth of his or her spiritual “work; the contribution made by it to the corporate life.
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Yet we observe that this secret co-operation of will and grace is seldom if ever effected in isolation. The supporting love and will of his fellows—intercession: the discipline and shelter of an institution and the tradition which it conserves—Church: these, in some form or degree, seem essential factors in the fullest transfiguration of man. Where they are apparently absent—e. g. the first in the emergence of a lonely spiritual genius such as Jacob Boehme or William Blake, the second in such unchurched sanctity as that of George Fox—careful inspection will commonly reveal their remote influence. The most independent, even the most illiterate, saint cannot elude all contact with those truths which the Church exists to proclaim. Thus Boehme, Blake, the early Quakers, were all fed not only by the Scriptures, but by mystical writers depending on Catholic tradition: whilst no believer in the effectiveness of spiritual action, the reality of that wide-spreading love which is poured out in intercessory prayer, can limit its possible sphere of influence to souls who wittingly receive its gifts.
We must hold, then, that God, the Supernatural, acts through personality and through history, from without and from within, by external influence and by personal striving, in the production of His Saints. What is a Saint? A particular individual completely redeemed from self-occupation; who, because of this, is able to embody and radiate a measure of Eternal Life. His whole life, personal, social, intellectual, mystical, is lived in supernatural regard. What is he for? To help, save, and enlighten by his loving actions and contemplations; to oppose in one way or another, by suffering, prayer and work upon heroic levels of love and self-oblation, the mysterious downward drag within the world which we call sin. He is a tool of the Supernatural, a ‘chosen
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vessel' of the redeeming, transforming, creative love of God.
All this is part of the widely various work of intercession: which is quite misunderstood by us if we limit it to acts of prayer for the needs of other men. We may expect to find this work being done by many different types of soul, from the most naïve to the most subtle, both consciously and unconsciously, and in many different ways and degrees. It will often be done in ways which our clumsy analyses fail to recognize as ‘religious’; and by souls not yet continuously self-devoted, but driven by a sudden generous impulse above their average level of life. Thus even one heroic self-obvious act, one tiny work of love, one cup of cold water given with eagerness, one passionate longing to comfort or save, does to that extent incarnate the supernatural; and contributes to the slow triumph of Spirit over animal self-interest. That triumph is prepared in the laboratory as well as in the cloister; by the artist and the adventurer as well as the ‘religious,' man. Every heroic devotion to beauty, truth, goodness, every ungrudging sacrifice, is a crucifixion of self-interest, and thus lies in the direction of sanctity; and wherever we find sanctity we find the transforming act of God, of supernature, upon the creature, irrespective of that creature’s dogmatic belief. All Saints, that ‘glorious touching Company’, will doubtless include many whom the world classed among its irreligious men. Because of 'sin’, because of that strange element within the world which opposes God, and perverts His gifts, all such working of the Supernatural in human life must involve suffering and tension. Real temptation, struggle, darkness, is involved in every genuine transcendence of the ‘natural man’. Yet since this transcendence is the very condition of the fulfilment of personality, it brings even
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through effort a real and vivid joy, an ever-deepening peace and harmony, to the soul that undertakes it.
These points, in so far as they are true of the individual, are also true of that Supernatural Society of which the regenerated spirit is a unit, a cell. It too is there to embody the Eternal ever more perfectly and variously in its widely various members; and thus to become an agent of the saving and redeeming power of God. It too remains completely a part of history and of humanity: subject to frailty, fed by tradition, called to a difficult interweaving of the present and the past. It too works by the transformation of sensible material to spiritual purpose. Yet in all its visible expressions and historical developments it looks beyond the sensual and historical world. It too must be holy in essence, universe in spirit ; not for its own sake, but in order that the Supernatural may have an unimpeded channel through those many and various members of which it is made.
Individual and group, then, are called, not to a rejection of the sense-world, but to its transmutation; to permeate the greatest number of successive acts, the widest area of relationships, with the living Spirit of the Infinite. Both church and soul retreat from the world only that they may in some way return to it. They must balance recollection by action, asceticism by love. The raw material to be supernaturalized is mostly found in the common ways of life. But the power of dealing with that raw material, the deep certitude in which such dealing becomes possible these are only fully achieved in those periods of exclusive attention to God in which the growing spirit, whether alone or with its fellows, turns from succession and breathes the bracing atmosphere of the Eternal World.
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II
THE transforming of character, sanctification: this is for the individual the first point of that process which enthrones the Supernatural at the heart of existence. No religion has passed from idea to actuality which does not incite to this reforming and reharmonizing of the plastic human psyche in accordance with the implicits of the spiritual life. The need of such remaking has been clear to all great moral teachers. Looking at man as he is, and not merely at the inconsistent diagrams of him offered by biology, psychology, and dogmatic theology, these have mostly seen, as St. Paul saw, two distinct strivings in him. The physical life-force is ever striving to fulfil itself. The spiritual impulse, still rudimentary save in exceptional natures, is seeking contacts with the supernatural world. With his emergent affinity for God, man is an animal still. Where the first striving triumphs completely, its assigned end is the full development of the natural man; the perfection of his this-world adjustments. Where the second triumphs completely, its assigned end is the self’s real santification; though not necessarily the production of anything which the official mind would recognize as a saint. The first type is bent towards an ever more adequate response to the world of particulars. Its interests, however legitimate and wholesome, are those of planetary life. The second is more and more dominated by the strange human thirst for universals, and sense of their commanding claim. Its true focus of interest lies beyond, although within, the experienced world. Wittingly or unwittingly, it aims at God.
