THE ETERNAL YEARS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”
“Tranquil Hope still trims her lamp
At the Eternal Years.”—Faber.
CHAPTER I.
OUR IMPRESSIONS.
It is probable that most of us have been, at some time in our intellectual and spiritual life, conscious of a divergence between our mental impressions and our received belief respecting the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. Outside the closed-in boundaries of our faith there has been, as it were, a margin of waste land which we seldom explore, but the undefined, uncultivated products of which flit athwart our imagination with something like an uncomfortable misgiving. We do not go far into it, because we have our certain landmarks to stand by; and while the sun of faith shines bright on these, we can say to ourselves that we have nothing really to do with the sort of fog-land which surrounds our own happy enclosure. Our allotment is one of peace within the true fold of the church.
We know where we are; we know what we have got to do; and we refuse to be seriously troubled by the dubious questions which may possibly never disturb us, unless we deliberately turn to them.
To us, as Catholics, this is a safe resolve. We know the Church cannot err. We believe, and are ready, absolutely and unreservedly ready, to believe, all she puts before us as claiming our belief. And this is no childish superstition. It is no unmanly laying down of our inalienable right to know good from evil; it is no wilful deafness or deliberate closing of our eyes. It is the absolutely necessary and perfectly inevitable result of the one primary foundation of all our belief—namely, that the church is the organ of the Holy Ghost, the infallible utterance of an infallible voice, which voice is none other and no less than the voice of God, speaking through and by the divinely-instituted kingdom which comprises the church of God. With this once firmly fixed in our hearts and intellects, nothing, can disturb us. Even supposing something to be defined by the church for which we were unprepared—as was the case with some on the definition of the Infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff—still these surprises, if surprises they be, can be no otherwise than sweet and welcome. To us there cannot be a jarring note in that voice which is the voice of the Holy Ghost. The trumpet cannot give a false sound. It is our fault—either intellectually our fault (which is rather a misfortune than a fault) or spiritually (which is from our negligence and lukewarmness)—if the blast of that trumpet painfully startle us from our slumbers. To all who are waking and watching the sound can only be cheering and encouraging. The good soldier is ever ready to hear it and prompt to obey. The slumberer is among those to whom our Lord says: “You know how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times?”[242]
He evidently expects us to know the signs of the times. The Lord is not in the strong wind, nor is he in the earthquake or the fire. He is in the gentle air.[243] But the wind and the earthquake and the fire are his precursors, and those who have experienced, and heard, and witnessed these warnings should be all attention for the softer sound which is the utterance of the divine Voice in the church.
There should be no surprise save the surprise of a great joy, the admiring astonishment of finding out how good our God is, and what marvellous treasures of things new and old our great mother, the church, lays before us from time to time, as the Spirit of God moves over the ocean of divine love, as it were incubating the creations of the world of grace. We lie down in our certainty as the infant lies down in its mother’s lap, and we rise on the wings of hope and faith as the lark rises in the morning light, without the shadow of a doubt that the lambient air will uphold the little fluttering wings with which it carries its joyous song to the gates of heaven. Underneath us are the “everlasting arms,”[244] and therefore we “dwell in safety and alone”—alone as regards those outside the church, who cannot understand our security, because they have never grasped the idea that, the voice of the church being the voice of the third Person of the ever-blessed Trinity to doubt the church is the same as to say that God is a liar.
If we have dwelt thus at length upon our certitude, and upon the intellectual and spiritual repose it gives us, we have done so for the purpose of making it absolutely impossible for our readers to suppose that when we speak of a divergence between some of our mental impressions and our received belief, we are in any degree insinuating that we have not got all we require in the absolute and definite teaching of the church; or that we have any cause to feel troubled about any question which the church has left as an open question, and respecting which any one of us individually may have been unable to arrive at a conclusion. All we mean is this: that there are certain feelings, impressions, and imaginings which we find it hard to silence and extinguish, difficult to classify in accordance with our substantial belief, and which hang about us like a sail on the mast of a vessel which the unwary crew have left flapping in a dangerous gale.
The points in question may be various as the minds that contemplate them. They may embrace a variety of subjects, and may assume different shapes and aspects, according to the external circumstances under which they present themselves, or to the color of our own thoughts and feelings at the moment they are before us. Their field is so vast and their possible variety so great that it would be vain for us to attempt to give even a glance at them all. Indeed, the doing so is beyond our capacity, and would be beyond the capacity of any one man. For who shall tell what is fermenting in the thoughts of one even of his fellow-beings? He can merely guess blindly at the souls of others from having dwelt in the depths of his own, and knowing, as the one great fact, that all men are brothers.
