Man and the Supernatural E-Book

Evelyn Underhill

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

I wish to  write a book about the fundamentals of that which we usually call ‘religion’. Not about the varieties and peculiarities of individual ‘religious experience’; for these varieties and peculiarities seem to me to receive a degree of detailed attention entirely out of proportion to their importance. Hundreds of students of ‘religious psychology’ can now pass an examination in the phenomena of conversion or the degrees of prayer; but few have anything solid to say about that view of reality which the fact of conversion and practice of prayer require of us, and without which these things are meaningless.

Leseprobe

MAN AND THE

SUPERNATURAL

BY

EVELYN UNDERHILL

Author of “Mysticism,” “Concerning the Inner Life,” etc.

© 2024 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385747527

In Memoriam

F. v. H.

O DIES AETERNITATIS CLARISSIMA; QUAM NOX NON OBSCURAT, SED SUMMA VERITAS SEMPER IRRADIAT; DIES SEMPER LAETA, SEMPER SECURA, ET NUMQUAM STATUM MUTANS IN CONTRARIA! LUCET QUIDEM SANCTIS PERPETUA CLARITATE SPLENDIDA, SED NON NISI A LONGE ET PER SPECULUM PEREGRIN ANTIBUS IN TERRA.

PREFACE

L

ooking

back in middle life upon my childhood and young age, I see in them two great literary landmarks. The first is a book called Reading without Tears, which, when I was six, fulfilled the promise of its name. The second, more ferocious in its methods, was administered at the age of fourteen. Its inaccurate title was The Anxious Enquirer after Salvation Directed and Encouraged. Man and the Supernatural is an amateur attempt to apply the methods of the first work to the subject-matter of the second, in other words, to offer the fundamentals of religious philosophy in a palatable form. An experience extending over a good many years has made it clear to me, that anxious and indeed eager inquirers into the meaning, credentials, and practices of what is generally called ‘religion’ are steadily increasing; but that they often find a difficulty in assimilating the answers which they receive from traditional sources. The symbols and technical language of theology seem to them at best incomprehensible, and at worst absurd and unreal. Knowing little or nothing of the system of ideas which these symbols represent, they cannot give them a content related to the experiences of ordinary life. Within the last few years, several brilliant and successful efforts have been made to help these seekers, and provide a new map of the theistic universe, agreeable to the needs of modern men. But these attempts have mostly been of one kind. They have envisaged one special class of difficulties, and aimed mainly at reconciling the outlooks of religion and of science. This religious naturalism, however, still leaves unsatisfied the deepest cravings of the spiritual consciousness. These cravings can only be met by a philosophy which shall include and give meaning to those dim yet deep experiences of the soul, those flashes of transcendental feeling which are of the essence of personal religion; and shall link these experiences with its doctrinal embodiments. They ask for something which shall look beyond the superficial explanations of psychology and shall harmonize the mystical, intellectual, historical, and institutional aspects of man’s spiritual life. This book is an attempt to suggest the direction in which such a synthesis may best be sought.

Theologians and philosophers know well all that I have tried to say here. But they have a habit of disguising the vital character of their knowledge, by dressing it in strange hieratic garments which intimidate the uninitiated: as ‘physiological chemists’ conceal under technical formulae priceless information about the human body and how it should be fed. The result is that many feel compelled to seek abroad that which is really stored for them at home. There does seem, then, to be a need for a simple exposition of the principles of theism, and the degree in which these principles are embodied in historical, institutional, and mystical religion. Therefore I have tried to describe, in terms which I believe to be consistent with Christian philosophy, some of the ways in which that independent spiritual Reality which we recognize as divine is disclosed to human beings and enters and transforms their lives. This undertaking involves the successive discussion of the spiritual significance of historical process, of personality, and of symbols and sacraments, as means by which the Transcendent truly enters human life; and of the activity we call prayer, and the transfiguration we call sanctity, as the classic witnesses to its presence within that life. History and confessional literature, philosophy and psychology, contribute the material upon which the various sections are based.