That view of human psychology which is gradually gaining acceptance, helps us to place what we know of
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man’s spiritual craving and growth in relation with the rest of his being. This view regards the essence of our psychic life as an energy, a life-force, informed by purpose. It allows us to look upon every soul as an undeveloped entity; not yet wholly emancipated from the animal instincts which have conditioned its past, but capable of progress, of growth in real being—those developments which we call character and personality. It allows us to suppose that the purposive action which prevails right through the animal world and explains its behaviour, in some degree conditions and spiritual life too; and that here as there, this means a total direction of the organism towards the required end, and can call all the faculties of the self to its service. In fact, the most recent psychology enthrones the Will once more in the position which St. Augustine gave to it: that of primacy in the mental and spiritual life. Will is character in action; and sanctity, which is simply character transformed upon supernatural levels, means above all else the complete and unreserved collaborations of this energetic will with the active grace of God.
The human and divine elements, as Aquinas insisted, rise and fall together. Neither a mere limp surrender to the supernatural power, nor a self-dependent striving neither Quietism nor Activism will alone suffice for the transforming of man. A delicate harmony must be established between the moulding action of the Divine creativity and the costly deliberate effort of the soul.
The little human creature is required, as a condition of growth, to work in its tiny way with the supernatural determinant; deliberately setting its active will in that direction. This it will tend to do, not merely by a desire, a general intention but by a series of purposive acts and willingly acepted disciplines, seldom well understood in
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their origin by those who undertake them, but having as their term a complete and stable redirection of interest and re-education of the unconscious mind. That redirection and re-education is the essence of the Pauline change from the ‘carnally minded’ to the ‘spiritually minded’ man.(1) Here, in his transcendence of nature, man utilizes a method deeply implanted in nature: for ‘the modes of purposive striving form a continuously graded series, from the pursuit of its prey by the Amoeba to the moral struggles of Man’. The series begins in ‘the vague almost undifferentiated striving of the animalcule in pursuit of his prey’ and passes through the stage of ‘strivings prompted by desire for instinctive goals’ to the ‘striving regulated in the choice of goals and means by the desire to realize an ideal of character and conduct.' (2)
Such an ideal means for the consciously religious nature, a recognition of the claim and the attraction of a realized Perfection drawing the soul ‘from the unreal to the real’; a recognition which is the very essence of the life of prayer. Now we find at every level, that the success of the creature’s deliberate striving is proportionate: first, to the calm clearness with which the goal is realized and gazed on. Next, to the eager steady trust in its possible attainment. Last and chiefly, to the generous and self-giving ardour with which it is pursued. These conditions apply equally, whether the chosen aim be an earthly or heavenly love; a natural, intellectual or spiritual achievement. Faith, Hope and Charity to give these states of soul their traditional names remain the essential conditions under which man can transcend himself; the dispositions in which alone he can bear the stresses and make the sacrifices, which are involved in
(1) Romans viii. 2-9.
(2) McDougall: An Outline of Psychology, p. 248. (See note on McDougall below. DCW)
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every increase in his knowledge of Reality. Not anxious conflicts, but a self-forgetting and all-enduring enthusiasm best draw him on; whether his assigned end be that of the discoverer, the artist, or the saint.
Formal religion has always declared that the two ‘instruments of perfection' which are in themselves enough to supernaturalize human personality, are Prayer and Mortification. By this it means on the one hand an ever greater self-opening and tendence towards the Eternal, that asking, seeking and knocking which cannot fail in their effect; and on the other hand an ever greater control of our instinctive reactions to the temporal. It is another way of stating the essential co-operation of will and grace in the spiritualizing of man.
‘In those two duties, therefore, of mortification and prayer, all good is comprehended ; for by the exercise of mortification those two general most deadly enemies of our souls, self-love and pride, are combated and subdued, to wit, by the means of those two fundamental Christian virtues of divine charity and humility. And prayer, exercised in virtue of these two, will, both by way of impetration obtain, and also with a direct efficiency ingraft, a new divine principle and nature in us, which is the Divine Spirit; which will become a new life unto us, and the very soul of our souls.’ (3)
The great masters of asceticism insist that this mortifying action is to be directed only to the affections and desires—as psychology would say, to the conative life—for that which must be changed is the powerful set of the self’s interest and striving. St. Augustine described the whole process with precision when he defined virtue as ‘an ordering of love’; and thus by implication declared sin to be the disordered, ill-directed action of that same desire. Love must be set in order, so that the strongest power of our nature, the true cause of all we do, may be rescued from self-squandering on unreal and fleeting ob-
(3) Augustine Baker: Holy Wisdom, p. 197.
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jects, self-regarding ends, and may be concentrated on ‘one only object which is God.’ (4)
The control of unruly and self-regarding instincts—in other words, moralized behaviour—though not in itself supernatural, is therefore an essential preliminary of supernatural life. It marks the first movement towards a universalized existence, by opposing at its source the downward drag of ‘sin’.