We are far, therefore, from intending to take up all the possible questions not hedged in and limited and defined by dogmatic teaching, or to try and help others to come to a conclusion on each. We might as well attempt to count the sands of the sea-shore. All we are proposing to ourselves for our own consolation, and, if possible, for that of our readers, is to lay hold of certain facts which will give a clew to other less certain facts, and, in short—if we may be allowed to resort to a chemical term—to indicate certain solvents which will hold in solution the little pebbles that lie in our path, and which might grow into great stumbling-blocks had we not a strong dissolving power always at our command.
It is self-evident that there is one knowledge which contains all other knowledge, and that is the knowledge of God. As all things flow from him, therefore all things are in him; and if we could see or know him, we should know all the rest. That knowledge, that seeing, is the “light of glory.” Its perfection is only compatible with the Beatific Vision, which vision is impossible to mere man in his condition of viator, or pilgrim.[245] It is the conclusion of faith just as broad noon is the termination of darkness. But as faith is the leading up to the Beatific Vision, to the light of glory, and to the knowledge of all things, therefore in its degree is it the best substitute for sight—the dawning of a more perfect day, and the beginning of knowledge. Consequently, “faith is the evidence of things that appear not.” And as it is some of the things “that appear not” which are puzzling and bewildering many of us, let us lay hold of our faith and go whither it shall lead us.
We can in this life only know God mediately and obscurely by reason and faith. But as the direct and clear intuition of God in the Beatific Vision will include the knowledge of all else, so even our present imperfect knowledge of him comprises in a certain sense all other and lesser science, and is necessary to the highest knowledge of created things.
To do this thoroughly we will investigate the occasional divergence between our mental impressions, as we sometimes experience them, and our received belief of the Divine Nature and characteristics.
In a burst of holy exultation S. Paul asks, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord?”[246]—not as though regretting his ignorance, but rather with the feelings of one who, having suddenly come upon an evidently priceless treasure, exclaims, Who can tell what wealth now lies before us?
Yes, indeed! we know him well while we know him but imperfectly. There is more to know than we can guess at, but our hearts are too narrow to hold it. And yet sometimes how full to overflowing has that knowledge seemed! Have we not followed him from the cradle to the grave, in that sweet brotherhood which he has established with each one of us? Have we not lost ourselves in far-reaching thoughts of how, and where he was when his brotherhood with us was not an accomplished fact, but only an ever-enduring divine intention co-equal with his own eternal existence—a phase of that very existence, for ever present to the Divine Idea, though not yet subjected to the conditions of time? We have thought of him as in the bosom of the Father in a way in which, wonderful to relate, he never can be again in the bosom of the Father. A something has passed in respect to the existence of God himself, and actually made a difference in the extrinsic relations of the divine Being.
There was an eternity in which the Son of God—he whom we most seem to know of the three Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity—dwelt in the bosom of the Father unconnected with his sacred humanity. There was an eternity when his name was not Jesus, when he was the Son of God only, and not the Son of man.
We are expressing what everybody knows who is a Christian—a platitude almost, and yet so full of wonder that, unless we have thoroughly gone into it and sifted it, we have not ransacked half the riches of what we can and may know of the “mind of the Lord.”
In truth, we are very apt to be repelled by this contemplation. There is something dreary to us in the eternity when the Brother of our race and the Spouse of our souls was only the everlasting Begotten of the Father, dwelling in that inscrutable eternity to which we, as the creatures of time, seem to have no link. Our thoughts and imaginations are shackled by the conditions of our own being. Yesterday we were not. And so all before yesterday seems like a blank to us. To-morrow we know will be—if not for us in this identical state, yet certainly for us in some other state. But that dim yesterday, which never began and of which no history can be written, no details given, only the great, grand, inarticulated statement made that the Qui Est, the “I am,” filled it—this appalls us. Can nothing be done to mitigate this stupendous though beautiful horror? Is there no corner into which our insignificance can creep, that so we may look out upon those unknown depths without feeling that we are plunging into a fathomless ocean, there to sink in blank darkness and inanition? Surely the God of the past (as from our point of view we reckon the past) should not be so appallingly unknown to us who have our beloved Jesus in the present, and who look forward to the Beatific Vision of the whole blessed Trinity with trembling hope in the future. But before we can in any degree overcome the stupor with which we think of the backward-flowing ages of eternity, we must endeavor more fully to realize the nature of time.
We are all apt to speak of time as a period; whereas it is more properly a state.