I am not so young as to suppose that anything which is here written will be found entirely satisfactory by others, or will long remain so even for myself. Men move on, as Blake truly observed, though the states are permanent for ever. From beginning to end every statement and argument remains in my own mind tentative and suggestive; however definite the literary form in which it is cast. The one principle of the duality of full human experience, man’s implicit participation in Eternity as well as Time, runs through all the chapters; and is applied in each to a different part of the religious field. For I am convinced that the solution of our deepest spiritual problems and the real explanation of our valid spiritual practices, is to be found in the right application of this principle, and the corresponding rejection of all merely immanental explanations of the world. Here is the ‘end of the golden string’. Each will doubtless wind it into a slightly different ball; but those who do so with reasonable care will find that it leads to the gateway of Reality. It is in order to emphasize this distinction in kind between the successive life of Nature and the eternal life of God, that the book has been called Man and the Supernatural—a title which will, I fear, invite the suspicions of many of those steady thinkers whose minds I most respect; whilst attracting lovers of the abnormal, whose approval I am less anxious to win.

The earlier chapters incorporate material which has been delivered in the form of lectures at the University of St. Andrews, at King’s College, London, and at the Church Congress of 1926. Chapters II, III, IV, and VIII, also embody the substance of articles on ‘The Authority of Religious Experience’, on ‘Our Relation with Reality’, and on ‘The Supernatural’, which have appeared respectively in Theology, The Hibbert Journal, and the Guardian. Chapter VII is based upon a paper read before the Anglican Fellowship, and afterwards printed in Theology. All this material, however, has been completely recast for the purposes of the present book. My grateful acknowledgements are due to those authorities and editors who so kindly gave these various opportunities of publicity.

More direct and profound are my obligations to thinkers and seers, known and unknown, living and dead, who have given me teaching, stimulus, and light. Most of these debts are acknowledged in the footnotes: the greatest of all, in the dedication. I also owe much to the help, criticisms, and encouragement of many kind friends; and chiefly to Mrs. Plunket Greene and Miss Clara Smith.

E. U.

Octave of SS. Peter and Paul, 1927.

MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL

MAN AND

THE SUPERNATURAL

CHAPTER I THE POINT OF DEPARTURE: THE SUPERNATURAL INSTINCT

Je ne crois pas manquer de respect à la lumière en recherchant ses premiers reflets jusque dans la nuit.

Pierre Charles

Il n’y a pas d’ennemi plus profond et plus dangereux du Christianisme que tout ce qui le rapetisse et le rend étroit.

Abbé Huvelin

Theology is not bound to graze in a paddock.

A. Schweitzer

I

wish to

write a book about the fundamentals of that which we usually call ‘religion’. Not about the varieties and peculiarities of individual ‘religious experience’; for these varieties and peculiarities seem to me to receive a degree of detailed attention entirely out of proportion to their importance. Hundreds of students of ‘religious psychology’ can now pass an examination in the phenomena of conversion or the degrees of prayer; but few have anything solid to say about that view of reality which the fact of conversion and practice of prayer require of us, and without which these things are meaningless.

Roughly speaking, the existence of religion is capable of, and constantly receives, two opposite explanations. It may represent the gradual development and propagation of an initial mistake: may be, in fact, a department of dream-psychology. Or it may represent the confused and still incomplete human apprehension of a real fact and a real world. We can view it, and write of it, from either point of view; but hardly without descending on one side or the other of the fence which divides them. Religion, to put it shortly, is either an illusion or a revelation: a retreat from, or an approach to, reality. I think that it is a revelation; and that ability to receive at least some of this revelation is the essential character of man. It is this view of reality and man’s relation with it—a relation implicit in the whole drift of religion, and explicit in its acute manifestations—of which I wish to write. This will involve, it is true, some discussion of special experiences; for much of our material comes to us in this form. But it will also lead us to consider the general philosophical landscape which these experiences seem to require, if the mind is to make sense of them; and the nature and need of those institutions, practices, and symbolic constructions which embody and carry forward through history the fragmentary spiritual discoveries of the race.

Such a book must be, to a great extent, the expression of personal conviction and experience. It cannot be written with entire scientific detachment. It is at least as much the result of meditation as of the industrious study of facts; and all fruitful meditation has an emotional colour of its own. But the faithful report of personal conviction has acquired in our days something of the value which scientific expositions of theology seem to have lost. Such expositions are now seldom interesting to people outside the professionally religious class; whilst those willing to disclose with candour what they really think about religion, and above all what meaning they really attach to its mysterious terminology, may hope for a more general attention. These chapters then represent the result of personal meditation on the great assumptions, problems and practices which Christian theism involves: and, if I should appear to speak hazily and sometimes dogmatically, this is because I am trying to describe something which has gradually loomed up and become ever clearer to me, but has not yet finished coming clear.