‘And what sin is, we have said already; namely to desire or will anything otherwise than the One Perfect Good and the One Eternal Will, and apart from and contrary to them, or to wish to have a will of one’s own. And what is done of sin, such as lies, fraud, injustice, treachery, and all iniquity, in short all that we call sin, cometh hence, that man hath another will than God and the True Good; for were there no will but the One Will, no sin could ever be committed.’ (5)
In this area, I differ in emphasis from EU. Sin, rather than being a desire for such objects, is simply the belief or perception that such objects of desire exist, that there is such a duality as "me and not-me". Primarily, sin is a condition or state, not an action.
Beyond this I think it is legitimate to think of sin as behaviour or action conditioned or initiated by such a perception or belief — ie, just about all behaviour per se, not just "bad" behaviour. DCW
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This view of sin shows us why real contrition is a supernatural state. It is evoked by measuring ourselves not against natural and human, but against more-than-human standards; by seeing the extent in which spirit, our essential reality, is degraded, smirched, amd deflected from its true business, cut off from its true life by all loveless and self-interested thoughts and deeds. We may perhaps think of the human spirit as possessing, alone among the various inhabitants of this planet, a certain latent capacity for continuing the line of creation beyond nature, to more than nature. ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts shall have no rest save in Thee.’ This line of growth proceeds from a narrow and self-regarding individualism controlled by the animal impulses to self-preservation, self-assertion and self-satisfaction, towards the production of a full, rich, warm, self-forgetful personality capable of receiving God and hence able to share His creative work. Incarnational religion points to
(4) Augustine Baker: Holy Wisdom, p. 240.
(5) Theologia Germanica, cap. 43.
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this, as the true function of the human spirit in the economy of the spiritual universe; and the saint is the human spirit who has fully grown up to that standard, by the perfection of his adoring and courageous responses to his environment, God.
'The soul,’ says Grou, ‘has reached the highest degree of sanctity when, having become perfectly simple, she sees God only in all things, loves God only in all things, and has no interests but His interests.’ (6)
This statement does not imply an ever-narrowing concentration on the materials of piety; but an ever-widening, more disinterested, more joyous communion with every aspect of the natural and supernatural world. Thus when Walter Hilton and mystics of his school speak of man’s inner growth as the abolition of the ‘image of sin' and the re-forming of the ‘image of God’, (7) they seem to be describing a costly organic process which does truly happen to those in whom the supernatural sense is active: the transformation of the individual outlook into the universal outlook, the complete surrender of man’s personal striving to the overruling Will of God, and thus the linking up of all the successive acts of daily life with the Abiding. For the natural man moralized behaviour is often hard; because it involves perpetual will-decisions in opposition to the instinctive drive. For the saint it has ceased to be hard, because that instinctive drive has been re-directed at the source.
‘La guerra & terminata
de le virtu battaglia
de la mente travaglia
cosa nulla contende' (8)
(6) Manuel des Âmes Intérieures, p. 330.
(7) Cf. Hilton: The Scale of Perfection. Bk. II.
(8) Jacopone da Todi, Lauda XCI.
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The yoke is now easy and the burden light; for the self’s striving is no longer merely individual. It gathers power from its mergence in the total and tranquil operation of the Divine creativity. ‘The Spirit helpeth our infirmities.’ ‘Create and make in us new and contrite hearts", is equivalent to a prayer for this profound supernaturalizing of personality.
Psychology can thus tell part of the story of sanctification: in terms first of the control and redirection of our animal strivings and desires, and next of the enhancement of our spiritual correspondence. In other words, it can tell us something of what happens to the human psyche through mortification and prayer. It may reasonably regard the whole process from its own angle; as a further stage, sometimes and unequally achieved, in that psyche’s development. But doing this, it only tells half the story. It describes an ethical and spiritual evolution; not a supernatural transmutation. For that which sets the production of sanctity aside from all other expansions of man’s plastic nature, all other achievements of personal status, is the fact that it cannot be described in terms of development alone. Behind the whole region analysed by psychology, and quite unreachable by psychology, is God; indwelling the soul that He transcends. That is what the mystics, in their confusing spatial language, mean by its ‘ground’. It is in the soul’s ground that sanctity is prepared: and from this ground, where the creature inheres in the Changeless, that the invitations and impulsions, the anguish and blessedness come, which prepare and mature man’s spiritual life.
‘This truly,’ says Tauler, ‘is much more God’s Dwelling-place than heaven or man. A man, who verily desires to enter in, will surely find God here, and himself simply in God, for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him, and he will find and enjoy eternity here.
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There is no past nor present here; and no created light can reach unto or shine into the divine ground; for here only is the Dwelling-place of God and His sanctuary.’ (9)
This profound imbeddedness of the little human spirit in the Divine and Infinite Spirit is known to us only in naïve intuition; or in that mystical experience which is the developed form of such naïve intuition. Yet all the symbols or hints by which we try to express it, here point beyond themselves to the primal reality of our life; ‘more inward than our most inward and higher than our highest'. (10) The interpenetration of spirit with spirit which is the basis of all that is perdurable in human friendship and love, is but a faint image of this interpenetration of the Spirit of God and the created spirit; the cause and support of all growth towards the supernatural life. Where that union of Spirit and spirit is perfected, we have sanctity; and the degree of such union achieved by any one soul, is the degree of this soul’s sanctification. God wills that union all the time; the generous response of the creature conditions its achievement.