The generality of persons, in thinking of time in relation to eternity, represent to themselves a long, long ago, blind past, and then an interminable but partially appreciable future, and time lying as a sort of sliced-out period between the two, which slice is attached to the eternity behind and the eternity in front, and about which we have the comfort and satisfaction of being able to write history and chronicle events, either on a large or a small scale. We treat it as we should do a mountain of gold, which we coin into money, and we conveniently cut it up into ages, years, months, days, and hours. It is our nature so to do, and we cannot do otherwise. It is the condition of our being. But as it will not be always the condition of our being, there are few things we are more constantly exhorted to than the attempt to raise our imagination, or rather our faith, as much as possible out of these conventional and arbitrary trammels, and dispose ourselves for that other state which is our ultimate end, and where there are no years and no days.
In point of fact, time is only an imperfection of our being—an absolutely necessary imperfection, because our being is finite, and our state is a probationary state; and probation implies not only that succession which is necessary in every finite being, but change and movement in respect to things which are permanent in a more perfect state. Our condition in time has not inaptly been compared to that of a man looking through the small aperture of a camera-obscura, which only permits him to behold a section of what is passing. The figures appear and vanish. But the window is thrown wide open in eternity, and he sees the whole at once. He is, therefore, under a disadvantage so long as he is in the camera-obscura, viewing the landscape through a small hole. And this is our position, judging of eternity through the aperture of time. Even now we have a wonderful power of adding to our time, or of shortening it, without any reference to clocks or sun-dials, and which, if we think about it, will help to show us that time is a plastic accident of our being.
When we have been very much absorbed, we have taken no note of time, and the hours have flown like minutes. During that interval we have, as it were, made our own time, and modified our condition with reference to time by our own act. Time, therefore, is plastic. Were we by some extraordinary and exceptional power to accomplish in one day all that actually we now take a year to effect, but at the same time intellectually to retain our present perception of the succession of events, our life would not really have been shorter for the want of those three hundred and sixty-four days which we had been able to do without. Life is shorter now than it was in the days of the patriarchs. But possibly the perception of life is not shortened. Nay, rather, from the rapidity with which events are now permitted to succeed each other, partially owing to the progress of science and to man’s increased dominion over material force, the probability is that our lives are not abstractedly much, if at all, more brief than Adam’s nine hundred and thirty years. All things now are hastening to the end. They have always been hastening. But there is the added impetus of the past; and that increases with every age in the world’s history.
Now, let us imagine life, or a portion of life, without thought—that is, without the act of thinking. Immediately we find that it is next door to no thing, to no time, and no life. We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it—that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual power which we have been able to bring to the small aperture in the camera-obscura, by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity which lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.
Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest reasonable and possible importance to the brute creation. It is an open question, in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless, it is obvious that brutes perceive only or chiefly by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions. There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perception of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjects to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life, we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[247] All we have said tends to prove that the existence of time is a relative existence; it is the form or phase of our own finite being. It is an aspect of eternity—the aspect which is consistent with our present condition. For time is the measure of successive existence in created and finite beings. As finite spirits we cannot escape from this limit of successive existence, any more than a body can escape from the limit of locality and finite movement in grace. Eternal existence is the entire possession of life, which is illimitable, in such a perfect manner that all succession in duration is excluded. This is possible only in God himself, who is alone most pure and perfect act, and therefore is at once all he can be, without change or movement. But the created spirit must ever live by a perpetual movement of increase in its duration, because it is on every side finite. Time, therefore, will continue to exist while creatures continue to exist.
Having arrived at this conclusion we cannot refuse ourselves the satisfaction of pointing out one obvious deduction—namely, that if time has, in itself, only a relative existence, it is impossible it can ever put an end to the existence of anything else. It is inconceivable that the non est can absorb, exterminate, annihilate, or obliterate any one single thing that has ever had one second of real existence, of permitted being, of sentient, or even of insentient, life. God can annihilate, if he so will (and we do not think he will), but time cannot. Time can hide and put away. It can slip between us and the only reality, which is eternity; that is the condition of God, the Qui Est. Wait awhile, and time will have, as it were, spread or overflowed into eternity. It will hide nothing from our view. It will be “rent in two from the top to the bottom,” from the beginning to the end, like the veil of the Temple, which is its symbol. And then will appear all that it has hitherto seemed, but only seemed, to distinguish. We shall find it all in the inner recesses of eternity. What cause, in point of fact, have we for supposing that anything which is shall cease to exist? Why, because we no longer behold certain objects, do we imagine them to be really lost for ever? Is this a reasonable supposition on the part of beings who are conscious that once they themselves were not, and yet believe that they always shall be? Why should the mere diversity in other existences make us apprehend that the missing is also the lost, and that we have any substantial cause for doubting that all which exists will go on existing? Do we anywhere see symptoms of annihilation? It is true we see endless mutations, but those very mutations are a guarantee to us of the continuousness of being. All material things change: but they only change. They do not ever in any case go out and cease to be. If this be true of merely material things, how absolutely true must it be of the immaterial; and how more than probable of that which is partly one and partly the other, of that far lower nature of the brutes, which have a principle of life in them inferior to ours and superior to the plants, and of which, since we do not believe their sensations to be the result of certain fortuitous atoms that have fashioned themselves blindly after an inexorable law, and independently of an intelligent Lawgiver, we may reasonably predicate that they too will have a future and, in its proper inferior order, an advanced existence. Everywhere there is growth—through the phases of time into the portals of eternity.
