(2) “The value of Personality nowhere finds a full recognition in Catholicism; Catholicism indeed is Pantheism.” Now this harsh judgment is based upon two sets of allegations, which, though treated by Sulze as of the same nature, are, I would submit, essentially different, and this because of their definitely different places and functions in the Catholic system.
“The Impersonal Godhead, the bond which unites the three Persons, stands above the Persons. Hence those who took religion seriously had to lose themselves, pantheistically, in the abyss of the Divinity. And in Christ the Person was even looked upon as the product of two Natures, the Divine and the Human, hence of two Impersonal Forces.”[456] Here two peculiarities in the early Conciliar Definitions are emphasized, which were doubtless as helpful, indeed necessary, for the apprehension of the great abiding truths thus conveyed to the Graeco-Roman mind, as they are now in need of reinterpretation in the light of our greater sensitiveness to the difference, in character and in value, which obtains between the concept of Spirit and Personality and that of Substances and Things.
But Sulze continues, without any change in the kind or degree of his criticism: “Impersonal miraculous means, created by the Hierarchy, are put by it in the place of the sanctifying mutual intercourse of the children of God.” “Christianity, torn away from the religious and moral life, became thus a special, technical apparatus, without any religious or spiritual worth. Ecclesiastical Christianity has become a Pantheism, Materialism, indeed Atheism.”[457] We have so continuously ourselves insisted upon the profound danger, and frequently operative abuse, of any and all complete apartness between any one means, function, or attrait of the spiritual life and the others, that we can, without any unfairness, restrict ourselves here to the attack upon the general acceptation of Impersonal means as helps towards the constitution of Personality. Now Sulze’s principle here,—that only directly personal means can help to achieve the end of Personality,—is most undoubtedly false, unless Mathematico-Physical Science is also to be ruled out of life, as necessarily destructive of, or at least as necessarily non-conductive to, Personality.
(3) Indeed Sulze himself tells us, most truly, that, “for Religion also, Science is a bath of purification”; and that “Doctrine and the Sacraments are aids, in the hands of Christ and of the Community, towards representing the riches of their interior life and offering these to believing hearts.”[458] This latter pronouncement is, however, still clearly insufficient. For if there is a double truth which, at the end of well-nigh five centuries, ought to have burnt itself indelibly into the mind and conscience of us all, it is, surely, the following. On the one hand, Man, unless he develops a vigorous alternating counter-movement, ever grows like to the instruments of his labour and self-development, and hence, whilst busy with Things, (whether these be Natural Happenings and their Sciences, or Religious Institutions and Doctrines), he inclines to become, quite unawares, limited and assimilated to them,—himself thus a Thing among Things, instead of, through such various Things, winning an ever fuller apprehension of and growth in Spiritual Personality. Yet, on the other hand, without such a movement of close contact with the Thing, (both the intensely concrete, the Here and Now Contingency, and the profoundly Abstract, the stringent Universal Law) and without the pleasure and pain derived from the accompanying sense of contraction and of expansion, of contrast, conflict, supplementation and renovation,—there is no fullest discipline or most solid growth of the true spiritual Personality.
(4) Thus Science, as Sulze himself clearly sees, not merely aids us to represent and to communicate our personality acquired elsewhere, but the shock, friction, contrast, the slow, continuous discipline, far more, beyond doubt, than any positive content furnished by such science, can and should constitute an essential part of the soul’s spiritual fertilization. And similarly, if we move on into the directly religious life, the Sacramental contacts and Doctrinal systems (the former so intensely concrete, the latter often so abstract,) are not simply means towards representing and transmitting spirituality acquired elsewhere: but they are amongst the means, and, in some form and degree, the necessary, indeed actually universal means, towards the awakening and developing and fulfilling of this our spiritual personality.
4. Three possible relations between Thing and Thought, Determinism and Spirit.
It remains no doubt profoundly true that, with the awakening of the Mystical sense, will come a more or less acute consciousness of an at least superficial and preliminary, difference between this sense, with its specific habits and informations, and those means and forms, in part so contingent and external, in part so intensely abstract and yet so precise. But it is equally certain that such a soul, and at such a stage, even as it continues to require, in some respects more than ever, for its general balanced development, some of the irreplaceable discipline and manly, bracing humiliation of the close external observation and severe abstract generalization of Science: so also does it continue to require, for the deepening of the spirit and for the growth of creatureliness, the contact with religious Things,—the profoundly concrete Sacraments and the intensely abstract Doctrines of the religious community.
(1) In one of Trendelenburg’s most penetrating essays, he shows us how, between blind Force and conscious Thought,—if we presuppose any tendency towards unity to exist between them,—there can be but three possible relations. “Either Force stands before Thought, so that Thought is not the primitive reality, but the result and accident of blind Force; or Thought stands before Force, so that blind Force is not itself the primitive reality, but the effluence of Thought; or finally, Thought and Force are, at bottom, only one and the same thing, and differ only in our mind’s conception of them.” And only one of these three positions can, by any possibility, be the true one: hence their internecine conflict.[459]
(2) Now Religion, in its normal, central stream, stands most undoubtedly for Thought before Force, the second, the Theistic view. And yet it would be profoundly impoverishing for our outlook and practice, and would but prepare a dangerous reaction in ourselves or others, were we ever to ignore the immense influence, in the history, not only of philosophical speculation, but even of religious feeling and aspiration, not indeed of the first, the Materialist, view, (which owes all its strength to non-religious causes or to a rebound against religious excesses), but of the third, the Pantheistic, Monistic, view, whose classical exponent Spinoza will probably remain unto all time.
(3) If we examine into what constitutes the religious plausibility and power of this view, we shall find, I think, that it proceeds, above all, from the fact that, only too often, the second, the Theistic view and practice, leaves almost or quite out of sight the purification and slow constitution of the Individual into a Person, by means of the Thing-element, the apparently blind Determinism of Natural Law and Natural Happenings. Yet nothing can be more certain than that we must admit and place this undeniable, increasingly obtrusive, element and power somewhere in our lives: if we will not own it as a means, it will grip us as our end. The unpurified, all but merely natural, animal, lustful and selfish individual man, is far too like to the brutes and plants, indeed even to the inorganic substances that so palpably surround him, for it not to be a fantastic thought to such thinkers as Spinoza, (and indeed it would be an excessive effort to himself,) to believe that he is likely, taken simply in this condition, to outlast, and is capable of dominating, the huge framework of the visible world, into which his whole bodily and psychical mechanism is placed, and to which it is bound by a thousand ties and closest similarities: his little selfish thinkings cannot but seem mere bubbles on a boundless expanse of mere matter; all creation cannot, surely, originate in, depend from, and move up to, a Mind and Spirit in any way like unto this trivial ingenuity.