We see then that M. Olier was right when he declared co-operation between the soul and the Eternal to be the perfection of prayer; and that we shall make no sense of the story of human sanctification, unless we acknowledge the priority for it of the distinct and personal action of God, the Changeless, upon the changeful, fluid personality of man. For it means the turning over of the finite self, every scrap of it, in utter trust and unlimited self-giving, to the total invasion of that Holy Spirit who is Lord and Giver of its life. No unpacking and re-ordering of the soul’s innate possessions, no development of its latent possibilities, will here meet the case.
(9) The Inner Way, p. 98.
(10) St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. III, cap. 6,
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The mighty factor which theology calls grace, the incitement and aid of a wholly other order than the human, is required if the specific and unearthly loveliness of the supernatural personality is to be brought forth within the world of time. The play of supernatural forces on and in the soul is rich and complex. In their reality they escape us; but the little we are able to apprehend must be actualized by us as a fresh invasion from the Transcendent Holiness beyond our radius, not only as an upspringing of Spirit from within, if we are to retain and feed our filial and creaturely sense. Those who see in the religious facts of incarnational and sacramental religion a witness to the dealings of Supreme Reality with its little creatures, can hardly refuse to bring this further instance of the creative action of the Supernatural into the scheme.
So the demand of the Ultimate on the tiny human self immersed in history seems to be on one hand a demand for full, generous and heroic action, deliberate striving, completeness of life; and on the other, for the humble acknowledgement that the incitement to this action and food of this life come from beyond the radius of the soul. A delicate balance must be found and maintained between the creature’s surrender to those mighty energies which would transform and use it, and its own initiative, its active, willed response. The Teresian collaboration between Martha and Mary is everywhere needed.(11) As it advances, the soul becomes ever more flexible, more able to combine the uncalculating, genial life of service with a secret and austere renunciation; and the line between God’s impulse and its own willed and generous action grows ever thinner, until at last a stable union between spirit and Spirit is achieved.
All this will be done by different spirits in an infinity
(11) Cf. The Interior Castle, Seventh Habitation, cap. iv.
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of different ways; for sanctity, human self-giving to the purposes of the Holy, means the gradual and at last perfect supernaturalizing of the special material offered to any one soul, not rigid conformity to a pious convention, or the slavish imitation of a type. Included in this material are the simple daily deeds of every man and woman of good will, the whole gamut of human sufferings and renunciations, lonely study and social relationships. Thus Christ more perfectly discloses His divine character by sitting at meals with sinners—being so wide, genial, strong and pure, that He can take all human acts within His span—than by pursuing the traditional methods of ascetic saintliness.
The Christian saints have all partaken of this lovely freedom; their peculiar charm, their variousness and effectiveness, depend largely on the degree in which they avoid all strain and rigorousness, all self-conscious correctness, and give with a generous simplicity just that which they have and are. For all descriptions of sanctity are accounts of the loving reaction of a human factor which is never twice the same to a Divine factor which is always the same; but always, in its richness, exceeds the capacity of any one soul. Each soul is personal and distinct; that which it has to offer, and is able to do, will be its own. There is no such thing as one ‘saintly type’. Therefore we do not discredit one by pointing out that he is not like another: and even the most apparently bizarre or ‘morbid’ vocation—St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar, Santa Fina on her wooden board—need not be too hurriedly condemned. Aquinas can be skilled philosopher and enraptured mystic; Francis of Assisi can be poet and penitent, troubadour and servant of the lepers; Lawrence can serve God in the kitchen and the wine-barge, and come from these homely duties to the skilled direction of
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souls. Santa Zita is a general servant; Margaret of Scotland is a queen. Julian of Norwich does her enduring work in the cell of an anchoress; Marie de l'lncarnation goes as a pioneer to the New World. And, in the records of modern sanctity, the Abbe Huvelin can radiate the Supernatural from a Paris confessional; his convert, Foucauld, from a lonely hut in the Sahara. Cardinal Mercier can equally manifest its power on homely and on heroic levels, in the spheres of pastoral, intellectual and political action; whilst Elisabeth Leseur gives us a perfect example of the sanctification, the universalizing of the particular life—so apparently narrow, yet so richly fertile—to which she was called.
‘I resolve,’ she says in her Journal, ‘to sanctify my intellectual work by giving to it a supernatural intention, performing it humbly, without personal preoccupation, for the sake of other souls.’ And again, ‘I only desire one thing—the accomplishment of Thy Will in me and through me; and I pursue, and desire more and more to pursue, one end alone: the gaining of Thy greater glory through the realization of Thy design for me.’(12)
Hence those desires, strivings and adjustments, those inward battles and surrenders, through which the pressure of the Holy is felt and actualized by men—the discovery that every gift of new light requires an answering movement of self-spending love—all this will not be confined to some special territory marked out as the domain of ‘religion’ or of ‘inner life’. It will be experienced, as all the great realities of our existence are experienced, on our own humble level and in our own humble way.
That is, within history, and on the plane of sense; no less than beyond history, and on the plane of spirit. God will then be felt by His awakened creature, inciting and helping the perfect performance of all mental or manual work; and not only as present in the times of solitary
(12) Journal et Pensées, pp. 161, 197.