Human religion begins with the spectacle—so startling, if we could but view it with detachment—of a self-conscious spirit emerging, he knows not how or why, from the flux of physical life; contemplating that flux and finding himself unable to be satisfied with it; and thus realizing his implicit relationship with, and need of, something other than the apparent physical world. It shows us this peculiar creature parting company with his animal relations, and beginning a blundering search for the hiding place of that haunting Presence which seems to speak to him from the burning bush. Thus, after many bad guesses, by dint of trial and error, we see man achieving the Idea of God.

It is clear that from the moment in which man thus reaches—in however vague and crude a way—the Idea of God, he ceases to live in and respond to a merely physical world. Perfect adaptation to that world is no longer his standard. His implicit relationship with something other than the physical becomes more or less explicit; a genuine correspondence begins to be established between this living and unstable creature, and a stable Reality beyond the reach of sense. The history of religion first appears to us as the history of this special human craving to discover the relation in which we stand to the eternal reality of the universe; this embryonic instinct for the transcendent. It begins with the vague sense of unexplained powers conditioning us. It leads up to the acknowledgement of affinity and dependence contained in the great saying of St. Augustine, ‘God is the only reality; and we are only real in so far as we are in His order and He in us’—a marvellous thought, surely, for the little human creature to achieve.

We may put all this in a more controversial way, and in language which many people will resist, by saying that human religion marks the point of contact between natural and supernatural orders; and that it is on the fringe-region between those orders, that the spiritual consciousness of man flickers to and fro. The word ‘supernatural’ is now out of fashion, having been cheapened by careless use; and modern thought is hostile to the dualism that it suggests. But those who dislike this antithesis of nature and supernature must still concede that in all its permutations, growth, rising, and falling, even in its worst corruptions and extravagances, religion does maintain one fundamental character: that of witnessing to a living and abiding Reality which is distinct from and beyond the world. It cannot be set aside as one of the devices by which the abstraction called Nature bribes or frightens man into becoming his natural best: for it often enters into sharpest conflict with that natural best. Nor can it be explained as a consoling fantasy; for its ultimate demands are the hardest that humanity has to meet.

Once he is religiously awakened, we always find that man becomes strangely and dimly aware that a demand is made on him and a gift is offered to him, which cannot be expressed in natural terms: and aware too of his own status, as a creature who is somehow capable of relations with a more than natural world. This is what religion says, and says all the time. We may think that it is struggling to state a supernal truth, or that it is perpetuating a lie born of the nightmares of primitive man. But if a lie, then we are left without any theory able to account for all that is involved in the mere existence of human spirituality—its heroism, devotedness and transfiguring power, its persistent and difficult orientation to an other-worldly end—though it is easy enough to explain or discredit its lower manifestations, if these are taken alone. Indeed, even the naturalistic critics who do thus discredit it are driven in the end to adopt the standards of value of that very conception of life which their theories reject: for all morality worthy of the name has arisen under the influence of religious imperatives.

Moreover, when we have conceded the worst that the totems, taboos, and fetishes seem to require of us, when we have explored the psychological dust-hole and considered without prejudice its most objectionable exhibits, we are still faced by the great conundrum which continues to baffle the most ingenious naturalist: the question why it is that the Idea of God is here at all, or why mammals of a certain type should be incited thus to seek communion with an unseen Power. No one has ever explained why or how a merely physical universe should or could breed these persistent other-worldly cravings, and evolve these strange interminglings of spirit with sense: or how it is that a world littered with the unpromising products of primitive credulity should yet be able to produce—either with or without their assistance—the moral splendour and heroic actions of the saints. This is the central problem of religious history; and no philosophy which leaves it out can claim to be dealing honestly and completely with the actualities of human life. To be useful to us, such a philosophy must find a place and an interpretation for these certain facts: for the spiritual life as we know it in history, with its risings and fallings, its mistakes and its triumphs, in all its non-utilitarian beauty, its austerity and its charm. The recorded and criticized experiences, achievements and peculiarities of men and women living that life have at least as much importance as the distinctive experiences and discoveries of the musician or the man of science. For it is these first-hand experiences in their totality, and not the doctrines and speculations of academic theology, which are in the last resort our most valid evidence of the existence, nearness, richness and overwhelming compulsions of a supernatural world. Here is the starting-point: in this profound human sense of an over-plus of reality, of something beyond the physical. We can allow this, long before we feel called upon to make any choice among the thousands of religious schemes in which men have given body to this instinct and tried to satisfy its demands.

