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Man and the SupernaturalChapter 4The Supernatural Self-Given in Process: History and Eternity
If we allow that there two ways of thinking, there are two levels of reality, two distinct worlds; then it surely falls within the province of religion to discover those ways and degrees in which the ‘supernatural’ world that bathes and supports us, and which is its special subject-matter, is revealed to human consciousness and enters into relation with men. Although it is from the mystics that we get the most vivid and personal accounts of such experienced relationship, we cannot limit the workings of the Transcendent in human life to their special contacts with God. It is essential if only as a check on subjectivism that the special page 77 experience and declarations of these individuals be supported and corrected by some more general conception, and some more general intimations: that we should be able to think of them as somehow deeply connected with, and even supported by, the common life of average men. The spiritual peaks, however great the distance that separates them from the ordinary level, and however strange, remote and lonely they may seem, must still rise from the earth and form part of it. They must not hang like cloud mountains in the air. This seems to mean that man’s total experience from within Nature of the Reality which is other than Nature, must be an experience of which some corporate history, tradition and practice on the one hand, and yet some secret personal communion on the other hand, must each form part; but never the whole part. It must have, like other sorts of life, a growing and sensible body as well as a living soul; an organic as well as a pneumatic side. Religion therefore needs not only those individuals who are capable of Isaiah’s apprehension and self-oblation, or St. Paul’s energetic love: persons able to ask in its fullest sense the mighty question of St. Francis, or formulate the answer of St. Ignatius. It needs also an articulated society, and a theory of existence, from within which such individuals can emerge as specialists and not as freaks; and which can therefore support, guarantee, and be enriched by their experience. In spite of the supposed antithesis between organized and personal religion, the supernatural life in man requires for its fullest existence and its richest unfolding both a general and a particular apprehension. To speak for a moment the language of theology, ‘natural religion’ alone cannot give a complete account of our knowledge of God. It is too general, vague and page 78 dim. Yet ‘revealed religion' alone loses its credentials, unless the special vivid insights and experiences of the historic Revealer be supported by the general fact of that everywhere possible if limited apprehension of God, which is the substance of ‘natural’ religion. And again, the intense and largely incommunicable certitudes of personal religion as seen in the saint and the mystic, require—if we are indeed to accept them as guides to Reality—the support of some general contributory consciousness; some concrete appearance, and embodiment in history, of those truths which the soul apprehends in the deep silence of contemplative prayer. These three theologies natural, historical, mystical are at bottom but the partial and oblique demonstrations within our little human sphere of the same august and superhuman Truth. Perhaps they are best thought of by us as the graded self-givings of that one living and eternal Spirit, Who is Light and in Whom is no darkness at all, in, through, and for our finite spirits; fragments from the richness of an infinite store, adapted to our limited human capacities and needs. Man receives authoritative news of the spiritual world through more than one channel, and must react to that world in more than one way, if he is not to cramp his soul. We may even extend the field within which these intimations of the supernatural can operate, beyond the rich nucleus which we call ‘religion’. It is reasonable and often useful, though it may not be adequate, to regard the unearthly passion of the religious genius as a response at a special level, and in a special way, to the same ultimate attraction as that which is felt in another manner by the philosopher and the artist. All three witness to the refusal of the fully awakened human spirit to be satisfied by a physical environment and an page 79 animal life; or identify reality with the time-series that conditions us. ‘The approach to God,’ says Professor Alexander, ‘may be made in various ways: through the phenomena of nature, through the pursuit of truth, through art, or through morality. Being one function of human nature, the religious sentiment does not exist in isolation from the rest, but is blended and interwoven with them; and all our experiences may in their various degrees be schoolmasters to teach us the reality of God.’ (1) The mediaeval story of the monk who wandered from his cloister into the heart of the forest, enticed by the song of an invisible bird, and listened to that music in an ecstacy which lasted for a hundred years, is the spiritual biography of many an artist and philosopher as well as of the saint. Each is struggling to convey to us, often without an adequate vocabulary, some idea of the insistent hints and glimpses he is receiving of a Reality wholly other than ourselves: the timeless Patria in which or Whom we live and move and are. The artist reaches out towards this Ultimate through the senses; the philosopher through the intellect; the mystic in another manner. But all three are seeking under symbols a metaphysical satisfaction: the ‘only substance of That which Is’. All three bring us in the end to the profound human rejection of a universe of mere succession. To say this is not to discredit the claim of experimental religion to a more complete and valid knowledge than can be reached by any other path: for it is only the great religious revealer who has yet been able to give us an experienced principle of stability in which the human soul can fully rest, and to link this abiding reality securely with the world of change. Perhaps at this stage we shall better understand the (1) S. Alexander: Space, Time, and Deity, vol. ii. p. 402. page 80 general reference and underlying implication of art, philosophy, and religion if we consider the special case of that which we call Romance. Romance is the heightened significance, the glow, the ‘otherness’, with which human beings tend to endow the plain narrative of human life. To explain away Romance by attributing it to a naïve preference for ‘2d. Coloured’ rather than ‘Id. Plain’ is to beg one of the deepest questions raised by existence. For why, after all, does the human self like—indeed, long for—this kind of colour, unless it appeals to an appetite which nothing in the untouched natural order can satisfy? These naïve efforts to transfigure the time-world are like the first adventures of a child with a paint-box; crude intimations of the emerging passion for beauty. They have no practical value. They help neither the preservation of the