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communion which support and explain that work. Nothing less than this integration in man of the natural and the transcendental, this supernaturalizing of the chainlike events of daily life, ‘each single act, each single moment, joined directly to God Himself not a chain, but one Great Simultaneity’, (13) can, it seems to me, make Reality homely to us; whilst fully safeguarding its overwhelming mystery, distinctness and perfection, the profound reaches of Eternal Life ever hidden from the creature’s furthest gaze. This means the lovely balance of detachment and attachment; detachment from all this-world demands and entanglements, but attachment to all this-world duties and self-spending loves. It means retreats and returns, prayer and work; that easy swinging of the soul between the Unseen and the Seen, which maintains within history its relation with That which transcends history and is in one form or another the very secret of Christianity, the crown of a fully harmonized life. It means finding in the particular the presence and the appeal of the Universal ; and thus moving ever more and more towards that universalizing of all love and of all life, which is called union with God.
All the great presentations of achieved saintliness witness in various ways to this richly inclusive ideal. Artists have again and again captured and shown its living peacefulness; its combined character of devotion and devotedness, quietude and zest. Thus in Sebastiano del Piombo’s lovely painting of ‘St. Jerome in his Study,’ (14) what we see is just a patient scholar, utterly lost in his work and therefore happy in it; yet with an outlook on a wide and lovely landscape. On the edge of his desk stands a crucifix; so placed, that when he raises his eyes to the landscape he must look at the Crucified too, and
(13) F. von Hügel: Selected Letters, p. 287.
(14) National Gallery, London.
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the most touchingly human of all self-givings of the Supernatural, the most inexorable of its demands on the love and trust of men, is brought into closest union with the natural scene. Concentrated as he is on the study of God’s supreme revelation within history; yet the saint’s protective, loving influence seems to radiate without effort to all his smaller or untamed relations—the quail walking about the floor in perfect security and confidence, almost within snapping distance of the peacefully snoozing lion. Nothing of him seems to be rusting; nothing is in conflict; nothing is turned inwards, to be used for his own sake. He has objectives for adoration, for homely compassion, and for thought. We feel that St. Jerome is in full and willing contact with all the levels and contingencies of life; all the bracing disciplines and frictions of ordinary existence, from the care of his monks and his animals to the exacting demands of textual research. He has varied and ample material for the exercise of the sacrificial will. Yet all is permeated by such an atmosphere, such a quietude of the spirit, as transmute these contingencies into sacraments of the Real.
Then balance that picture—as we must, if we are to understand it—with those other pictures of ‘St. Jerome in the Desert’, which show us the inevitable times of stress and solitude, when the saint must turn from the contingent and face the bare actualities of God and his own soul. There he is, in penitence—that is to say, deeply conscious of his inherent unworthiness, his creaturely imperfection—and measuring that creaturely imperfection, that nothingness, against his vision and his love. As unguessed and ever deeper reaches of the Supernatural are disclosed to that loving, awestruck vision; so must this abasement of the creature over against the Holy increase. His creative work, his spiritual authority,
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his kindly civilizing influence, his peaceful acceptance of life, all have their origin here. Without that meek recourse to the Unchanging Perfect, that perpetual rediscovery of his own small status, he might have been a doctor, but never a saint.
III
THIS saint, this more or less completely love controlled and irradiated creature, cannot be thought of as existing merely for his own sake. He only has meaning in so far as he is in some way creative; and thus becomes a channel through which God, the Abiding Perfect, acts within the successive world. This supernatural action, this ceaseless divine creativity, is still mainly uncomprehended by us. The ‘tranquil operations of perpetual Providence’ may be dimly recognized in particular expressions and effects. We fail to realize these expressions and effects as glimpses of a vast and hidden order; tiny ripples that witness to the subtle forces and interacting currents of the Sea Pacific in which we are immersed. Those glimpses warn us that our world will lack richness and meaning if we forget the unmeasured powers which lie beyond the fragmentary universe disclosed by science, and exclude supernatural causation from our theory of human life. And it is in the sphere of supernatural causation that we must look for the significance of the saints.
Reports of experiences and adventures which remind us of our mysterious situation, and cannot be squared with ‘common sense’, appear again and again in the history of religion, and in accounts of spiritual action outside the organized field. They all point to unrealized possibilities in human nature; and suggest the vast extent to which personality can stretch beyond the apparent con-
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fines of the animal, the interdependence of all spirits, the personal yet co-operative character of all spiritual life. These reports oblige us to believe that human souls are, in certain circumstances, open to each other’s moulding influence and loving regard; and that the spiritual development of man is largely effected by God through such mutual influence—an influence which transcends- spatial limitations, and perhaps can even cross the chasm which seems to separate the ‘living’ from the ‘dead'. In some this sympathetic contact reaches the conscious level; and, by its energy of love and pity, enters into, knows and shares, the secret griefs, needs, temptations and destinies of those to whom its help is sent. Thus contemporary witnesses describe St. Catherine of Siena as vividly aware of the sins, troubles and necessities of her absent sons, and drawing back with invisible cords those wanderers who had once come within her sphere of influence.(15) Telepathic and clairvoyant ability of the same kind is claimed on good evidence for George Fox (16) and such modern saints as the Cure d’Ars and Abbe Huvelin seem to have possessed a supernormal power of entering and reading souls.(17) Here however we move on the fringe regions of psychology, where little that is precise is yet known. Such scattered facts as are available should only induce in us a humble suspension of judgment as to the limits of human faculty and possible interaction between souls.