The idea in the eternal Mind, of all essences, the least as well as the greatest, was, like the Mind that held it, eternal—that is, exempt from all limit of succession. The past, present, and future are the progressive modes of existence and of our own perceptions rather than the properties of the essences themselves. Those essences had a place in the Eternal Idea; they occupy an actual place as an actual existence in the phases of time, and they go on in all probability—may we not say in all certainty?—in the endlessness of the Creator’s intention. Let no one misunderstand this as implying that matter was eternal in any other sense than its essence being an object of the idea of the eternal God, it was always clearly present to the eternal Mind. Its actuality, as we know it, dates from this creation of the crude, chaotic mass. But once formed, and then fashioned, and finally animated, we can have no pretence for supposing that any part of it will ever cease to be. Nor can we have any solid reason for supposing that what has once been endowed with sentient life will ever be condemned to fall back into the all but infinitely lower form of mere organic matter, any more than we have reason to suppose that at some future period organic matter will be reduced to inorganic matter, and that out of this beautiful creation it will please God to resolve chaos back again, either the whole or in any one the smallest part. We have nothing to do with the difficulties of the question. They are difficulties entirely of detail, and not of principle; and they concern us no more than it concerns us to be able to state how many animalcula it took to heave up the vast sierras of the western hemisphere. The details may well puzzle us, and we cannot venture on the merest suggestion. But the principle is full of hope, joy, and security, which in itself is a presumption in its favor. If we would but believe how God values the work of his own hands; if we would but try to realize how intense is creative love, what much larger and deeper views we should have of the future of all creation, and of the glory that is prepared for us! Even the old heathen religions began by taking larger and more accurate measure of these questions (though they necessarily ended in error) than too many of us do with all the light of the Gospel thrown upon them. The animism of the heathens, which makes no distinction between animate and inanimate existence, but lends a soul to each alike, had in it a sort of loving and hopeful reverence for creation which is often wanting to us who alone truly know the Creator. In their blind groping after faith it led them to fetichism, and further on, as a fuller development of the same notion, to pantheism, and then to the ever-renewed and quite endless incarnations of Buddha. But these errors took their rise originally from a respectful and tender love of that beautiful though awful nature which man found lying all around him; external to himself, yet linked to himself, and beneath the folds of which he hoped to find the hidden deity.
If these reflections have at all enabled us to understand the nature of time, and to shake off some of the unreasonable importance we lend to it in our imaginations—making of it a sort of lesser rival to eternity, fashioning it into an actual, existing thing, as if it were an attribute of God himself, instead of being, what it is, a state or phase imposed upon us, and not in any way affecting him—we shall have done much to facilitate the considerations we wish to enlarge upon. Eternity is “perpetually instantaneous.” It is the nunc stans of theology. Time, on the contrary, is the past, present, and future of our human condition—the nunc fluens of theology.
With this truth well rooted in our minds, we will now turn to the investigation of some of those impressions to which we referred at the beginning of this section, and endeavor to throw light upon them from out of the additional knowledge we acquire of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being through the simple process of clearing away some of our false impressions with respect to time. We had in our modes of thought more or less hemmed in the Eternal, with our human sense of time, and subjected even him to the narrowing process of a past, present, and future. Now we are about to think of ourselves only in that position, and to contemplate him in eternity, dealing with us through the medium of time, but distinctly with a reference to eternity, and only apparently imposing on himself the conditions of time in order to bring himself, as it were, on a level with us in his dealings with us.