individual nor the propagation of the race. They are entirely incompatible with all that we mean by ‘animal’ life; we need go no further than the Book of Tobit or the Odyssey to discover that man cannot be described in animal terms alone. The tendency to romanticize history is at bottom the tendency to supernaturalize it; to make it the vehicle of transcendental feeling, to achieve at least a diminished ecstacy, some contact with the Ultimate, by means of the series of changing events. For Romance is history which is suffused by eternity; and is thus a witness to that more perfect synthesis of Changeful and Unchanging which is the essence of religion. If religion requires ontology to give it meaning, Romance requires ontology too. Almost any of its characteristic products is enough to assure us of this. ‘Right so departed Galahad, Percivale and Bors with him; and so they rode three days, and then they came to a rivage, and found the ship whereof the tale speaketh of tofore. And page 81 when they came to the board they found in the middes the table of silver which they had left with the maimed king, and the Sangreal which was covered with red samite. Then were they glad to have such things in their fellowship; and so they entered and made great reverence thereto; and Galahad fell in his prayer long time to Our Lord, that at what time he asked, that he should pass out of this world. So much he prayed till a voice said to him: Galahad, thou shalt have thy request; and when thou askest the death of thy body thou shalt have it, and then shalt thou find the life of the soul. Percivale heard this, and prayed him, of fellowship that was between them, to tell him wherefore he asked such things. That shall I tell you, said Galahad; the other day when we saw a part of the adventures of the Sangreal I was in such a joy of heart, that I trow never man was that was earthly. And therefore I wot well, when my body is dead my soul shall be in great joy to see the Blessed Trinity every day, and the Majesty of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. So long were they in the ship that they said to Galahad: Sir, in this bed ought ye to lie, for so saith the scripture. And so he laid him down and slept a great while; and when he awaked he looked afore him and saw the city of Sarras.’ (2) I have chosen this passage because we see in it certain well marked characters of great romantic literature, which bear out the view that we have in such literature a real product of the transcendental sense. Sensitive readers always notice in it a curious sense of slowingdown, the partial replacement of succession by duration; hints of a neighbouring deep stillness, the yet-veiled presence of another kind of life. We can find these qualities conveyed in the free working of the creative imagination, as in La Belle Dame Sans Merci: or even, in a less extent and at a lower level, in some of the early plays of Maeterlinck. We also find them operating along that dangerous strip of country where fact and fact-like legend meet. Take, for instance, the story of another journey, where we surely recognize in a sublimated form tHe amalgam of romantic narrative and spiritual truth. ‘When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came (2) Malory: Le Morte Darthur, Part IV, Bk. XVII, cap. 21. page 82 and stood over where the young child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his Mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. (3) The Bible of course provides us with some of the greatest examples of this romantic transfiguration of events; and much of its rich meaning is lost to those who refuse to apply this method of interpretation, and acknowledge the part played by it. But safer instances may be found in abundance in mediaeval literature; and supremely in such a work as the Little Flowers of St. “Francis of Assisi. ‘St Francis being much weakened in body through his sharp abstinence, and through the assaults of the devil, and desiring to comfort the body with the spiritual food of the soul, began to think on the immeasurable glory and joy of the blessed in the life eternal; and therewithal began to pray God to grant him the grace of tasting a little of that joy. And as he continued in his thought, suddenly there appeared unto him an Angel with exceeding great splendour, having a viol in his left hand and in his right the bow; and as Saint Francis stood all amazed at the sight of him, the Angel drew the bow once across the viol; and straightway Saint Francis was ware of such sweet melody that his soul melted away for very sweetness and was lifted up above all bodily feeling; insomuch that, as he afterwards told his companions, he doubted that, if the Angel had drawn the bow a second time across the strings, his mind would have left his body for the all too utter sweetness thereof.’ (4) Such transfigurations of the actual, such penetrations of a described series of moments by a rapture, awe, mystery and loveliness which seem to belong to another order than this, come, says one of the most profound literary critics of our day, from ‘the transcendental element in human nature . . . the shadowy Companion, (4) The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assist. ‘Of the second reflection on the most holy Stigmata.’ page 83 the invisible attendant who walks all the way beside us, though his feet are in the Other World’.(5) Here the ‘programme music' of narrative literature is shot through by the ‘absolute music' of spiritual literature; and, in consequence, some little hint of all that lies beyond us filters in. God, said Brother Giles of Assisi, is like a great mountain of corn; and even the greatest of the saints is only a sparrow, picking up a grain here and there. Other birds too bring their grain from that mountain, and witness in their own manner to its richness and reality: the mysterious overplus of Being, beyond the conceptual range of our various but limited minds. Thus we need not despise even the contributions of the torn-tit, or refuse to admit them to the total of our knowledge of the supernatural world: for ‘every good gift and every perfect gift' partakes of the Ultimate and ‘comes down from the Father of lights’. (6) We are obliged to think of man’s access to the Infinite in these clumsy ways, to alternate between personal and impersonal, concrete and fluid image, because of our conceptual limitations. But however we think of it, we shall never escape the fact that in so far as God is known at all, He is necessarily only known because and in so far as He is experienced. And this experience is not as realized by us through the shifting veils of creation simple, uniform, and absolute. It is subtle, many-levelled, various and approximate; and at the best inevitably incomplete. We climb to reality by a rope of many strands, each giving strength to the rest. Our total experience of the Supernatural, then, is both corporate and individual; both historical and metaphysical. It is sensual, intellectual and spiritual. It requires the explication within societies of truths which have first (5) Arthur Machen: Hieroglyphics, p. 118. page 84 been apprehended