Part 30 (1/2)
[206] Furneaux Jordan: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Later editions change the nomenclature.
[207] As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J.
M. Baldwin's little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.
We have to pa.s.s a similar judgment on the whole notion of saints.h.i.+p based on merits. Any G.o.d who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a G.o.d for our credence. When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility.
So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.
The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of G.o.d must not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sensitiveness and narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all things a simplified world to dwell in.
Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells himself and from which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we have the church fugient, as one might call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches pursuing the same object--to unify the life,[208] and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things. Amus.e.m.e.nts must go first, then conventional ”society,” then business, then family duties, until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne. The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of inner tone.[209] ”Is it not better,” a young sister asks her Superior, ”that I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation, so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which I might not be conscious?”[210] If the life remains a social one at all, those who take part in it must follow one identical rule.
Embosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped, and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this stability an incomparable kind of mental rest.
[208] On this subject I refer to the work of M. Murisier (Les Maladies du sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the mainspring of the whole religious life. But ALL strongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything to themselves. One would infer from M.
Murisier's pages that this formal condition was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of material content which is characteristic and which is more important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find M. Murisier's book highly instructive.
[209] Example: ”At the first beginning of the Servitor's [Suso's]
interior life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness.” The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by Knox, London, 1865, p. 168.
[210] Vie des premieres Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congregation de St. Dominique, a Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.
We have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of Saint Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification.
I think you will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external and discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire.
At the age of ten, his biographer says:--
”The inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of G.o.d his own virginity--that being to her the most agreeable of possible presents.
Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was in him, joyous of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chast.i.ty.
Mary accepted the offering of his innocent heart, and obtained for him from G.o.d, as a recompense, the extraordinary grace of never feeling during his entire life the slightest touch of temptation against the virtue of purity. This was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded even to Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dwelt always in courts and among great folks, where danger and opportunity are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis from his earliest childhood had shown a natural repugnance for whatever might be impure or unvirginal, and even for relations of any sort whatever between persons of opposite s.e.x. But this made it all the more surprising that he should, especially since this vow, feel it necessary to have recourse to such a number of expedients for protecting against even the shadow of danger the virginity which he had thus consecrated.
One might suppose that if any one could have contented himself with the ordinary precautions, prescribed for all Christians, it would a.s.suredly have been he. But no! In the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the most insignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril, just as in the mortification of his flesh, he went farther than the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordinary protection of G.o.d's grace was never tempted, measured all his steps as if he were threatened on every side by particular dangers.
Thenceforward he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation with them, although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of every kind.”[211]
[211] Meschler's Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by Lebrequier, 1891, p. 40.
At the age of twelve, we read of this young man that ”if by chance his mother sent one of her maids of honor to him with a message, he never allowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened door, and dismissed her immediately. He did not like to be alone with his own mother, whether at table or in conversation; and when the rest of the company withdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring....
Several great ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight; and he made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly and readily to accede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all visits to ladies.” [212]
[212] Ibid., p. 71.
When he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order,[213]