But take the last, the Spiritual, Personal level as alone ultimate, and yet as necessarily requiring, to be truly reached and maintained, that the little, selfish, predominantly animal-minded, human being should ever pass and repass from this, his Individualistic plane and attitude, through the Thing-and-Fate region, out and on to the “shining table-land, whereof our God Himself is sun and moon”: and you will, in time, gain a depth and an expansion, a persuasive force, an harmoniousness and intelligibleness with which, everything else being equal, the Pantheistic or Agnostic self-renunciation cannot truly compare. For, in these circumstances, the latter type will, at best, but prophesy and prepare the consummation actually reached by the integrational, dynamic religiousness, the Individual transformed more and more into Spirit and Person, by the help of the Thing and of Determinist Law. Freedom, Interiority, Intelligence, Will, Grace, and Love, the profoundest Personality, a reality out of all proportion more worthy and more ultimate than the most utterly unbounded universe of a simply material kind could ever be, thus appear here, in full contradiction of Pantheism, as ultimate and abiding; and yet all that is great and legitimate in Pantheism has been retained, as an intermediate element and stage, of a deeply purifying kind.
9. Return to Saints John of the Cross and Catherine of Genoa.
And thus we come back to the old, sublime wisdom of St. John of the Cross, in all that it has of continuous thirst after the soul’s purification and expansion, and of a longing to lose itself, its every pettiness and egoistic separateness, in an abstract, universal, quasi-impersonal disposition and reality, such as God here seems to require and to offer as the means to Himself. Only that now we have been furnished, by the ever-clearer self-differentiation of Mathematico-Physical Science, with a zone of pure, sheer Thing, mere soulless Law, a zone capable of absorbing all those elements from out of our thought and feeling which, if left freely to mingle with the deeper level of the growing Spiritual Personality, would give to this an unmistakably Pantheistic tinge and trend. Hence, now the soul will have, in one of its two latter movements, to give a close attention to contingent facts and happenings and to abstract laws, possessed of no direct religious significance or interpretableness which, precisely because of this, will, if practised as part of the larger whole of the purificatory, spiritual upbuilding of the soul, in no way weaken, but stimulate and furnish materials for the other movement, the one specially propounded by the great Spaniard, in which the soul turns away, from all this particularity, to a general recollection and contemplative prayer.
And we are thus, perhaps, in even closer touch with Catherine’s central idea,—the soul’s voluntary plunge into a painful yet joyous purgation, into a state, and as it were an element, which purges away, (since the soul itself freely accepts the process), all that deflects, stunts, or weakens the realization of the soul’s deepest longings,—the hard self-centredness, petty self-mirrorings, and jealous claimfulness, above all. For though, in Catherine’s conception, this at first both painful and joyful, and then more and more, and at last entirely, joyful, ocean of light and fire is directly God and His effects upon the increasingly responsive and unresisting soul: yet the apparent Thing-quality here, the seemingly ruthless Determinism of Law, in which the little individual is lost for good and all, and which only the spiritual personality can survive, are impressively prominent throughout this great scheme. And though we cannot, of course, take the element and zone of the sheer Thing and of Determinist Law as God, or as directly expressive of His nature, yet we can and must hold it, (in what it is in itself, in what it is as a construction of our minds, and in its purificatory function and influence upon our unpurified but purifiable souls), to come from God and to lead to Him. And thus here also we escape any touch of ultimate Pantheism, without falling into any cold Deism or shallow Optimism. For just because we retain, at the shallower level, the ruthlessly impersonal element, can we, by freely willed, repeated passing through such fatalistic-seeming law, become, from individuals, persons; from semi-things, spirits,—spirits more and more penetrated by and apprehensive of the Spirit, God, the source and sustainer of all this growth and reality.
And yet, let us remember once more, the foreground and preliminary stage to even the sublimest of such lives will never, here below at least, be abidingly transcended, or completely harmonized with the groundwork and ultimate stage, by the human personality. Indeed our whole contention has been that, with every conceivable variation of degree, of kind, and of mutual relation, these two stages, and some sort of friction between them, are necessary, throughout this life, for the full development, the self-discipline, and the adequate consolidation, at the expense of the childish, sophistic individual, of the true spiritual Personality.
IV. Final Summary and Return to the Starting-point of the Whole Inquiry: the Necessity, and yet the Almost Inevitable Mutual Hostility, of the Three Great Forces of the Soul and of the Three Corresponding Elements of Religion.
Our introductory position as to the three great forces of the soul, with the corresponding three great elements of religion, appears, then, to have stood the test of our detailed investigation. For each of these forces and corresponding elements has turned out to be necessary to religion, and yet to become destructive of itself and of religion in general where this soul-force and religious element is allowed gravely to cripple, or all but to exclude, the other forces and elements, and their vigorous and normal action and influence.
1. Each of these three forces and elements is indeed necessary, but ruinously destructive where it more or less ousts the other two.
(1) The psychic force or faculty by which we remember and picture things and scenes; the law of our being which requires that sense-impressions should stimulate our thinking and feeling into action, and that symbols, woven by the picturing faculty out of these impressions, should then express these our thoughts and feelings; and the need we have, for the due awakening, discipline and supplementation of every kind and degree of experience and action, that social tradition, social environment, social succession should ever be before and around and after our single lives: correspond to and demand the Institutional and Historical Element of Religion. This element is as strictly necessary as are that force and that law.