7. Multiplicity and unity, in different proportions, needful for all spiritual life.
We find, then, that it is essential for even the most advanced souls, that they should keep and increase the sense and the practice of a right multiplicity, as ever a constituent and essential condition of every concrete, living unity; of a right attachment, as ever the necessary material and content for a fruitful and enriching detachment; of a right consciousness and articulation of images, thoughts, feelings, volitions, and external acts, as ever stimulations, restful alternations, and food for a wise and strengthening prayer or states of Quiet and inarticulation; and of a right personal initiative and responsibility, as the most precious means and element for the operations of God.
We find, too, that it is equally important, for even the most imperfect souls, to be helped towards some, (though but ever semi-conscious and intermittent), sense of the unity which alone can give much worth or meaning to their multiplicity; of the detachment which alone can purify and spiritualize their attachments; of the self-oblivion, in rapt and peaceful admiration, which alone can save even their right self-watchings and self-improvements from still further centring them in themselves; and of the true self-abandonment to pure grace and the breathing of God’s Spirit, which alone can give a touch of winning freedom and of joyful spaciousness to all the prudence and right fear and conscious responsibility which, left alone, will hip, darken and weigh down the religious soul.
And thus we shall find that there is no degree of perfection for any one set of souls which is not, in some form and amount, prefigured and required by all other souls of good-will; and again, that there is no one constituent, to which any one soul is specially drawn, which does not require the supplementation and corrective of some other constituents, more fully represented in other souls of possibly lower sanctity.
Thus each soul and grade requires all the others; and thus the measure of a soul’s greatness is not its possessing things which cannot, in any degree or way, be found in, or expected of, all human souls, in proportion as they are fully and characteristically human, but, on the contrary, its being full of a spirit and a force which, in different degrees and forms, are the very salt and yeast, the very light and life, of all men in every place and time.
The following weighty declaration, long ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas, fully covers, I think, the doctrine and ideal aimed at throughout this section: “Already in this life we ought continuously to enjoy God, as a thing most fully our own, in all our works.… Great is the blindness and exceeding the folly of many souls that are ever seeking God, continuously sighing after God, and frequently desiring God: whilst, all the time, they are themselves the tabernacles of the living God … since their soul is the seat of God, in which He continuously reposes. Now who but a fool deliberately seeks a tool which he possesses under lock and key? or who can use and profit by an instrument which he is seeking? or who can draw comfort from food for which he hungers, but which he does not relish at leisure? Like unto all this is the life of many a just soul, which ever seeks God and never tarries to enjoy Him; and all the works of such an one are, on this account, less perfect.”[138]
IV. Pure Love, or Disinterested Religion: its Distinction from Quietism.
The problem of Pure Love, of Disinterested Religion, can hardly, in practice, be distinguished from that of Quiet and Passivity, if only because Quietists, (those who have considered perfection to diminish more and more the number of the soul’s acts, or at least to eliminate more and more the need of distinctness or difference between them), have, quite inevitably, ever given a special prominence to the question as to what should be the character of those few acts, of that one unbroken act. For once allow this their main question we should all have to answer in the Quietist’s way,—viz. that this single act must, for a perfect soul, to be the most perfect of the acts possible to man, and hence must be an act of Pure Love.—Yet it is well to realize clearly that, if Quietism necessitates an even excessive and unreal doctrine of Pure Love, a moderate and solid Pure-Love teaching has no kind of necessary connection with Quietism. For even though my interior life be necessarily one continuous stream and tissue of acts, countless in their number, variety, and degrees of inter-penetration, it in nowise follows that acts of Pure Love are not the best, or are impossible; nor that, in proportion as Pure Love informs the soul’s multiform acts, such acts must lose in depth and delicacy of variety and articulation. Indeed here, with regard to the very culmination of the interior life, we shall again find and must again test the two conceptions: the finally abstractive and materially simplifying one, which must ever have any one real thing outside of another; and the incarnational and synthetic one, which finds spiritual realities and forces working the one inside and through the other. And the latter view will appear the true one.
1. New Testament teaching as to Pure Love.
Now we must first try and get some clear ideas as to how this difficult matter stands in the New Testament,—in the Synoptic tradition and in the Pauline-Joannine teaching respectively. Here again it is the former which, (though on its surface it appears as the more ordinary and the more locally coloured teaching), is the richer, in its grandly elastic and manifold simplicity; and it is the latter which has most profoundly penetrated and articulated the ultimate meaning and genius of a part of Our Lord’s doctrine, yet at the cost of a certain narrowing of the variety and breadth of that outlook. In both cases I shall move, from the easier and more popular teaching, to the deepest and most original enunciations and explanations.[139]