Part 2 (2/2)
Let no man suppose that the intellectual virtues are outside the range of religion. ”Candour, moral courage, intellectual honesty, scrupulous accuracy, chivalrous fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested collaboration, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening solitude; these, and many other cognate qualities,” says Baron von Hugel, ”bear upon them the impress of G.o.d and His Christ.”
What Dr. Inge, who quotes these words, says of Plotinus declares his own character. He speaks of ”the intense honesty of the man, _who never s.h.i.+rks a difficulty or writes an insincere word_.”
But though he is a.s.sociated in the popular mind chiefly with modernism, Dr. Inge is not by any means only a controversial theologian. Above and beyond everything else, he is a mystic. You may find indications of this truth even in a book like _Outspoken Essays_, but they are more numerous in his two little volumes, _The Church and the Age_ and _Speculum Animae_, and of course more numerous still in his great work on Plotinus[5]. He is far more a mystic than a modernist. Indeed I regard him as the Erasmus of modernism, one so sure of truth that he would trust time to work for his ideas, would avoid fighting altogether, but certainly all fighting that is in the least degree premature. The two thousand years of Christianity, he says somewhere, are no long period when we remind ourselves that G.o.d spent millions of years in moulding a bit of old red sandstone.
[Footnote 5: ”I have often thought that the unquestionable inferiority of German literature about Platonism points to an inherent defect in the German mind.”--_The Philosophy of Plotinus_, p. 13]
Meanwhile we have our c.o.c.ksure little guides, some of whom say to us, ”That is primitive, therefore it is good,” and others, ”This is up-to-date, therefore it is better.” Not very wise persons any of them, I fear.
And again, writing of Catholic Modernism in France:
We have given our reasons for rejecting the Modernist attempt at reconstruction. In the first place, we do not feel that we are required by sane criticism to surrender nearly all that M. Loisy has surrendered. We believe that the Kingdom of G.o.d which Christ preached was something much more than a platonic dream. We believe that He did speak as never man spake, so that those who heard Him were convinced that He was more than man. We believe, in short, that the object of our wors.h.i.+p was a historical figure.
I will give a few extracts from _Speculum Animae_, a most valuable and most beautiful little book, which show the true bent of his mind:
On all questions _about_ religion there is the most distressing divergency. But the saints do not contradict each other.
Prayer ... is ”the elevation of the mind and heart to G.o.d.” It is in prayer, using the word in this extended sense, that we come into immediate contact with the things that cannot be shaken.
Are we to set against such plain testimony the pessimistic agnosticism of a voluptuary like Omar Khayyam?
_There was the Door to which I found no Key_... .
May it not be that the door has no key because it has no lock?
The suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is ridiculous to anyone who has prayed.
The life of Christ was throughout a life of prayer. Not only did He love to spend many hours in lonely communing with His Father, on the mountain-tops, which He was perhaps the first to love, and to choose for this purpose, but His whole life was spent in habitual realisation of G.o.d's presence.
Religion is caught rather than taught; it is the religious teacher, not the religious lesson, that helps the pupil to believe.
What we love, that we see; and what we see, that we are.
We need above all things to simplify our religion and our inner life generally.
We want to separate the essential from the nonessential, to concentrate our faith upon the pure G.o.d-consciousness, the eternal world which to Christ was so much nearer and more real than the world of external objects.
Christ meant us to be happy, happier than any other people.
It is because he is so profoundly convinced of the mystical truth of Christianity, because he has so honestly tried and so richly experienced that truth as a philosophy of life, it is because of this, and not out of a lack of sympathy with the sad and sorrowful, that he opposes himself to the obscurantism of the Anglo-Catholic and the emotional economics of the political reformer.
”The Christian cure,” he says, ”is the only real cure.” The socialist is talking in terms of the old currency, the currency of the world's quant.i.tative standards; but Christ introduced a new currency, which demonetises the old. Spiritual goods are unlimited in amount; they are increased by being shared; and we rob n.o.body by taking them. He believes with Creighton that ”Socialism will only be possible when we are all perfect, and then it will not be needed.”
In the meantime, ”Christianity increases the wealth of the world by creating new values.” Only in the currency of Christ can true socialism hope to pay its way.
We miss the heart and centre of his teaching if we forget for a moment that it is his conviction of the sufficiency of Christ's revelation which makes him so deadly a critic both of the ritualist and the socialist--two terms which on the former side at least tend to become synonymous. He would have no distraction from the mystery of Christ, no compromise of any kind in the world's loyalty to its one Physician.
Simplify your dogmas; simplify your theologies. Christ is your one essential.
I have spoken to him about psychical research and the modern interest in spiritualism. ”I don't think much of _that!_” he replied. Then, in a lower key, ”It was not through animism and necromancy that the Jews came to believe in immortality.” How did they reach that belief? ”By thinking things out, and asking the question, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
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