If then we allow that God, the Supernatural, is ever at work upon human personality through the distinct yet deeply connected spirits of those men and women whom He creates and indwells: we may perhaps think of the saints as individuals who are so perfectly self-
(15) J E. Gardner: St. Catherine of Siena, caps, v and x.
(16) Cf. R. Knight: The Founder of Quakerism, Pt. 2.
(17) A. Germain: Le Bienheureux; J. B. Vianney, p. 127, and H. Brémond: Histoire Littéraire, vol. iii, p. 591.
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given to His purpose, that here in their ‘intercessory action' immanent Spirit works most freely and with power. And in intercession as a whole we have the simplest example provided by the general religious life, of a vast principle which is yet largely unexplored by us. It is the principle, that man’s emergent will and energy can join itself to, and work with, the supernatural forces for the accomplishment of the work of God: sometimes for this purpose even entering into successful conflict with the energies of the ‘natural world’. Here the little human creature, in virtue of its mysterious power of sublimation, can use every act and intuition, every sacrifice, disability and pain for the purposes of the Eternal. Yet, so doing, it can and will come to feel more and more that all this is but a drop of water as against the ocean of supernatural power in which we live and move; and that the mercy and generosity of the redeeming saint who gladly takes the burden of another’s sin, is only a hint, a microscopic expression of those saving and supernaturalizing forces which are begotten of the very essence of Reality.
Hence intercession in its widest and deepest sense is the true business of sanctity; and emerges in some way or degree in all those lives and separate acts which lie in the direction of the Holy. It completes, with Adoration and Communion, the triune life of prayer; and as that life of prayer develops, so do these its three great constituents fuse into one loving act of communion which redeems while it adores and adores while it redeems. But such adoring intercessory action cannot be limited to overtly religious desires and deeds. Since every act and thought of its members affects the whole spiritual society, there is hardly any mental or bodily action which cannot by intention gain or lose intercessory worth.
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‘All that you do,’ says Cardinal Mercier, ‘for good or for evil, either benefits or damages the whole society of souls . . . the humblest of you all, by your degree of virtue, and by the work that you are called to do even in the most obscure situation, makes his contribution to the general sanctification of the Church.’ (18)
The great surge of cleansing and compelling life we call ‘grace' takes and uses these men and women. Lifting them from concentration on the life of nature, it teaches them each in their own way and degree and often in terms unconnected with theology the supreme supernatural secret of heroic and redeeming love. As the longing for personal purification and harmony points to a deep need in the human creature, an implicit knowledge of its half-achieved status and spiritual call; so the longing to do in some way this redemptive work distinctive of all the greatest souls surely points to a fundamental character of the supernatural life in man. It is given a place in every great religion. Thus for Islam, the right of intercession vests in the Prophet alone, but is claimed by the Sufi saints as part of their spiritual inheritance from him (19) whilst the Buddhist Path of Holiness, which has as its first stage personal salvation, leads through enlightenment to the achievement of redemptive power. Doubtless this redeeming impulse is, and will be, worked out in many ways and at many different levels. The great intercessory action of the whole Supernatural Society, whether it be still within the physical world or beyond (so touchingly acknowledged in the invocation of the Saints) includes all the diverse responses to God, to Supernature, all the aspirations, all the sacrifices made by every type of soul. Both adoration and supplication, both love and renunciation, accepted suf-
(18) Lettre sur L’Unité Catholique, mai 1922. Quoted in Irenikon Collection No. 3, 1927.
(19) R. A. Nicholson: The Idea of Personality in Sufism, p. 65.
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fering as well as devoted action, enter into this; and, in religious language, ‘prevail with God'.
Physical and mental labour, no less than spiritual labour, can therefore become the vehicles of spiritual effectiveness: for the worth of intercession abides, not in the specific things which it can and does do for man, but in the unimpeded channel offered by its loving intention to the transforming Divine love and will. There is included in its work that strange power of one spirit to penetrate, illuminate, support and rescue other spirits, through which so much of the spiritual work of the world seems to be done; the more awful privilege of redemptive suffering, as it appears again and again in the lives of the saints; the total dedication of the contemplative, redressing in adoration the downward trend of our largely self-interested world; the strong out-streaming prayer of the cloistered nun, given for the general need. Not only these, but the scientists’ costly battle with disease; the heroic reformer’s struggle for social purity; the joyful endurance of physical pain and weakness which makes many a sick-bed into a radiant centre of spiritual power. By each such act and life the tiny human creature, if only for a moment, contributes to that spiritualizing of the natural order which ‘takes away the sin of the world’.
'I believe,’ says Elisabeth Leseur, ‘that there circulates among all souls, those here below, those who are being purified, and those who have achieved the true Life, a vast and ceaseless stream made of the sufferings, the merits, and the love of all those souls: and that even our smallest pains, our least efforts can, through the divine action, reach other souls both near and distant, and bring to them light, peace and holiness.’ (20)
All this must inevitably take place at a certain cost to the creature; for here the physical and mental vehicle is
(20) Journal et Pensées, p. 317.
