4. Two conditions of the fruitfulness of the entire process.
Yet even the simplest effort, within this innumerable sequence and simultaneity of activities, will lack the fullest truth and religious depth and fruitfulness, unless two experiences, convictions and motives are in operation throughout the whole, and penetrate its every part, as salt and yeast, atmosphere and light penetrate, and purify and preserve our physical food and bodily senses.
The vivid, continuous sense that God, the Spirit upholding our poor little spirits, is the true originator and the true end of the whole movement, in all it may have of spiritual beauty, truth, goodness and vitality; that all the various levels and kinds of reality and action are, in whatever they have of worth, already immanently fitted to stimulate, supplement and purify each other by Him Who, an Infinite Spiritual Interiority Himself, gives thus to each one of us indefinite opportunities for actualizing our own degree and kind of spiritual possibility and ideal; and that He it is Who, however dimly yet directly, touches our souls and awakens them, in and through all those minor stimulations and apprehensions, to that noblest, incurable discontent with our own petty self and to that sense of and thirst for the Infinite and Abiding, which articulates man’s deepest requirement and characteristic: this is the first experience and conviction, without which all life, and life’s centre, religion, are flat and dreary, vain and philistine.
And the second conviction is the continuous sense of the ever necessary, ever fruitful, ever bliss-producing Cross of Christ—the great law and fact that only through self-renunciation and suffering can the soul win its true self, its abiding joy in union with the Source of Life, with God Who has left to us, human souls, the choice between two things alone: the noble pangs of spiritual child-birth, of painful-joyous expansion and growth; and the shameful ache of spiritual death, of dreary contraction and decay.
Now it is especially these two, ever primary and supreme, ever deepest and simplest yet most easily forgotten, bracing yet costing, supremely virile truths and experiences—facts which increasingly can and ever should waken up, and themselves be vivified by, all the other activities and gifts of God which we have studied—these two eyes of religion and twin pulse-beats of its very heart, that have been realized, with magnificent persistence and intensity, by the greatest of the Inclusive Mystics.
And amongst these Mystics, Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna, the Saint of Genoa, has appeared to us as one who, in spite of not a little obscurity and uncertainty and vagueness in the historical evidences for her life and teaching, of not a few limitations of natural character and of opportunity, and of several peculiarities which, wonderful to her entourage, can but perplex or repel us now, shines forth, in precisely these two central matters, with a penetrating attractiveness, rarely matched, hardly surpassed, by Saints and Heroes of far more varied, humorous, readily understandable, massive gifts and actions. And these very limits and defects of her natural character and opportunities, of her contemporary disciples and later panegyrists, and of our means for studying and ascertaining the facts and precise value of the life she lived, and of the legend which it occasioned, may, we can hope, but help to give a richer articulation and wider applicability to our study of the character and necessity, the limits, dangers and helpfulness of the Mystic Element of Religion.
INDEX
(Some corrections of mistakes in names and references, as given in the foregoing work, have been silently effected in the following Index)