(1) Dr. Simmel declares, with admirable cogency: “The concept of religion completely loses in Kant, owing to his rationalistic manner of discovering in it a mere compound of the moral interest and the striving after happiness, its most specific and deepest character. No doubt these two apprehensions are also essential to religion, but precisely the direction in which Kant conjoins them,—that duty issues in happiness, is the least characteristic of religion, and is only determined by his Moralism, which refuses to recognize the striving after happiness as a valuable motive. The opposite direction appears to me as far more decisively a part of religion and of its incomparable force: for we thus find in religion precisely that ideal power, which makes it the duty of man to win his own salvation. According to the Kantian Moralism, it is every man’s private affair how he shall meet his requirement of happiness; and to turn such a private aspiration into an objective, ideal claim, would be for Kant a contradiction and abomination. In reality, however, religion itself requires that man should have a care for his own welfare and beatitude, and in this consists its incomparable force of attraction.”[185] Let the reader note how entirely this agrees with, whilst properly safeguarding, the doctrine of Pure Love: it is the precise position of the best critics of the unamended Fénelon.
(2) Professor Taylor insists that “it is possible to desire directly and immediately pleasant experiences which are not my own.… Because it is I who in every case have the pleasure of the anticipation, it is assumed that it must be I who am to experience the realization of the anticipation.” Yet “it is really no more paradoxical that I should anticipate with pleasure some event which is not to form part of my own direct sensible experience, than it is that I should find pleasure in the anticipation at twenty of myself at eighty.” “The austerest saints will and can mortify themselves as a thing well-pleasing to God.”[186] In this way the joy of each constituent of the Kingdom of God in the joys of all the rest, and in the all-pervading joy of God, is seen to be as possible as it is undoubtedly actual: the problem of the relation between pleasure and egoism is solved.
(3) And Professor Taylor again insists upon how pleasant experiences, which do not owe their pleasantness to their relation to a previous anticipation, are not, properly speaking, good or worthy. It is by “satisfactions” and not by mere “pleasures” that “even the most confirmed Hedonist must compute the goodness of a life.… Only when the pleasant experience includes in itself the realization of an idea is it truly good.”[187] But, if so, then the experience will be good, not in proportion as it is unpleasant, as Kant was so prone to imply; nor directly in proportion as it is pleasant, although pleasantness will accompany or succeed it, of a finer quality if not of a greater intensity, according as the idea which it embodies is good: but directly in proportion to the goodness of that idea. Thus all things licit, from sense to spirit, will find their place and function in such acts, and in a life composed of such acts, spirit expressing itself in terms of sense. And the purification, continuously necessary for the ever more adequate expression of the one in and by the other, will be something different from any attempt at suppressing this means of expression. Thus here again the great Christian Incarnation-Doctrine appears as the deepest truth, and as the solution of the problem as to the relations of pleasure and duty.[188]
(4) And finally, as to the ever-present need and importance of a theory concerning these matters, Professor Taylor points out, not only that some such theory is necessary to the full human life, but that it must place an infinite ideal before us: paradox though it may sound, nothing less is truly practical, for “any end that is to be permanently felt as worth striving for, must be infinite,” and therefore “in a sense infinitely remote”; and hence “if indifference to the demand for a practicable ideal be the mark of a dreamer or a fanatic, contentment with a finite and practicable ideal is no less undeniably the mark of an esprit borné.”[189]
Here Fénelon has adequately interpreted the permanent and complete requirements of the religious life and spirit. “You tell me,” he says to his adversaries, “that ‘Christianity is not a school of Metaphysicians.’ All Christians cannot, it is true, be Metaphysicians; but the principal Theologians have great need to be such. It was by a sublime Metaphysic that St. Augustine soared above the majority of the other Fathers, who were, for the rest, as fully versed in Scripture and Tradition. It was by his lofty Metaphysic that St. Gregory of Nazianzum has merited the distinguishing title of Theologian. It is by Metaphysic that St. Anselm and St. Thomas have been such great luminaries of the Church. True, the Church is not ‘a school of Metaphysicians,’ who dispute without docility, as did the ancient sects of philosophers. Yet she is a school in which St. Paul teaches that Charity is more perfect than Hope, and in which the holiest Doctors declare, in accordance with the principles of the Fathers, that Love is more perfect, precisely because it ‘abides in God, not in view of any benefit that may accrue to us from so doing.’” “I know well,” he writes to a friend, “that men misuse the doctrines of Pure Love and Resignation; I know that there are hypocrites who, under cover of such noble terms, overthrow the Gospel. Yet it is the worst of all procedures to attempt the destruction of perfect things, from a fear that men will make a wrong use of them.” Notwithstanding all misuse of the doctrine—“the very perfection of Christianity is Pure Love.”[190]
CHAPTER XII
THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES
Moving on now to the questions concerning the After-Life, it will be convenient to consider them under five heads: the chief present-day positions and perplexities with regard to belief in the After-Life in General; the main implications and convictions inherent to an Eschatology such as Catherine’s; and then the principal characteristics, difficulties, and helps of her tendencies and teachings concerning Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And throughout the Chapter we shall busy ourselves directly only with the After-Life in the sense of a heightened, or at least an equal, consciousness after death, as compared to that which existed before death: the belief in a shrunken state of survival, in non-annihilation, appearing to be as certainly the universal minimum of belief as such a minimum is not Immortality.