But, in the third place, a man need only directly attack the family, society, the state; or art, literature, science,—as intrinsically evil or even as, in practice, true hindrances to moral and religious perfection,—and the Church,—both the learning and experimenting, and the official and formulating Church,—will at once disavow him: so strong is, at bottom, the instinct that attachment and variety of interests,—variety both in kind and in degree—that materials, occasions, and objects for spirituality to leaven and to raise, and to work on in order to be itself deepened and developed,—are as truly essential to the spiritual life as are detachment, and unity, and transcendence of ultimate motive and aim; these latter furnishing to the soul the power gradually to penetrate all that material, and, in and through this labour, more and more to articulate its own spiritual character.
(4) No man can become, or is proclaimed to have become, a Christian saint, who has not thus achieved a profound spiritualization and unification of a more or less recalcitrant material and multiplicity. In some cases, it is the unity and detachment that greatly predominate over the multiplicity and attachment,—as, say, in the Fathers of the Desert. In other cases, it is the variety and attachment that strikes us first of all,—as, for instance, in Sir Thomas More and Edmund Campion. And, in a third set of cases, it is the depth of the unity and detachment, in the breath of the variety and attachment, which is the dominant characteristic, so with St. Paul and St. Augustine. Catherine herself belongs, for her great middle period, rather to the third group than to either of the other two; only during her penitential period and her last long illness does she clearly belong to the group of intensely detached and unified saints.—It is evidently impossible in such a matter to do more than insist upon the necessity of both movements; upon the immensely fruitful friction and tension which their well-ordered alternation introduces into the soul’s inner life; and upon the full ideal and ultimate measure for the complete and perfected man, humanity at large, being a maximum of multiplicity and attachment permeated and purified by a maximum of unity and detachment. The life which can englobe and organize both these movements, with their manifold interaction, will have a multitude of warm attachments, without fever or distraction, and a great unity of pure detachment, without coldness or emptiness: it will have the, winning because rich, simplicity and wondrous combination of apparent inevitableness and of seeming paradox furnished by all true life, hence exhibited in its greatest fulness by the religious life which, at its deepest, is deeper any other kind of life.
III. Quietude and Passivity. Points in this tendency to be considered here.
We have inevitably somewhat anticipated another matter, in which Catherine shows all the true Mystic’s affinities: the craving for simplification and permanence of the soul’s states,—her practice and teaching as to Quietude and Passivity. Pushed fully home, this tendency involves four closely related, increasingly profound, convictions and experiences. Utter unification of the soul’s functions, indeed utter unity of its substance: i.e. the soul does one single thing, and seems to do it by one single act; itself is simply one, and expresses itself by one sole act. Passivity of the soul: i.e. the soul does not apparently act at all, it simply is and receives—it is now nothing but one pure immense recipiency. Immediacy of contact between the soul and God: i.e. there seems to be nothing separating, or indeed in any way between, the soul and God. And, finally, an apparent coalescence of the soul and God: i.e. the soul is God, and God is the soul.—Only the first two points, and then the closely related question of Pure Love, shall occupy us here; the last two points must stand over for our penultimate chapter.
1. Distinction between experiences, their expression, and their analysis.
We have already studied the psycho-physical occasions, concomitants, and embodiments of Catherine’s keen desire for, and profound experience of, spiritual unification and passivity; and we can have no kind of doubt as to the factual reality and the practical fruitfulness of the state so vividly described by her. Here we have only to inquire into the accuracy of the analysis and terminology effected and employed by her, in so far as they seem to claim more than simply to describe the soul’s own feeling and impression as to these states thus experienced by itself. We have then to consider the nature and truth of what can roughly be styled Quietism and Passivity.
Now here especially will it be necessary for us carefully to distinguish between the direct experiences, impressions, and instinctive requirements of the soul,—here all souls, in precise proportion to their depth and delicacy of holiness and of self-knowledge are our masters, and furnish us with our only materials and tests; and, on the other hand, the implications and analysis of these states, as, in the first instance, psychological, and then as requiring elucidation with regard to their ontological cause and reality by means of a religious philosophy,—here, psychology, and religious philosophy, especially also the discriminations and decisions of theologians and Church authorities as expressive of these ultimate questions, will be our guides.[122]
(1) If we start from the history of the nomenclature which, (though present only partially in Catherine’s sayings, for she nowhere uses the term “passivity”), runs, with however varying a completeness, right through the Christian Mystics more or less from the first, we shall find that it consists, roughly, of three stages, and, throughout, of two currents. There is the Pre-Pauline and Pre-Philonian stage; the stage of Paul, Philo, and John, through Clement and Origen, on to Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine; and the stage from the Pseudo-Dionysius onward, down to Nicolas of Coes inclusive, and which, to this hour, still largely influences us all.—And there are the two currents. The one tends so to emphasize the sense and reality of the soul’s simple receptivity, and of what the soul receives at such, apparently, purely receptive times, as to ignore, or even practically deny, the undeniable fact that this very receptivity is, inevitably, an act of its own. Its decisive terms are Passivity, Fixedness, Oneness. The other current realizes that Grace does not destroy, violate, or supplant Nature, either entirely or in part, but that it awakens, purifies, and completes it, so that every divine influx is also ever a stimulation of all the good and true energy already, even though latently, present in the soul. And its characteristic terms are “Action” (as distinguished from “Activity”), Growth, Harmony.
(2) And we should note with care that these two currents are not simply Heathen and Christian respectively. For if that great, indeed all but central, term and conception of “Action” has been wisely generalized by most Christian Mystics, as the truly Christian substitute for the strongly Neo-Platonist term “Passivity”: that term and conception of “Action” was first fixed and elucidated by Aristotle, who, as Mr. Schiller well puts it, “has packed into his technical term ‘Energeia,’ and especially into the combination ‘Unmoving Energy,’ all that was most distinctive, most original, most fundamental, and most profound in his philosophy”;[123] whilst the second term, “Passivity,” goes on figuring in Christian Mystics and Mystical Theologies—(in spite of its demonstrably dangerous suggestions and frequently scandalous history)—because the religious, especially the Christian, consciousness requires a term for the expression of one element of all its deepest experiences, that character of “giveness” and of grace, of merciful anticipation by God, which marks all such states, in exact proportion to their depth and to the soul’s awakeness.