Part 1 (2/2)
And the first point I wish to make is, that the experience which we call the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all times and places, and at all levels of life. It is an experience which is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or rationalization we may choose to make of it: and no one, as a matter of fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some form of the experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience, whole and una.n.a.lyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most readily understand and respond to it.
Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of a.n.a.lysis, can only say: ”The soul knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the dispenser of true life.” Yet in saying this, does he not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of Soul? And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying ”More than all else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless life in this world,”[5] a.s.sures us in these words that he too has known that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious experience, in so far as ”pure” experience is possible to us; which is only of course in a limited and relative sense. The subjective element, all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and control it. Nevertheless, they refer to man's communion with an independent objective Reality. This experience is more real and concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which theology seeks to explain it. We may then take it, without prejudice to any special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study is _one life_; based on experience of one Reality, and manifested in the diversity of gifts and graces which men have been willing to call true, holy, beautiful and good. For the moment at least we may accept the definition of it given by Dr. Bosanquet, as ”oneness with the Supreme Good in every facet of the heart and will.”[6] And since without derogation of its transcendent character, its vigour, wonder and worth, it is in human experience rather than in speculation that we are bound to seek it, we shall look first at the forms taken by man's intuition of Eternity, the life to which it seems to call him; and next at the actual appearance of this life in history. Then at the psychological machinery by which we may lay hold of it, the contributions which religious inst.i.tutions make to its realization; and last, turning our backs on these partial explorations of the living Whole, seek if we can to seize something of its inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way in which education may best prepare its fulfilment, and the part it must play in the social group.
We begin therefore at the starting point of this life of Spirit: in man's vague, fluctuating, yet persistent apprehension of an enduring and transcendent reality--his instinct for G.o.d. The characteristic forms taken by this instinct are simple and fairly well known. Complication only comes in with the interpretation we put on them.
By three main ways we tend to realize our limited personal relations with that transcendent Other which we call divine, eternal or real; and these, appearing perpetually in the vast literature of religion, might be ill.u.s.trated from all places and all times.
First, there is the profound sense of security: of being safely held in a cosmos of which, despite all contrary appearance, peace is the very heart, and which is not inimical to our true interests. For those whose religious experience takes this form, G.o.d is the Ground of the soul, the Unmoved, our Very Rest; statements which meet us again and again in spiritual literature. This cert.i.tude of a principle of permanence within and beyond our world of change--the sense of Eternal Life--lies at the very centre of the religious consciousness; which will never on this point capitulate to the attacks of philosophy on the one hand (such as those of the New Realists) or of psychology on the other hand, a.s.suring him that what he mistakes for the Eternal World is really his own unconscious mind. Here man, at least in his great representatives--the persons of transcendent religious genius--seems to get beyond all labels. He finds and feels a truth that cannot fail him, and that satisfies both his heart and mind; a justification of that transcendental feeling which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art.
If his life has its roots here, it will be a fruitful tree; and whatever its outward activities, it will be a spiritual life, since it is lived, as George Fox was so fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All know the great pa.s.sage In St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes how ”the mysterious eye of his soul gazed on the Light that never changes; above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence.”[7] There is nothing archaic in such an experience. Though its description may depend on the language of Neoplatonism, it is in its essence as possible and as fruitful for us to-day as it was in the fourth century, and the doctrine and discipline of Christian prayer have always admitted its validity.
Here and in many other examples which might be quoted, the spiritual fact is interpreted in a non-personal and cosmic way; and we must remember that what is described to us is always, inevitably, the more or less emotional interpretation, never the pure immediacy of experience.
This interpretation frequently makes use of the symbolisms of s.p.a.ce, stillness, and light: the contemplative soul is ”lost in the ocean of the G.o.dhead,” ”enters His silence” or exclaims with Dante:
”la mia vista, venendo sincera, e piu e piu entrava per lo raggio dell' alta luce, che da se e vera.”[8]
But in the second characteristic form of the religious experience, the relations.h.i.+p is felt rather as the intimate and reciprocal communion of a person with a Person; a form of apprehension which is common to the great majority of devout natures. It is true that Divine Reality, while doubtless including in its span all the values we a.s.sociate with personality, must far overpa.s.s it: and this conclusion has been reached again and again by profoundly religious minds, of whom among Christians we need only mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.
Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of finding place for the overwhelming cert.i.tude of a personal contact, a prevenient and an answering love. For it is always in a personal and emotional relations.h.i.+p that man finds himself impelled to surrender to G.o.d; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing--
”I believe in G.o.d as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should be renouncing all the others--for there is no turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign and loving. And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the way of the Lord.”[9]
Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: ”If,” he says, ”this Absolute Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our life's experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it a.s.sociations too human and too limited adequately to express this profound G.o.d-consciousness.”[10]
Such a personal G.o.d-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn.
We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their philosophy: for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so to speak its own guarantees. Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an ”intellectual fountain,” hears the Divine Voice crying:
”I am not a G.o.d afar off, I am a brother and friend; Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me.”[11]
Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say:
”O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!”[12]
Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Divine Wisdom as the Father and ever-present Companion of the soul,[13] and Kabir, for whom G.o.d is the Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim:
”From the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and thee: and how shall such love be extinguished?”[14]
Christianity, through its concepts of the Divine Fatherhood and of the Eternal Christ, has given to this sense of personal communion its fullest and most beautiful expression:
”Amore, chi t'ama non sta ozioso, tanto li par dolce de te gustare, ma tutta ora vive desideroso como te possa stretto piu amare; che tanto sta per te lo cor gioioso, chi nol sentisse, nol porria parlare quanto e dolce a gustare lo tuo sapore.”[15]
On the immense question of _what_ it is that lies behind this sense of direct intercourse, this pa.s.sionate friends.h.i.+p with the Invisible, I cannot enter. But it has been one of the strongest and most fruitful influences in religious history, and gives in particular its special colour to the most perfect developments of Christian mysticism.
Last--and here is the aspect of religious experience which is specially to concern us--Spirit is felt as an inflowing power, a veritable accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group, impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living-out of its existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, and lifting it to fresh levels of life. This sense of enhanced life is a mark of all religions of the Spirit. ”He giveth power to the faint,” says the Second Isaiah, ”and to them that hath no might he increaseth strength ... they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”[16] ”I live--yet not I,” ”I can do all things,” says St.
Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this Divine strength invading and controlling him: and a.s.sures his neophytes that they too have received ”the Spirit of power.” ”My life,” says St. Augustine, ”shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee.”[17] ”Having found G.o.d,” says a modern Indian saint, ”the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained fresh strength.”[18] All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and endurance.
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