The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Underhill, Evelyn
Spiritual life
Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old thoughts of
religion and the new thoughts of psychology may unite and complete one
another. Here the scientific conception of the psyche is merely
restating the fundamental Christian paradox, that man is truly one, a
living, growing spirit, the creature and child of the Divine Life; and
yet that there seem to be in him, as it were, two antagonistic
natures--that duality which St. Paul calls the old Adam and the new
Adam. The law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the
earthward-tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life
of re-directed desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are
conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise.
True, religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of
the facts. That which one calls original sin, the other calls the
instinctive mind: but the situation each puts before us is the same. "I
find a law," says St. Paul, "that when I would do good evil is present
with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man _but_ I
see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind....
With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law
of sin." Without going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst who said
in my hearing, "If St. Paul had come to me, I feel I could have helped
him," I think it is clear that we are learning to give a new content to
this, and many other sayings of the New Testament. More and more
psychology tends to emphasize the Pauline distinction; demonstrating
that the profound disharmony existing in most civilized men between the
impulsive and the rational life, the many conflicts which sap his
energy, arise from the persistence within us of the archaic and
primitive alongside the modern mind. It demonstrates that the many
stages and constituents of our psychic past are still active in each one
of us; though often below the threshold of consciousness. The blindly
instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety
and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried
over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when
we are off our guard. The more complex life of the human primitive; with
its outlook of wonder, self-interest and fear, developed under
conditions of ignorance, peril and perpetual struggle for life. The
history of primitive man covers millions of years: the history of
civilized man, a few thousand at the most. Therefore it is not
surprising that the primitive outlook should have bitten hard into the
plastic stuff of the developing psyche, and forms still the infantile
foundation of our mental life. Finally, there is the rational life, so
far as the rational is yet achieved by us; correcting, conflicting with,
and seeking to refine and control the vigour of primitive impulse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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