There has seldom been a period in which religious experience has been more vigorously studied than it is at the present time. People explore its peculiarities, compare and contrast its various expressions, search out, describe and try to explain its most eccentric manifestations. But that which makes religious experience interesting and important is not its eccentricity, but its universality: the fact that it represents the persistent effort of the race to approach Reality—an effort which meets with a partial success. Religion cannot matter at all, unless it matters supremely: unless, as a distinguished psychologist has not hesitated to say of it, it is ‘the most important thing in life’.[1] Its claim to be heard rests on the fact that there are, and always have been, men and women for whom this effort to approach or respond to Reality has been the ruling passion of existence—persons who possess in a greater or less degree what is called an ‘immediate experience of God’, and try to live in conformity with this vision—and the further fact that the experience of these persons does not contradict, but deepens and gives precision to the obscure religious consciousness of the race.

We look at the long and varied history of human religion; and what we find in it, side by side with many fallings short, aberrations and absurdities, is the embodiment in particular personalities of this or that element in the whole concrete richness of eternal truth. We see the constant reappearance in various degrees of purity of the same certitudes and same cravings: certitudes and cravings which the physical world cannot produce and cannot satisfy. As the evidence accumulates, so it becomes more and more difficult to evade the conclusion that there is a literal sense in which man must be a

‘Swinging-wicket set

Between

The Unseen and Seen’,

though much that comes through from the unseen side of the gate is pressed and distorted by its narrowness.

What then do these facts, which we cannot ignore if we want to look squarely at human experience, imply for us? What is their bearing on our conception of Reality, of life, and of ourselves—those three mysteries which we cannot solve and cannot escape? Here is the human soul, constantly asking of the other Reality over against us the eternal question which was formulated by St. Francis: ‘What art Thou? and what am I?’ And there are the innumerable religions and philosophies of the world, propounding their answers. Some of these answers are based on Part I of the question; and are so abstract and theoretical that they merely change the form of the mystery, the shape of the shadow which is cast upon the veil. Other of the answers are based upon Part II of the question; and answer it in a form that hardly finds a place even for man’s best and none at all for his persistent sense of a better that lies beyond him. But now and again the whole question is answered with a startling thoroughness, certitude and distinctness; as in the sudden saying of St. Ignatius: ‘I come from God, I belong to God, and I am destined for God!’ That saying covers both the nature of Reality and the meaning of man; and at once makes the little theatre of his life the scene of a supernatural mystery. It is unfortunate that such an affirmation is now commonly classed as devotional, and tucked away into a corner, whence it cannot affect ‘practical life’. But it is not really devotional. It is practical, even scientific; and in making it the key to that interpretation of existence which it is the business of the Spiritual Exercises to drive home, St. Ignatius showed far more intelligence than piety.

Neither those who ask, nor those who provide answers for these fundamental questions seem fully to have realized the strangeness of the fact that the questions are asked again and again. But could the human race and human history be seen from outside by an intelligent personality which had never heard of the religious sense—an observer possessing both width and depth of vision, and so able to see the whole human world intensively and yet relatively, as one might see a tiny ant-heap in the solemn cosmic forest—surely it is the oddness and ‘unnaturalness’ of our spiritual longings and experiments which would strike him first? For here we have a small ephemeral animal; one amongst the many various creatures evolved upon, and anchored to, one of the smaller fragments in an uncounted stellar universe. And this fragile, ever-changing little creature, whose birth and death conform so perfectly to the rest of the physical routine, and whose visible existence is unlikely to outlast seventy or eighty journeys round the sun, is yet possessed of an innate sense of the Unchanging. His limited faculties seem to have been wholly developed in response to the threats and invitations of the ever-changing physical world, and trained to assist him to live and breed in it; yet he refuses to be satisfied by those given aspects of reality which are so plainly present to his senses, and are all those senses know. Alone among the jostling crowd of related organisms which surround him, feed him, threaten him and fear him, he is found again and again rejecting the obvious and inescapable landscape to which he is adapted, and seeking persistently for something unseen.