Strange as it may appear, out of the depths of our stupidity we have fabricated a difficulty to ourselves in his very condescensions, and, looking back from our present to the past, we find ourselves puzzled at certain divers revelations of God made to mankind in gone-by times; just as, in the weakness of our faith, we are sometimes troubled with doubts about our own condition, and that of those about us, in that future which must come, and which may not be far off to any one of us.
The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob—is he really quite the same as our own God? our God of the womb of Mary, of the manger, of the wayside places in Palestine, and Mount Calvary, and now, of the silken-curtained Tabernacle, and the Blessed Eucharist, and the dear, ineffable moments of silent prayer—is he the same?
Of course we know that, literally and absolutely, he is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Nevertheless, he appears to us under such different aspects that we find ourselves unintentionally contemplating the Old Testament as a revelation of the divine Being with very different emotions from those with which we contemplate him in the New Testament, and this, again, differing widely from our view of him in the church. It may be a mere matter of feeling, perhaps; but it is nevertheless a feeling which materially influences our form of devotion, the vigor of our faith, and the power of our hope and love.
If we could take in all these different impressions and amalgamate them; if we could group them together, or make them like the several rays of light directed into one focus, we should obtain a more complete and a more influential knowledge of God than we can do while we seem rather to be wandering out of one view of him into another, as if we walked from chamber to chamber and closed each door behind us.
Now, the only way we can arrive at this is by bearing in mind that the acts of God in governing the world are not momentary and solitary facts, but continuous acts, or rather one continuous act.
Our difficulty lies in producing a visibly satisfactory harmony in our own minds as regards the acts of God, and thus (though for our own appreciation of them, they are to us broken up into fragments, or, in other terms, into separate facts) arriving at the same mental attitude towards them as though we saw them as one continuous act.
It will aid us in our search if we, first of all, endeavor to qualify that act.
Its very continuity, its perpetual instantaneousness, must essentially affect its character and make the definition no complex matter. It is an act of love, and it is revealed as such in the whole creation, and in the way God has let himself down to us and is drawing us up unto himself. There have been many apparent modifications, but there have been no actual contradictions, in this characteristic; for even the existence of evil works round to greater good, to a degree sufficiently obvious to us for us to know that where it is less obvious it must nevertheless follow the same law. For law is everywhere; because God is law, though law is not God.
Modern unbelief substitutes law for God, and then thinks it has done away with him. To us who believe it makes no difference how far back in the long continuous line of active forces we may find the original and divine Author of all force. It is nothing but the weakness of our imagination which makes it more difficult to count by millions than by units.
What does it matter to our faith through how many developments the condition of creation, as we now see it all around us, may have passed, when we know that the first idea sprang from the great Source of all law, and that with him the present state is as much one continuous act as the past state and the future state? You may trace back the whole material universe, if you will, to the one first molecule of chaotic matter; but so long as I find that first molecule in the hand of my Creator (and I defy you to put it anywhere else), it is enough for my faith.
You do not make him one whit the less my Creator and my God because an initial law or force, with which he then stamped it, has worked it out to what I now see it. You may increase the apparent distance between the world as it is actually and the divine Fount from whence it sprang; you may seem to remove the creative love which called the universe into existence further off, by thus lengthening the chain of what you call developments; but, after all, these developments are for ever bridged over by the ulterior intentions of the Triune Deity when he said,“Let us make man in our image,” and by the fact that space and time are mere accidents as viewed in relation to the Qui Est. They are, so to speak, divinely-constituted conventionalities, through which the Divinity touches upon our human condition, but which in no way affect the Divine Essence as it is in itself. On the contrary, in the broken-up developments and evolutions which you believe you trace, and which you want to make into a blind law which shall supersede a divine Creator, I see only the pulsations of time breaking up the perpetually instantaneous act of God, just as I see the pulsations of light in the one unbroken ray. The act of God passes through the medium of time before it reaches our ken; and the ray of light passes through the medium of air before it strikes our senses; but both are continuous and instantaneous.
If we have in any degree succeeded in establishing this to our satisfaction, it will become easier for us to estimate the acts of God as they come to us through the pulsations of Time; because we shall be able to bear in mind that they must be in a measure interpreted to us by the time through which they reach us. They were modified by the time in which they were revealed, much as the ray is modified by the substance through which it forces its way to us.
Now, we arrive at the causes of the different impressions we receive of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. They are a consequence of the different epochs in which we contemplate him. They are the pulsations appropriate to that epoch. Other pulsations belong to our portion of time, and to our consequent view of the divine Being; and so on and on, till time shall be swallowed up in Eternity, and the Beatific Vision burst upon us.
TO BE CONTINUED.