by the special powers of individual souls; and the sharpened realization and representation by those special individuals of the general certitude latent in the crowd. It requires a race with ears to hear; and also individuals of musical genius who can select and adapt to the scale of humanity strains from that torrent of melody which is, in its wholeness, so far in excess of our span. Christianity, at once so historical yet philosophical, so personal yet institutional, so practical yet mystical, admirably demonstrates this. All this means that, so far as man in his religion is reaching out towards the meaning of the universe, and towards a Something Other which expresses itself to him through that universe, then we may expect that he must explore more than one channel of revelation. Therefore the opposition which is often set up between these various channels of revelation is artificial, and destructive of the true balance of his spiritual life. Nevertheless man, thus receiving in more than one way intimations of that Reality which yet is One, finds, directly he tries to reduce his intuitions and experiences to order, that some division and classification is forced upon him. And we, who are now trying on a small scale to discover the character of human relation to the Infinite, must also divide before we seek to unite. Especially four ways among the many in which the human creature experiences the fact of God, and God is self-disclosed to men, stand out before us. First, in History we find the Supernatural penetrating Process and revealed through it. Next, in Incarnation and, depending from this, in the fact of sanctity we find the Supernatural penetrating Personality and revealed through it. Thirdly, in Sacraments and Symbols we find the page 85 Supernatural penetrating created Things, and revealed to the soul through the channels of sense. Last, in Prayer we find the Supernatural in immediate contact with created spirit; self-revealed and self-active within the Individual Soul. Each of these four great ways of access to God has often been embraced and explored in isolation; and exalted at the expense of the rest. The sacramental and the spiritual, the historical and mystical, the immanental and the incarnational strands of the religious complex, have been forcibly separated and placed in a false opposition. To treat them thus is to lose all hope of understanding them, for each one is only truly explained through the others, and no one of them has meaning alone; and if in this book these four ways of approach are studied in succession, it is only in the hope of uniting them at last in a stable synthesis. In such a study History must inevitably come first; since all these methods of contact between Infinite and finite are experienced and developed by growing and evolving creatures who form part of a historic process, are themselves incidents in the slow unfolding of the tale of organic life. Indeed it is easy but probably far too easy to be accurate to think of the relation between history and Eternity as the relation between a tale and the Teller of the tale. So now we go on to consider the way in which through History the unchanging Object of religion finds and is found by men; and the human beings borne upon the surface of one tiny cooling planet in the truest sense ‘inheritors of a dying world’ meet and lay hold of a Reality to which they can give the names of Infinite, Perfect and Eternal One. Human life, indeed all created life, appears to us as existing in Time and conditioned by Time. It is suc- page 86 cessive: and so deeply coloured is all our thinking by succession, that the strangeness of this fact is not noticed by any but philosophic minds. Yet it may seem very strange to the angels that our life and thought consist in a ceaseless chain of mental and physical events. We cannot stop; and such identity as we possess must be an identity which endures by and through continual change. The words which cluster round the concept of life—evolution, development, growth, variation, birth, maturity, decay, death—all carry with them and develop this sense of mutability, of flux. Even the deep stillness experienced in contemplation does not constitute a true escape from the time-series; but seems to be tranquil only by contrast with the more feverish pace of our normal thought. Whilst it appears to be, and indeed may be, tasting Eternity, it remains conditioned by history and subject to time. ‘Whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell,’ said St. Paul of his own ecstacy; and that is the puzzle which haunts all the higher ranges of the devotional life. But we know by the felt contrast between our enslavement by succession and our incurable thirst for the Abiding, that the world of change alone cannot use or satisfy all the capacities of man. Now religion, we have said, seems to us to begin in this intuition of the Abiding; in this metaphysical thirst, this dim yet real craving, for ultimates. And this craving, if we look at its essence and not at its imperfect expressions, already involves an implicit apprehension—even a cloudy intimate knowledge—of that which we agreed to call supernatural reality: a Perfection transcending time. It is always turned in desire, in terror, or in adoration to a world that is other than this: a world in which succession has no place. page 87 ”I see Thee without beginning or midst or end!” exclaims Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.’ (7) ‘Is alone,’ says Plato, ‘may properly be attributed to the Eternal Essence.’ (8) ‘That alone is truly real which abides unchanged’, says his pupil St. Augustine; describing, after nine unresting years of active Christian life, the essential character of his quest for God. (9) In such words as these we have, not merely a special conclusion of philosophy, but a deep conviction renewed again and again in all great spiritual souls: in Socrates and Plotinus ; in Gautama and Mohamed ; in the Psalmists and Prophets; above all, and in most exquisite tenderness of expression, in the Synoptic Christ. All these souls invariably and instinctively look to and adore, not some future possibility, some not-yet-finished idea of Holiness; but an already existing Perfection. This abides unchanged; but the relation of the plastic and historically conditioned soul ceaselessly changes. In the movement of St. Augustine’s life and feeling through many phases of sensual and intellectual desire and satisfaction, yet never outside the field of influence of that steadfast One, ‘fixed yet incomprehensible; unchangeable yet changing all' (10) we see exhibited the true relation of Historic to Eternal Life: ‘The difference within affinity between two, the deepest and most real of all realities really known to us; our finite durational spirit and the infinite eternal Spirit, God.’ (11) This cloudy knowledge of Eternal Life develops on man’s side through a series of experiments, and by a (7) Bhagavad Gita, XI. 16, 19. (11) F. von Hügel: Eternal Life, p. 3. Page 88 method of trial and error; destined to establish at least some partial truth about its nature, the relation which is possible between it and mankind. We have seen that at first he tends to incorporate it in those aspects of the physical that he does not understand; and only with deepening knowledge, and by the help of great revealing personalities, gradually learns to conceive it in terms which transcend his own immediate sensations and needs. Even so, he drags with him in his ascent plenty of furniture from his religious past, and adapts it with surprising skill to the ‘more stately mansions of his soul’ ; thus laying himself open at every stage to the various charges of conservatism, superstition, and syncretism which formal religion always has to meet. So plain is all this, and so profoundly is religion as we know it coloured by the historical process through which it has passed, that many sympathetic students are unable to see in it more than an immanental unfolding within the time-stream of the spiritual consciousness of man; an extension of his natural evolution, conforming to natural law. The current view of Old Testament history, tracking out the unfolding of the Hebrew religious consciousness from its first crude intuitions to the heights of prophetic inspiration in Ezekiel and Isaiah, encourages this simplification; and harmonizes well with the general outlook which is supposed by the unscientific to be characteristic of natural science. Thus one of the best exponents of Christian Modernism has said that: ‘The essence of religion, of the Christian religion as of others, is Spirit working from within, not imposed from without’; (12) and proceeds on this basis to develop the well-known but deceptive antithesis between the religion of ‘authority and institutions"— representing merely the conservation (12) Percy Gardner: Modernism in the English Church, p. 89. page 89 of outgrown forms—and that personal religion of experience and spirit in which all the seeds of progress must be sought. But this attractive simplification already comes into conflict not only with the observed facts of religion, but also with the philosophy of history in its richest and deepest developments. For surely the differentia of history, that which marks it off from the general process of organic nature which we see round us, is exactly the breaking-in which we observe in it of something other than natural causation; and the difficulty of understanding it comes from this apparent breach of continuity, the resulting action and reaction of unique personalities and events. When event and process reach the human level and thus become history, they always begin to exhibit peculiarities which point beyond themselves. Naturalism here ceases to be adequate as an explanation of the observed process of life. Historic religions, when we come to understand them, are the supreme examples of this interweaving of the entirely natural with something utterly beyond the natural; and Christianity is the most truly historical of all religions because, whilst giving fullest value to all the acts and experiences of human life, it yet insists that this human life alone is not enough to exhibit the purposes of God. Christianity neither flees from the world, nor capitulates to the world. The double strand of which all history is woven—tradition and novelty—is present in it; and it is the vivid sense of this ‘something more’, the breaking-in of the Transcendent upon the temporal series, which Christian Apocalyptic is trying under its peculiar symbolism to express. In Christ’s own teaching, the immanental parable of the mustard seed cannot tell all the truth about the Kingdom of God. ‘Behold! The page 90 Bridegroom cometh' tells us more. So too in the Johannine vision, the pure river of the Water of Life flows out of the very heart of the Supernatural for the healing of the nations of the earth; and the New Jerusalem is not the result of even the most enlightened townplanning, but ‘descends out of heaven from God’.(13) But the Apocalyptic principle is not confined to religion. Secular history too shows us again and again sanctions and imperatives, which we cannot class as natural, emerging and exercising a determining influence on human affairs. It shows us the face of the world and the destiny of nations sharply changed by the action of minds and wills that moved to and fro between natural and supernatural regard; or obeyed an insistent push that seemed entirely unrelated to the practical needs and advantages of men. Again and again it suggests that the life of man only exhibits its full meaning, its specific character, in so far as some degree of this twofoldness appears in him ; that he must partake of Eternity as well as of time. History shows us successive events contributing to the creation of heroic personality; and the building-up of rich characters who seem to exceed what nature could either produce or require, as St. Joan of Arc transcends the political scene which conditioned her career. It shows us great and daring thinkers emerging within an uncomprehending and often censorious society and making gifts to it; patient scientists who reap no personal advantage from the corner of the universe which they unveil ; great men of action behaving from within history upon heroic levels, and thus witnessing to attractions and obligations beyond the level of the natural world. Plato and Marcus Aurelius—Pasteur and Darwin—Lincoln and Livingstone—all these manifest page 91 within history the supernatural life. It shows us too man’s fever of creation harnessed to the service of music and of plastic art. It shows us great ideas incarnated in groups of men and in institutions; and enduring, when the groups and institutions degenerate and die. History gets its real character from the often abrupt and inexplicable appearance of such particular individuals and unique actions and events : persons, actions, and events which contribute to no utilitarian purpose, and seem to require for their explanation something other than the orderly unpacking of the world’s portmanteau. It lies before us like some closely woven fabric, in which every now and again, in defiance of the apparent pattern, there comes a tiny golden thread—some single perfect act never to be repeated, some single perfect work of art. More rarely, the texture is abruptly broken for the emergence of a wonderful gold flower: a sudden burst of beauty, heroism, or vision, involving many devoted lives. These separate inspired moments of beautiful or heroic action, these great flowerings of faith, sacrifice, or art, give the little race of men their chief means of guessing the existence of the ‘secret and inviolate Rose’. We only begin to understand history, as distinct from biology, when we look at these, its noblest products; in which something of the non-successive, the Eternal, is embodied and revealed. Then we perceive it—to use another, still imperfect image—as a process which meanders along the borderland between the animal and spiritual realms; sometimes making a sudden surge into free supernature, sometimes falling back into mere nature, often exhibiting together in bewildering conjunction the characters of both worlds. History shows us a succession which is naturally conditioned, and