Our detached observer would therefore perceive an animal possessing a mental machine which has been developed through correspondence with a sensual world, and is indeed only truly adequate to its data and requirements. Yet he would see this machine deliberately turned by its controlling entity away from and beyond that sensual world to which it is fitted, and set tentatively and rather clumsily to seek for contact with another order of reality: and this for no utilitarian purpose, but in obedience to a craving which it could not understand. He would see man, at various stages of his racial childhood and adolescence, choosing out of his environment some power or object as yet inexplicable to him, on which to fasten his creaturely sense of dependence and impulse of adoration. A mountain, a river, a stream, thunder and lightning, sun, moon, or fire; the mysterious power that gives fertility, brings pestilence, presides over birth and death—anything standing over against the mind, as an ensign and reminder of that Reality which is always felt but never understood. And as mind, becoming more clearly conscious, achieved a more and more perfect control of its animal home; so the symbols and acts through which it apprehended the Infinite would be seen to expand in majesty and meaning. He would also see that no other member of the animal creation looked out upon the natural scene with this sense of incompleteness, or showed any signs of discovering within and beyond it the demand and attraction of another level of life.

If this dispassionate observer had the power of distinguishing the significant from the obvious, he might discover as he continued his intent contemplation, that the small creatures over-running the surface of this little hurrying world produced now and again an individual who did not merely feel the queer, vague, other-worldly hunger, but also seemed capable of a certain other-worldly knowledge. He would perceive that, with a daring and confidence at once august and absurd, this ephemeral crumb of life actually sought and claimed a personal communion with the ultimate Reality. The relation which such an onlooker would see to exist between this possible possessor of supersensual knowledge and that ultimate Reality—the place, that is, of religious genius on the scale of created intelligence, and the degree of truth to which it can attain—are matters on which it is useless for us to speculate. All we are concerned to know is the strange and yet certain fact, that the human species does produce minds which are able and anxious to transcend that sense world, in which and for correspondence with which they have been developed. The way in which they can best do this is the ultimate problem of practical religion. The reason why they should wish to do it at all is the central interest of speculative theology. But the facts themselves cannot be denied; and can never be squared with a merely naturalistic philosophy.

Perhaps our observing mind would presently perceive that something more was involved in the phenomena on which he looked than a strange craving, more or less acutely realized, and a more or less complete satisfaction of it. He might see that the up-stretching of these little animals to Something Other did not originate within their dim and half-real lives, and could not properly be described in terms of development from within. On the contrary, it was always called forth, occasioned and met by an inpouring from beyond the apparent theatre of their life; and was indeed a response to, rather than a seeking of, an Absolute Reality which already transfused and sustained them. And further, he would see that this correspondence of the childish human spirit with its true and living Patria was not sterile. It started and maintained a veritable growth and transformation. There was, on the part of some of those fugitive creatures in whom the supernatural sense developed, a gradual yet actual absorption and bodying forth of that Infinite Reality, which yet so immeasurably transcended the vague and limited minds of men.

He would see, in fact, the production of sanctity. Thus, by sharing both the limitations and the privileges of the created, he would learn the three primary truths which seem to govern man’s dim or vivid experience of the Infinite: God’s initial movement and invitation, man’s return movement to God, and sanctity, God-likeness, as the possible term of his spiritual growth. He would feel the ever present activity of an unchanging Life beyond yet within life, recognized in and through the various hints and incarnations of the temporal order; and would see the seeking spirits of men to be themselves bathed and upheld all the time in and by that very Ocean of Spirit for which they seek and crave.