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wrested from its normal purpose, endures fresh strains, and serves the purposes of another level of life. Much that goes to make full natural life may be sacrificed ; ease and liberty, family happiness, health. Nor are the spiritual consolations of the sort which admiring outsiders often suppose. Creative and redemptive prayer, in which the human creature seems to advance to the very fringe of personality and act in dimly understood co-operation with another power, has never been regarded by those called to it as a succession of interior delights. By their universal testimony it is often full of pain, bitterness and tension; though always proceeding from a spirit which is utterly at peace. For it carries a heavy burden, but carries it with joy.
There is a drawing by Eric Gill of the Agony in Gethsemane, (21) which presents in one poignant scene the very essence of such an intercessory life. In the foreground three drowsy, earthy figures sit huddled in their cloaks in the thick darkness; comfortably somnolent, wholly insensitive to that which is being endured on their behalf. Beyond them, the prostrate figure of the agonized Reedeemer lies bathed in a white celestial light which He does not see. By His costly act of immolation, He has completely entered the supernatural world. Beside Him in that changeless light, an angel holds the dark but radiant chalice of redemptive suffering; the ‘cup of salvation' willingly accepted from God for other men. In their lesser degrees and ways, the intercessory saints have all sought to take their part in this supernatural action. The steadfast pressure of God, felt at different levels right through creation, finds through them a special path of discharge. Because of their burning love and limitless compassion, they have become tools
(21) In The Passion, published at the Golden Cockerel Press, 1926.
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of the Divine Creativity; and this in the most real and concrete sense.
Thus the prayers, tears, and secret sufferings of St. Monica avail more for St. Augustine than all his anxious studies and fervent search. His sanctification is the work of her redemptive love. (22) Thus St. Francis of Assisi, as he enters more deeply into his supernatural vocation, knows that behind the joy and expansion, the apparent simplicity of his message and life, lies the mysterious relationship with Reality which at last impressed upon his body the signature of the Cross. Thus St. Catherine of Siena, a young and untaught woman, declares that she is sent into the world ‘to taste and devour souls’. (23) She awakens the sense of the supernatural, sets up the standard of Reality, wherever she appears; effects thousands of conversions in her thirty years of life, and soothes and rescues sinners by taking on herself the burden of their sins. At last, worn out by the intensity of her saving labours, which try to the utmost both her body and her soul, (24) she dies ‘merry and joyous’ regretting only that she has not reverenced yet more deeply the sweet and glorious privileges of creative pain. (25) Thus the Cure d’Ars, always ailing and tortured by insomnia, offers his sufferings for the good of his parishioners and penitents, and in defiance of physical weakness accomplishes his astonishing work.(26) Thus David Brainerd, the saintly Evangelical leader, when first filled with the light and love of the mystic vision ‘felt at the same time an exceeding tenderness most fervent towards all mankind’. ‘God enabled me so to agonize in prayer that
(22) St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. III, caps, 11 and 12.
(23) E. Gardner: St. Catherine of Siena, p. 214.
(24) ‘Her prayers were of such intensity’, says an eye-witness, ‘that one hour of prayer more consumed that poor little body than two days upon the rack would have done another.’ Quoted by Gardner, op. Cit, p. 333.
(25) Op. Cit., pp. 85, 214, 349> etc.
(26) Germain: Le Bienheureux J. B. Viannay, p. 133.
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. . . my soul was drawn out very much for the world: I grasped for multitudes of souls.’ (27)
In their fullness such dispositions as these, and such results, are doubtless the privilege of the saints. Yet they show how close and real is the interlocking of all human spirits; how far reaching the soul’s force and responsibility. They suggest that we stand as it were on the verge of a world of supernatural action, and are in touch with powers of which the full span cannot be conceived by us: powers most truly given by God to the spirit of man, a world in which creation on spiritual levels can go forward; a world of which the limitations have not been seen by any human soul.
When we reflect on these things, their steady exhibition throughout history, their perpetual emergence wherever man’s love and man’s religion transcend the self-regarding stage and anchor themselves upon God, we are driven towards the view that in such total self-giving to the purposes of the Eternal—at whatever level it may be actualized, and in whatever way—the human spirit lives according to its measure the supernatural life. Whether by naïve petition, by costly action, by single heroic deeds, long secret suffering and renunciation, or the disinterested and often agonizing travail of the mind—in all these we find man painfully yet willingly transcending that level of nature within which he emerges, and giving himself to a mighty purpose which he loves but does not comprehend. The sacrificial instinct, so deeply planted in his soul and finding such various and such strange expressions as it accompanies his upward path, holds within itself the secret of his correspondence with Reality. Whether that Reality, self-revealed within the life of succession, is best found by
(27) Jonathan Edwards: An Account of the Life of David Brainerd, quoted by C. E. Padwick: Henry Martyn, p. 86.
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him in lonely intuition or in corporate action, along sensible or speculative paths—whether his experience of God be mainly mystical, social, sacramental or intellectual in type—the response which it asks for is always the same. This response we find made with classic completeness by the saints. In them we see the soul’s deep thirst for the Perfect, satisfied in and through its own loving and creative action on the imperfect. In its service of the successive, its here and now sufferings and tensions entinctured as they are by the ever-present sense of the Abiding the Transcendent Other is fully known and enjoyed.
