And with such an Ideal, required by fundamental Catholic positions, ever increasingly actuating the soul and binding it to all souls beneath, around, above it, what there is of truth in the savage attacks of Spinoza and of Kant and of such recent writers as A. E. Taylor,[173] upon the supposed hypocritical self-seeking in the practice and temper of average Christians, would lose all its force.
3. Cognate Problems.
Three much-discussed cognate matters require some elucidation here. They answer to the questions: Does reference to the self, as for instance in acts of gratitude and thanksgiving, prevent an act from being one of Pure Love? Is the pleasurableness, normally ever attached and subsequent to all virtuous acts, to be regarded as part of the reward from which Pure Love abstracts? And finally are, I will not say any technically ecstatic or other in part psycho-physical peculiarities and manifestations, but even active Contemplation or the simple Prayer of Quiet, necessary conditions or expressions of a state of Pure Love,—understood in the sense explained above?
(1) As to reference to the self, it is highly important to distinguish between acts of Pure Love, and attempts, by means of the maximum possible degree of abstraction, to apprehend the absolute character and being of God. For these two things have no necessary connection, and yet they have been frequently confounded. St. Teresa’s noble confession of past error, and consequent doubly valuable, amended teaching is perhaps the most classical pronouncement extant upon this profoundly important point.[174] The contingent, spacial and temporal, manifestations and communications of God, above all as we have them in the life of Our Lord and in those who have come nearest to Him, but also, in their several degrees and forms, in the lives of each one of us: all these, in their sacred, awakening and healing, particularity and closeness of contact, can and should be occasions and materials for the most perfect, for the purest Love.
Indeed it is well never to forget that nothing, and least of all God, the deepest of all the realities, is known to us at all, except in and by means of its relation to our own self or to our fellow-creatures. Hence if Love were Pure only in proportion as it could be based upon our apprehension of God as independent of all relation to ourselves, Pure Love would be simply impossible for us.—But, in truth, such a conception would, in addition, be false in itself: it would imply that the whole great Incarnation-fact and -doctrine,—the whole of that great root of all religion, the certainty that it is because God has first loved us that we can love Him, that He is a self-revealing God, and One whom we can know and reach because “in Him we live and move and have our being”—was taking us, not towards, but away from, our true goal. There are, surely, few sadder and, at bottom, more deeply uncreaturely, unchristian attitudes, than that which would seek or measure perfection in and by the greatest possible abstraction from all those touching contingencies which God Himself has vouchsafed to our nature,—a nature formed by Himself to require such plentiful contact with the historical and visible.—And if God’s pure love for us can and does manifest itself in such contingent acts, then our love can and should become and manifest itself purer and purer by means, not only of the prayer of formless abstraction and expectation, but also by the contemplation of these contingencies and by the production of analogously contingent acts. And if so, then certainly gratitude, in so far as it truly deserves the name, can and does belong to Pure Love, for the very characteristic of such gratitude consists in a desire to give and not to receive.[175]
Not, then, the degree of disoccupation with the Contingent, even of the contingent of our own life, but the degree of freedom from self-seeking, and of the harmonization and subordination of all these contingencies in and under the supreme motive of the Pure Love and service of God in man and of man in God, is the standard and test of Christian perfection.
(2) As to the pleasurableness which, in normal psychic conditions, more or less immediately accompanies or follows the virtuous acts of the soul, the realizations of its own deeper and deepest ideals, we should note that, in its earthly degree and form, it is not included in what theologians mean by the “rewards” of virtuous action. And in this they are thoroughly self-consistent, for they adhere, I think with practical unanimity, to Catherine’s doctrine that these immediate consequences of virtuous acts are not to be considered a matter of positive and, as it were, separate divine institution,—as something which, given the fundamental character of man’s spiritual nature, might have been otherwise; but as what,—given the immutable nature of God and of the image at nature in His creature, man,—follows from an intrinsic, quite spontaneous necessity.—Hence, at this point especially, would it be foolish and fanatical, because contrary to the immanental nature of things, and to the right interplay of the elemental forces of all life, to attempt the suppression even of the several actual irruptions of such pleasure, and still more of the source and recurrence of this delectation. Fortunately success is here as impossible as it would be undesirable,—as much so as, on a lower plane, would be the suppression of the pleasure concomitant with the necessary kinds and degrees of eating. Indeed, it is clear, upon reflection that unless a man (at least implicitly) accepts and (indirectly) wills that spiritual or physical pleasure, he cannot profitably eat his food or love his God.
But from this in nowise follows what Bossuet tried so hard to prove,—that what is thus necessarily present in man, as a psychical or physical prompting and satisfaction, must also of necessity be willed by him, directly and as his determining reason and justification. In turning to eat, man cannot help feeling a psychic pleasure of an all but purely physical kind; and, if he is wise, he will make no attempt to meddle with this feeling. But he can either deliberately will, as his action’s object, that pleasure which is thus inevitably incident to the act, and the more he does so, the more simply greedy and sensual he will become; or he can directly will, as his determining end, that sustenance of life and strength for his work and spiritual growth, which is the justification and ultimate reason of eating (the rationale of that very pleasure so wisely attached by nature, as a stimulus, to a process so necessary to the very highest objects), and the more he does so, the more manly and spiritual he will grow.
And so with every one of man’s wondrously manifold and different physical, psychical, spiritual requirements and actions, within the wide range of his right nature and ideals. There is not one of them,—not the most purely physical-seeming of these acts,—which he cannot ennoble and spiritualize by, as it were, meeting it,—by willing it, more and more, because of its rational end and justification. And there is not one of them,—not an act which, judged simply by its direct subject-matter and by the soul’s faculties immediately engaged, would be the most purely mental and religious of acts,—which man cannot degrade and de-spiritualize, by, as it were, following it, by willing it more and more because of its psychical attraction and pleasurable concomitance alone. For, in the former case, the act, however gross may seem its material, is made the occasion and instrument of spiritual character-building and of the constitution of liberty; in the latter case, the act, however ethereal its body, is but the occasion and means of the soul’s dispersion in the mere phenomenal flux of the surface of existence, and of its subjection to the determinism which obtains here.[176]
Catherine’s whole convert life is one long series of the most striking examples of an heroic delicacy in self-knowledge and self-fighting in this matter: a delicacy which, as to the degree of its possibility and desirableness in any particular soul, is, however, peculiarly dependent upon that soul’s special circumstances, temperament, attrait, and degree of perfection reached and to be reached.