Aware from another angle than ours—and doubtless in another manner—not only of this everywhere-present transcendence, but also of the majesty of its creative expression in the universe, once more the paradox of those dimly seeking and yet finding souls would amaze him: the gentle drawing-out of these little, half-real spirits from the seething world of organic life. Seen thus, it might perhaps be that the other-worldly complex of meekness, heroism and love which is called Holiness, would seem to him the most deeply significant and enduring character of the life on which he looked: for in this alone he would see, completely developed, the result of a full and faithful correspondence between the embryonic human spirit and its supernatural environment. And he would find that it was actually one of these tiny and ephemeral creatures, born of that small and cooling planet, who had found the words of awe and amazement in which this paradoxical relation of Infinite Spirit soul might be expressed:

‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

And the son of man, that thou visitest him?’[2]

This little parable will have served its purpose if it draws attention to certain constant factors in our human experience, which naturalism can neither deny nor explain. It reminds us that religion, as seen from the human side, is a branch, and perhaps even the most significant branch of anthropology: that any attempted explanation of our nature and meaning which ignores it is distorted and incomplete. It reminds us further that the facts of religion—neither those we despise nor those we approve taken alone, but all together in their richest developments—require something more than the emergence from within the organic world of a fresh quality or power, a mere unpacking of that world’s portmanteau, another episode in the endless drama of Becoming. They involve, beyond this, the awestruck response of the creature to something wholly other and over-against itself; something given, an Existence independent of all man’s conceiving, which already contains within Itself both the question and the answer of Reality. Whatever our own philosophic convictions may be, we are forced to acknowledge that somehow or other a series of events began, which ended in the strange recognition of a contrast and a relationship between ‘man’s nothing-perfect and God’s all-complete’. The religious history of man, minute as its best achievements must be over against the Ultimate that it seeks, does show us at an infinite number of levels and in an infinite number of ways, this mysterious surge of created life towards that which lies beyond and yet within itself; its response to the attraction of Eternity.

That religious history seems to move between two poles. On the one hand, there is the moulding action, the initial call and pressure, of the everywhere present and unchanging Reality. On the other hand, there is the need and craving of man; gradually awaking to a more and more vivid consciousness, a more and more passionate desire of that Presence in which he discerns the plenitude of knowledge, joy and peace. These completing opposites inform our spiritual experience; though we may acknowledge that they appear in it always imperfectly and unequally apprehended, always mixed with and disguised by our natural instincts and cravings, thwarted by animal impulse, and dragging with them many disconcerting legacies from our sub-human past.

These great general facts of an existent, active supersensual order calling man’s awakened spirit to transcend the world of sense, and of that spirit’s desiring but difficult response—facts gathered up by Aquinas in the celebrated phrase which defined man as ‘a contemplative animal’—ought surely to dominate the world-view of religion. They are, or they should be, the sky that overarches and the air that bathes the special landscape of theology. And indeed it is mainly for want of the humbling sense of that unmeasured sky, and of the presence of that warmly generous fresh and living air, that this landscape of theology so often seems dry, petty, and unreal. Those whose business it is to recommend one special form of religious belief and practice, or to examine in isolation one type of religious experience, urgently need this profound yet general sense of the supernatural, as an antidote to their natural trend to theological contraction and stuffiness.

How grand it would be, were these persons compelled as a part of their training to share for a while the position of our imaginary observer! Then they would be forced to consider the background of Eternity, and in relation with the solemn pageant of the universe—or such fragments of that pageant as we can yet perceive—their always geocentric and often parochial piety. Then they might cease to feel that religion stands or falls by the poor and variable rationalizations of men; might grasp the fact that its stammering utterances convey at best a fragmentary apprehension of That which Is, and see that there is nothing inherently sacred in the particular sort of religious shorthand in which they try to describe their particular series of supernatural certitudes. This shorthand, hardly ever transcribed into the vernacular or fully and simply explained, has now become one of the great obstacles to faith. Its crisp mysterious characters repel the uninitiated, who are left without any clue to its relation with the alphabet of everyday life; concealing from all but students of doctrine and those rare persons able to read the score of the supernatural music, the unchanging and objective truths with which religion deals.