In the Christian sacraments we have compact exhibitions, suited to our comprehension, of the self-giving of that Eternal Life which is nevertheless virtually present in and with all things; and in the historic Incarnation, the summing up and explication of many lesser theophanies. So perhaps in the redemptive saints we have a succinct and vivid demonstration of the general vocation of the Race; and in the existence of sanctity a clue to the deepest mysteries of our strange human experience. For where else shall we find so fully expressed, and made so vigorously operative, that instinct of heroism and self-sacrifice, that alliance of beauty and pain which emerges in all man’s freest acts and volitions, and points beyond itself to an unearthly goal? The protective pity of the intercessor, his willing suffering in and with the souls with which he is charged, the intensity of his detailed care how close this brings the human spirit to the divine nature; how well this runs in series with the life and mind of Christ.
The physical world, with its iron laws, its apparent cruelties, its strains and conflicts; this is the theatre within which the intercessory spirit emerges. The seeth-
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ing pot of organic life, coloured and darkened by countless fugitive joys and agonies, creative novelty and beauty, the horrors of decay, the ceaseless cycle of birth, growth and death ; this is the material with which he has to deal. The power by which alone he can deal with it—or with such scraps as are proposed to the action of his redeeming love—is the power inherent in that costly and unconditioned self-giving of the creature to the will of the Holy, which finds its supreme symbol in the Cross. And in this loving, suffering surrender to the Supernatural, the tiny human spirit achieves its glory and its rest. In so far as it is a creature of time, it suffers. In so far as it partakes of Eternity though it may not comprehend its own experience that suffering is transfused by a deep exultancy, a still and living peace; for beyond and within the stress and conflict, it knows the enfolding presence of an infinite and unbreakable joy. And here it is perhaps that the changeful soul of man draws nearest to the Unchanging, and tastes the peace, the splendour and the pity that dwell together in the heart of God.
From Wikipedia: (McDougall was an influential if somewhat extreme figure in his time but largely overtaken by more recent developments in both psychology and evolutionary studies. EU was originally much influenced by Henri Bergson, but having abandoned his elan vital theories, is still in search of a workable theory that would account for, or at least allow for, what she saw as the supernatural element in mystic experience. DCW)
William McDougall (22 June 1871 in Chadderton, Lancashire, England - 28 November 1938 Durham, U.S.) was an early twentieth century psychologist who spent the first part of his career in the United Kingdom and the latter part in the United States. He wrote a number of highly influential textbooks, and was particularly important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world. He was an opponent of behaviorism and stands somewhat outside the mainstream of the development of Anglo-American psychological thought in the first half of the twentieth century; but his work was very well known and respected among lay people.
McDougall was educated at Owens College, Manchester and St John's College, Cambridge.[1] He also studied medicine and physiology in London and Göttingen. After teaching at University College London and Oxford, he was recruited by William James to Harvard University, where he served as a professor of psychology from 1920 to 1927. He then moved to Duke University, where he established the Parapsychology Laboratory under J. B. Rhine, and where he remained until his death. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Among his students was Cyril Burt.
McDougall's interests and sympathies were broad. He was interested in eugenics, but departed from neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in maintaining the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as suggested by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck; he carried out many experiments designed to demonstrate this process. Opposing behaviourism, he argued that behaviour was generally goal-oriented and purposive, an approach he called hormic psychology (from Greek ὁρμή hormḗ "impulse").
However, in the theory of motivation, he defended the idea that individuals are motivated by a significant number of inherited instincts, whose action they may not consciously understand, so they might not always understand their own goals. His ideas on instinct strongly influenced Konrad Lorenz, though Lorenz did not always acknowledge this. McDougall underwent psychoanalysis with C. G. Jung, and was also prepared to study parapsychology. In 1920 he served as president of the Society for Psychical Research, and in the subsequent year of its US counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research[2]. A strong advocate of scientific method and academic professionalization in psychical research, McDougall was instrumental in establishing parapsychology as a university discipline in the US in the early 1930s.[3]
Because of his interest in eugenics and his unorthodox stance on evolution, McDougall has been adopted as an iconic figure by proponents of a strong influence of inherited traits on behaviour, some of whom are regarded by most mainstream psychologists as scientific racists. While McDougall was certainly an unorthodox figure and always willing to take a minority view, there is no reason to suppose that in the light of modern psychological knowledge and political developments, he would have supported the position taken by these groups. Though he wrote:
"...; the few distinguished Negroes, so called, of America - such as Douglass, Booker Washington, Du Bois - have been, I believe, in all cases mulattoes or had some proportion of white blood. We may fairly ascribe the incapacity of the Negro race to form a nation to the lack of men endowed with the qualities of great leaders, even more than to the lower level of average capacity" (McDougall, William., The Group Mind, p.187, Arno Press, 1973; Copyright, 1920 by G.P. Putnam's Sons).
McDougall married at the age of 29 ("against my considered principles", he reports in his autobiographical essay, "for I held that a man whose chosen business in life was to develop to the utmost his intellectual powers should not marry before forty, if at all"). He had five children.