yet is ever open to invasion from another order; a scene within page 92 which Personality—that more than natural thing—first emerges and becomes regnant. When we try to see all this as a whole, it is too intricate for us. The woven fabric is like one of those verdures which hung below the tapestry pictures in a mediaeval hall. As we look at it, we seem to be gazing into a jungle that thrills with life; life which emerges at every level, from weed to tree and from brute to angel, and is set at every pace. All there seems interdependent, yet all is not of equal significance and worth; and, gazing with a more concentrated attention, we gradually learn to distinguish those strands in history which most clearly manifest the presence of Eternal Life. In the solemn beauty of the death of Socrates, and far off in time though very near in spirit in the unhesitating, quiet sacrifice of Captain Oates; in the half-mystical fervour and heroic endurance of the first navigators, and in the same non-utilitarian passion driving men to suffer for the conquest of Mount Everest, we see the call of the Supernatural, variously interpreted and variously obeyed by men standing right away from a self-interested world. Again, the age-long influence of a great political vision arising within an individual mind, as in Caesar or Justinian; the great secular benefits and civilizing changes within the world, which trace their origin from St. Benedict’s refusal of that same world; the romantic impulse to adventure which lay behind the first Crusade or the voyage of Columbus, and the immense results which flowed from these defiances of the self-preserving instinct of man: all these, in their different ways, are examples of the free emergence of novelty into history through the gateway of human character. They are genuine creations and movements of the life process; yet have in them something, some quality or incentive, page 93 that seems to enter from beyond the evolutionary scheme. Nor is the guiding presence of the Supernatural seen only in the emergence of great personalities. In the history of the Hebrew nation—so intractable to naturalistic explanation in its mysterious mingling of political disaster and spiritual growth, its bit by bit discovery of God, its deepening sense of the supernatural preparing and culminating in the appearance of Christ—we seem to see a special self-giving of the Universal by means of a particular series—a true historic embodiment of Eternal Life. And summing up all this we may surely say, that whenever historic process is found thus to embody absolute value whether in great personalities or in the great transfiguration of events it witnesses decisively to those truths about the universe which the doctrine of supernature requires. Our instinctive grouping of history into epochs, our distinction of ‘great periods’ and significant moments, our description of its great figures as heroes, leaders, prophets, enlighteners of other men, are implicit acknowledgements of this. They point to a dualism even here, in the very arena of practical life ; and warn us that the strange complex, the unresting process within which we seem to be captive, has its hidden aspect—is, as it were, a dough within which some penetrating leaven is at work. II If this means that history cannot be reduced to mere process, but is a field in which transcendent as well as natural forces are truly active, it also means that religion—as the greatest of all embodiments of this Transcendent—does and must itself form a strand in history, and have its historic aspect; even though its objective lies beyond Time. Understood in its fullness, religion page 94 must amount to an explanation of history. Though in its inmost nature it is a response to, and even a discovery of, the Unlimited and Unchanging; yet this discovery it makes—and must always make—from within the limited world of succession and change, and largely by use of material found within the physical field. Full religion cannot rest in the abstract; nor is it adequately conceived as ‘what the individual does with his own solitariness’. (14) It requires revealers, bridge-builders, men firmly planted in history who are yet aware of the Light bathing all history: Gautama and Socrates, Moses and Amos, Paul and Plotinus, and many more. Here religion recapitulates, at its own level and with peculiar clearness, that double process that interweaving of temporal and eternal realities which gives to history its special character and to our human life all its entrancing interest and touching beauty. To the queer human creature,—compounded of sense and spirit, so apparently immersed in and adapted to things, and yet so persistently haunted by the sense of a Reality other than things—the experience of mystery, which afterwards grew into the experience of God, could only come mixed with and conditioned by things and events. Thus in its origin religion was not, and could not be, a ‘pure' experience; nor has it ever since become a ‘pure' experience. And just where it has been most effective and most profound, there have its human limitations been most clearly and humbly felt. St John of the Cross, at the end of one of his great mystical poems, exclaims suddenly ‘How delicately Thou teachest love to me!’ Perhaps if we realized more fully all that is implied in this utterance of one of the greatest of the contemplative saints, so wide and deep in his ex- (14) A. N. Whitehead: Religion in the Making, p. 16. page 95 perience of the realities of the spiritual world, we should not be quite so hurried and full of assurance in constructing our clumsy diagrams of the delicate and subtle processes of God; so rigid in our exclusions, so horribly crude in our conceptions and demands. Perhaps this saying might even give us the beginning of a vision of God, as a Presence of unchanging Love and Beauty; teaching the, race through history, and each soul through and within those faculties which have been evolved from our animal past. It might persuade us that a supercilious contempt of history and the time-process, an effort to achieve the Eternal by the mere rejection of the temporal, is hostile to the truest and richest theism. Such a lofty refusal of the common experience, such an attempt to get out of our own skins and elude the discipline of our humbling limitations, merely defeats its own end. Rather the faithful acceptance of history, a genial sharing in the experience of the race, is required of an incarnational religion: a full use of, and entrance into, that general scene within which the Eternal penetrates time, and the little creature of time can ascend to consciousness of the Eternal. Thus the right attitude of religion towards history is that of complete and humble acceptance, not rejection. Indeed, all the greatest supernatural experiences of men are found, when we investigate them, to require and arise within a rich historical environment. We saw, in considering the witness of the mystics, how their special discoveries of the supernatural always arose within the normal historic conditions of their life; the divine communication flowing easily along the channels