The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
And more than this: the apparent reason of this isolation seems but to
aggravate the case, because here more than anywhere else imagination,
feeling, intuition seem indeed to play a predominant, determining part;
and yet here more than anywhere else we feel such a predominance to
be fraught with every kind of danger. Thus here especially we feel as
incapable of suppressing, indeed of doing without these forces, as of
frankly accepting, studying, and cultivating them. Now and then we
take alarm and are in a panic at any indication that these springs and
concomitants of life are at work within us; yet we persist in doing
little or nothing to find sufficient and appropriate food and scope
and exercise for the right development and hence the real purification
of these elemental forces, forces which we can stunt but cannot kill.
Nothing, we most rightly feel, can be in greater or more subtle and
dangerous opposition to manly morality or enlightened religion than
the seeking after or revelling in emotion; nothing, we most correctly
surmise, can equal the power of strong feeling or heated imagination to
give a hiding-place to superstition, sensuality, dreamy self-complacent
indolence, arrogant revolt and fanaticism; nothing, even where such
things seem innocent, appears less apt than do these fierce and
fitful, these wayward and fleeting feelings, these sublimities and
exquisitenesses, to help on that sober and stable, consistent and
persistent, laborious upbuilding of moral and religious character,
work, and evidence which alone are wanted more and more. Indeed, what
would seem better calculated than such emotion to strain the nerves,
to inflame the imagination, to blunt common-sense and that salt of the
earth, the saving sense of the ridiculous, to deaden the springs of
research and critical observation, to bring us, under the incalculably
sapping influences of physical abnormalities, close up to where sanity
shades off into madness, and ethical elevation breaks down into
morbidness and depravity?
5. _The experience of the human race: the two series of personalities,
movements, races._
And the secular experience of the race would seem fully to bear
out such suspicions. For have we not there a double series of
personalities, events, and movements far too long and widespread not
to be conclusive? On the one hand, there are those that seem to spring
from dimly lit or dark feeling, to arise,--as it were, hydra-like, to
sting and madden, or mist-like, to benumb all life, and turn it into
mere drift and dreaming,--from out of the obscure, undrained, swampy
places of human ignorance and passion. On the other hand, there are
those that are formed and fashioned by clear, transparent thought; and
these flourish in the cultivated, well-drained plains of human science
and strict demonstration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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