‘Divine things’, said St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘are not named by our intellect as they really are in themselves, for in that way it knows them not; but they are named in a way that is borrowed from created things.’[3] Yet in spite of this warning voice, popular theology has brought us to a pass in which thousands of persons spend their lives, like the unconverted Augustine, in ‘reproving the saints for thinking what they never thought’.[4] They are repudiating a God and a spiritual order which Christian philosophy has never proclaimed; but which have been arrived at by understanding the condensed and symbolic statements of dogmatic religion in a crude and absolute sense. No one reminds them now, as St. Catherine of Genoa reminded her disciples, that ‘all that can be said about God is not God, but only certain smallest fragments which fall from His table.’[5] They forget that theological terms at best can only represent the struggles of other men to communicate their limited yet ineffable experience of the Given: that ‘revealed religion’ in its most intensive form, is yet necessarily revealed to the human race through human minds immersed in human history, and takes colour from the medium through which it has passed. Nor do they dwell over much on the probable results of demanding from the symbols of chemistry or mathematics, the childish standard of realism which they exact from the liturgies and creeds. Hence an inquiry amongst educated agnostics and unsectarian theists, as to what they suppose Christians to mean by such terms as Trinity, Incarnation, Grace, Heaven and Eternity, would bring startling evidence of the nature of the doctrines which these honest doubters so earnestly—and in many cases so properly—disbelieve.

Within the religious world itself the result of this popular neglect of origins and meanings has been hardly less deplorable. Ignorant of the real character of its own aims, credentials and beliefs, and frightened by criticisms which it has not learnt how to refute, Christian interest has concentrated with increasing determination on the social and ethical obligations and advantages of faith. It has lost the old, deep sense of man as essentially a citizen of

‘Two worlds immense,

Of spirit and of sense . . .’

a creature capable of reacting to both these orders of reality, and only living his full life when moving freely between them. And contemporary Christianity has paid for this exclusively horizontal development, by an impoverishment of that nobly transcendental temper, that rightful other-worldliness, which is or should be the very heart of religion; and which alone can satisfy the spiritual hunger of men.

When St. Augustine exclaimed ‘My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee!’[6] he proclaimed in these words the power of the human soul to transcend its physical environment: and gave human personality and human religion a content and objective beyond the span of ‘social Christianity’. He felt, as the spiritual genius always does feel, that the natural world and the natural creature taken by themselves are only half-real; and that a life which merely consists in the correspondence between them leaves the soul’s innate thirst for reality unquenched. In God alone he found that full reality; the plenitude of Eternal Life which ‘fully Is’. And his sense that this real life, this Being, was also in a measure accessible to man’s spirit, carried with it the corollary that in so far as we and other creatures lack such completeness of existence, we ‘are’ not. The true demand and invitation of religion, therefore, is not that the human mind shall believe something, but that the human spirit shall be something. That it shall respond to the call of this Supernatural Reality, shall receive its generous dower of light and grace, and move on and grow up into a fuller being and more abundant life. And the real history of religion is the unfinished history of man’s efforts and discoveries, his surrenders, triumphs and mistakes in this field.

‘I perceived’, says St. Augustine again, ‘that I was far away from Thee in the land of unlikeness; as if I heard Thy voice from on high saying “I am the Food of the full grown: grow, and thou shalt feed on Me. Nor shall thou change Me into thy substance as thou dost the food of thy flesh; but thou shalt be changed into Me” . . . and I beheld all things beneath Thee and saw that they are neither wholly real nor wholly unreal. They are real in so far as they come from Thee—unreal, because they are not what Thou art. For that alone is truly real which abides unchanged.’[7]

These words, if we will move away from the unreal temper in which we usually read ‘devotional books’, and will look at them with innocence of eye, must surely amaze us. They set before us, in its most intense form, the living heart of all religion: the fact of man’s craving for and implicit experience of the Spaceless and Changeless Reality of God.

[1] William Brown: Mind and Personality, p. 268.

[2] Psalm viii. 3, 4.

[3]Summa Theologica, Pars. I, Q. 13. I.

[4] St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. VI, cap. 4.

[5]Vita e dottrina, 77b. Quoted by von Hügel in The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. i, p. 277.

[6] St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. X, cap. 28

[7] St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. VII, cap. 10.

CHAPTER II THE PARTICULAR WITNESS: SUPERNATURAL EXPERIENCE

It is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses, and another to have experience of it also; it is one thing to have ideas of “the holy” and another to become consciously aware of it.

Rudolf Otto

When thou saidst, Seek ye my face: my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.

Psalm xxvii. 8

The voice, the exceeding great cry, of that unquenchable passion, of that irrepressible aspiration, whereby the soul of man shows forth its truest dignity and highest virtue in seeking the better to know and love and serve its Highest and Invisible Object.

H. P. Liddon

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