provided by the human and natural scene. Though their experience in its essence must be lonely because unshareable, no conscious break with history was involved in it; and if we insist on cutting them out of the historic page 96 fabric, their value for us is lost. Even Christ, in His hours of communion with the Father on the mountain, still brought to that profoundly solitary experience a mind steeped in the Jewish tradition, a religious vocabulary formed by the prophets and psalmists of His race, and an emotional life developed by human relationships and responsibilities. He was and is at once utterly the child of the Eternal, and the teacher and leader of time-conditioned men. And it always remains true that from within natural and historical conditions, not in repudiation of them, the human soul drinks deepest of the Water of Life. So Isaiah sees the glory of God in the Temple; the very home of a developed institutional and national religion in its most rigid form. St. Francis kneels before the Crucifix; the supremely concrete symbol of a thoroughly historic yet profoundly supernatural faith. St. Thomas Aquinas, at the end of a life devoted to the intellectual analysis of Divine Mysteries and the re-making of Catholic philosophy, is suddenly lifted up to the contemplation of ineffable Reality as he stands at the altar saying Mass; the extreme expression of ceremonial and dogmatic religion. Thus convinced from within history of all that lies beyond history, he does not abandon traditional devotion, but only intellectual explanation; and, returning to his cell, quietly puts his pens and inkhorn away, saying, ‘I have seen too much I shall write no more.’ (15) All these were men of their own time. The contacts of their souls with the Reality of God were conditioned by history, by their actual place in the time-process: and the material within which they found the Eternal revealed was historical material. Not historical material in its ‘pure' form—for the Mass and the (15) Acta Sanctorum. Martii, torn, I, pp. 6726-7110. page 97 Crucifix are no more like the Upper Room and Calvary than the Temple of Isaiah’s day was like the travelling tent in which Moses and Aaron spoke to God but material which had been subjected to the pressure of change and development. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. But the point of that astute epigram surely is, that in order to remain the same we are compelled to move; because our natures are doubly conditioned by Eternity and by Time, and all our acts have a two-fold reference. Thus every deliberate attempt in religion to stop the clock, or reascend the time-stream, defeats its own end. The little sect which reproduces with care the methods of the Apostolic Church really reveals less of the full Christian secret than does a historic Church in the form which it has assumed under the pressure of historic change. The ‘ancient wisdom’ of Theosophy refuses to convey supernatural value because like well-tinned asparagus, though it may on the dish look very attractive it is only pretending to be alive. But those who accept with simplicity, and in spite of all its disconcerting features, that rich amalgam of past and present, of tradition and novelty, which provides the historic expression of man’s relation with God; these will then find themselves able to press on—through the historic event or personality, and by a process appropriate to our half-animal human life—to the conviction of a spiritual and supra-sensible Reality expressing itself in that historic event. All the factors which really contribute to man’s spiritual history have, like the humble rush with which Virgil girded Dante, (16) this double natural and supernatural reference. It is surely in this amalgam of the changing and the Changeless—this interweaving of History and Eternity page 98 —that the true peculiarity and nearly all the difficulty of religion is to be found. Yet this two-fold character is essential to it, if it is fully to meet the needs of men. For were it, as George Fox believed, entirely dependent on an individual and inward light; or, as convinced traditionalists have insisted, entirely revealed in a closed series of historic events—then it would be inadequate to the fullness of human life, which is founded in the implicit conviction that there is both an outside and an inside to things. The character which most distinguishes man from all other forms of life known to us, is that he is aware of, and enticed by, both the successive and the Abiding. His spirit is so made and conditioned that it cannot be fully fed or rightly grow, unless it has some access, virtual or actual, to the Universal, Abstract and Spiritual; whilst also remaining in closest contact with the particular, historical, and sensible. ‘To understand something merely in general, not in particular’, says St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘is to know it imperfectly’ a saying which, fully understood, covers the whole Christian scheme. The abstract idea of whiteness must be embodied for us in some particular thing that is white, if our mind, trained towards the concrete, is to receive it. Yet this white ‘thing’ depends for its quality on the universal that it represents.
Hence, in the long run, one group of experiences without the other must starve and distort the soul. For we are all immersed in nature, in history, in succession; and a great deal of our religion, like the rest of our experience, is concerned with nature, history, succession—but not all. There is always present in it the claim of an Eternal Reality which is not a reality of time and space: which stands away from, yet everywhere conditions, life, mind and change. Man has aptitude for both these levels, page 99 and will not truly find satisfaction in one alone: for he does not become a sacramentalist through peculiar and ‘magical' beliefs, but is one by nature, tending always to reach out to the universal through its particular embodiments. And from this point of view, History is the major sacrament. On the one hand in his works of art and romantic treatment of events, on the other in heroic lives lived within the world of time, man shows his virtual realization of this. Wherever we find the Transcendent, under whatever name, entering the arena of human life and inciting to disinterested contemplation or to selfless and heroic deeds there, though not necessarily in the vestments of religion, the Supernatural truly reveals itself and gives gifts to men. Here intuition achieves a certain reconciliation of those apparent opposites, the successive and abiding, the natural and supernatural worlds. This reconciliation, then, must also be expressed in our religious constructions, if they are to be adequate to our spiritual life. These constructions must convey the eternal Form, and that eternal Form in a way in which man can apprehend it: that is, as revealed in historic happenings and sensible things. In other words, the complete religion of the human spirit must have soaring theological vision and concrete historical embodiment. It must seek and adore the Ultimate, without despising the contingent; for it is required to give one rich Reality under two aspects—the universal and achieved, the particular and emergent. Rorate coeli desupen aperiatur terra et germlnet Salvatorem. ‘Eternal Life' says von Hügel, ‘its practice and conception, can but suffer from any attempt to restrict the spirit’s action to one of its two movements—to abstraction and negation only; or to cut religion loose from the mysteriously mighty stimulation accruing to it, in and through the very tension and difficulties, page 100 from historic personalities and the happenings and operations in time and space; or, above all, from the full, vivid conviction of the distinctness from our own spirits, and of the supreme, stupendous richness, of the life of the Spirit of God, the Godhead.’ (17) Along this path a way is opened up towards a philosophy of religion which will not merely permit but require the fact and principle of incarnation, and its extension in the apparatus of institutions, symbols and sacraments. The mere existence of history witnesses to the fact that succession, the contingent, does matter—that it contains a thread of meaning, includes more than one level of reality. We insult history by regarding it as a form of Maya; as the sweep of varied cloud armies across an unchanging sky. This poor conception shows little understanding of the richly woven fabric of the universe. Yet we make nonsense of history if we capitulate to the philosophy of change, and try to understand it apart from that unchanging sky: or if we are tempted to shirk its difficult interpretation by holding that all its bodying-forths of the Eternal have equal rights. Surely by ‘history' we mean that organic quality in the life of the world, of human society, art, or any other complex, which integrates and gives significance to the chain of events and redeems them from mere unmeaning succession. Succession is the galloping horse which bears forward a Rider whose identity is maintained throughout the time-process: who, clothed with the Past, carries that Past into the present, making of each new moment something which is richly charged with all that life has accomplished, and yet is wide open towards all its future possibilities. It is because of this character of carrying forward the achieved towards the unachieved that history requires, to make sense, a concept of End and Pur (17) F von Hügel: Eternal Life, p. 120. page 101 pose; even as science requires belief in the rationality of the Cosmos, the uniform operation of Law. And since we are each of us a part of this history, are carried along by this process, and can never escape from it during life, it is within history and in closest connection with such End and Purpose, that God, the Supernatural, must meet us. If we stand in a deep forest, and look up through the branches to the sunshine seen in a broken pattern between the countless leaves, it is possible to say and to feel that the foliage hides the sky. Yet perhaps the living screen lets through as much of that pure radiance as the little dwellers in the forest can bear. We, immersed in the forest, are entranced by these shining glimpses between the leaves; with their assurance of the steady presence ‘yonder' of an infinite light-flooded world. Without this breaking in, this fragmentary revelation, we should have no direct apprehension of the transcendent energy and glory over-arching us, by which the forest lives. Yet a deeper insight can learn to find that sunshine, that same unearthly radiance seen by us in these dazzling and broken yet ‘religious’ glimpses as the essential life of each one of those leaves. We can come to realize that all-pervading energy, poured in its abounding richness through space; penetrating all things yet steadfastly continuing in itself, in the dual character of a given Presence and self-imparting Power. And with the deepening of our contemplation, with an ever more complete and sympathetic entrance into the mysterious process, the cyclic births and deaths of the many-graded forest life, there comes to us a more profound sense of the ‘otherness' of those secret forces in which that life is bathed and by which it is continuously created and maintained. page 102 It is truly the real radiation of the real sun, utterly distinct from the earth and the tree—a radiation undiscerned by the senses, and of which the true character remains unknown that causes and upholds the vivid life and growth of the tree. Yet without the dazzling vision of sunlight between the leaves, the lifting up of the adoring soul to an apprehension of the ‘something other’, beyond and yet within each cell of the forest life, we should never have guessed that this ‘something other’, steadily flooding our whole world with its invisible energies, was also fully present here. Thus do the eyes of the man of prayer, turning back from Eternity to history, find in history itself a new wonder and new incentive to the deepening of his love and awe; feeling through the entangled life and growth of men the allpenetrating influence, the ‘dark radiations', of God. Yet the transcendent glimmerings on the one hand, the intricate organic embodiments on the other hand, leave the overplus of mystery, the Deus incomprehensibilis unimpaired.
Thus we are bound to think of history as having, like the forest, its own, yet dependent, reality. It abides in and feeds on the Eternal, truly present in it yet utterly transcendent to it: and our chance of apprehending this Transcendent, this Supernature, is mainly through and within history. To think otherwise—to turn from God’s conditioned self-disclosures in the race, and demand a (18) Divine Dialogue, cap. 18. page 103 separate and ‘spiritual' illumination is to fall a victim to a ludicrous individualism which the sight of the starry sky might be sufficient to rebuke. Yet though God, Supernature, be inalterably present with Nature—or rather, Nature within Him— some distinct religious vision of God over-against His Creation is needed, if His genuine presence in history and men’s hearts is to be known at its full worth. Hence in the full life of religion, tradition and contemplation both have their rights. This fact of the importance of history, and of our natural adaptation to its pace and its limitations, creates the conditions within which the spiritual life of nan must be developed; if it is to be healthy, humble and secure. That life must have attachments to both orders, and must move with suppleness between them: a ferocious other-worldliness maims our human nature almost as seriously as a cheap capitulation to the ‘world.’ We know, as yet, very little about ourselves; but what we do know, if we try to be fair to all its elements, seems best expressed in the statement that man is a thoroughly natural yet also implicitly spiritual creature. At one end of the scale is the conclusion of biology that he is simply ‘one of the greater ground-apes.’ At the other end of the scale is the conclusion of religious philosophy, that he is a creature with a capacity for God. Both can produce evidence in support of their convictions ; and both must be treated with respect. Taken together, they suggest that man’s relation with Reality is to be thought of as an emergent and growing relation; a forward-moving, energetic push. He is subject to process, yet has attachments to the unchanging. Though continuous in some sense with his natural origins, in its higher reaches his life involves intuitions, obligations, achievements, for which biological process alone can never account. There page 104 is, it is true, no point at which we can draw a line and say with certainty: here the animal self leaves off, and the human personality begins. Yet it is equally certain that nothing in the greater ground-ape seems to lead by logical stages to the Second Isaiah, or St. Francis of Assisi. The same paradoxical character seems to mark that stream of history in which we find ourselves; of which, indeed, we are a part. This too, in so far as we can make anything of it, appears as a mixture of determined nature and free spirit of biological process and overruling purpose of steady development and sudden novelty. And this stream of history, though when we try to think of it its richness and intricacy overwhelms us, is only one tiny strand, perhaps, in the great fabric of a guided universe. Yet plainly it is the strand with which we are connected; and with which, therefore, we must begin. Thus we are faced once more by these two concepts, both needful if we are to make any sense of our crude experience: the historical, natural and contingent the timeless, supernatural and absolute. They must be welded together, if we are to provide a frame for all the possibilities of human life; and that life, whether social or individual, must have both its historically flowing and its changelessly absolute sides. The achievement by man of self-consciousness—at first merely utilitarian, but now developed far past the practical level and its requirements—seems to be a stage in his further growth towards consciousness of this double reality and double obligation. Such a vivid, warmly realistic consciousness of God in His untouched perfection, richness and generosity, and of the world with all its strife, demands and tensions, page 105 is put before us in its loveliest, simplest, and yet deepest form in the Synoptic portrait of Christ. It was epitomized in His two commandments, and expressed in a life which alternated between solitary communion with the Eternal and willing self-mergence in the stream of human life. And again in the Christian Apocalypse, that which entrances us and survives its mythical embodiment is surely the same deep vision of two-fold Reality; of the absolute world, the transcendent yet present ‘throne of God and the Lamb' over against the serial changes, the conflicts and dooms of time. The eternal song of wonder, joy and praise, offered by the angelic host to God, persists through and transcends the vicissitudes of history, the fall of nations, the pouring out of the vials of wrath and suffering, the terrible working of the law of consequence. Through and within all this, the man who is 'in the Spirit’ can yet hear the voices of adoration which ‘rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come’.(19) Doubtless in the mass of men this balanced consciousness is still in the rudimentary stage. Yet it is implicit in every genuine religious experience, and may in some degree be made explicit by us all. Thus, when we go from the jangle of streets filled with the solid roar of succession, into the sudden hush of a silent church ; there, experiencing the peculiar slowing down of consciousness, the dew-like refreshment of the soul, which comes with our surrender to its influence, we are surely tasting from within history the food of Eternity and hearing the faint rhythms of its song. If the contemplative spirit tends to place here the focus of religion, whilst the active, more deeply aware of succession, hears only the voice of the world’s need, the Christian theist in so far as he is page 106 aware of these two levels of experience is called upon to strike a working balance between them; to weave together Eternity and Time. Thus alone can he rightly harmonize the elements of life and achieve a stable relation with reality. If, then, we accept this view that Divine Reality does indeed reach and teach us, not by one but by two channels then, the man who is God-conscious (and I use this phrase in its widest, not merely its pietistic sense) is not called upon to de-naturalize in order to spiritualize himself. This mistake has often enough been made in the past ; but it is an essentially un-Christian solution, and (distorts our relation with reality. It is indeed the glory of Christianity that, alone among the great world-religions, it fully accepts and utilizes this mingling of eternity and history, spirit and sense. But man is most certainly called by religion to actualize his relation with the eternal order as well as with the world of succession—to be, in the succinct phrase of Aquinas, a Contemplative Animal; and it is hardly necessary to point out how seldom this obligation is understood in a literal sense. We observe that this inspired realist did not describe man as a Contemplative Spirit. His words link the natural to the supernatural; and imply that man is called to realize the infinite purposes of God up to the limit of possibility, from within the natural and historical situation in which he finds himself. ‘Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.’ (20) On the faithfulness and vividness of our response from within history to that which transcends history, our spiritual development ultimately depends. But if all this be true, then to what are we brought? Surely to the position that the adequate revelation of the page 107 Supernatural to the human can only be through such a strictly equivalent series of mental and bodily events, as shall give historical expression to each eternal fact; shall relate in closest union the supernatural and the natural, and shall raise to the very highest levels of reference the implicits of our two-fold experience. But here we are led to that amalgam of history and eternity which marks the greatest creations of art, and on from creative art to sacraments; and at last to Incarnation, the supreme art-work of the Infinite Love.
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1906 - The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary 1912 - Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing 1914 - Introduction: Richard Rolle - The Fire of Love 1915 - Introduction: Songs of Kabir 1916 - Introduction: John of Ruysbroeck 1920 - The Essentials of Mysticism, and other Essays 1922 - The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (Upton Lectures) 1926 - Concerning the Inner Life 1928 - Man and the Supernatural 1933 - Mixed Pasture: Twelve Essays 1943 - Introduction to the Letters of Evelyn Underhill COPYRIGHT As far as I have been able to ascertain, all of these works are now in the public domain. If you own copyright in any of these, please let me know immediately and I shall either negotiate permission to use them or remove them from the site as appropriate. DCW
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