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
There is, next, the constant conviction of the reality of moral
accountableness on the one hand, and of the strength of the passions
and of the allurements of sense on the other, of the costing ethical
character of the search for light and truth, of the ceaseless necessity
of a turning of the whole man, of conversion. “As the bodily eye
cannot turn from darkness to light without the turning of the whole
body, so too when the eye of the soul is turned round, the whole soul
must be turned from the world of generation unto that of Being, and
become able to endure the sight of Being, and of the brightest and
best part of Being, that is to say of the Good.”[2] Hence Philosophy
is a Redemption, a Liberation, a Separation of the soul from the
body, a Dying and seeking after death, a constant Purification and
Recollection of the soul; and the four Cardinal Virtues are so many
purifications;[3] and men who have once come to lay the blame of their
own confusion and perplexity upon themselves, will hate themselves and
escape from themselves into Philosophy, in order to become different
and get rid of their former selves.[4]
There is, in the third place, the dominant consciousness of
Multiplicity in Unity and of Unity in Multiplicity, and of the
necessity of the soul’s ever moving from one to the other--moving out
of itself and into the world of Multiplicity, of sense and exterior
work; and moving back into itself, into the world of Unity, of spirit
and interior rest. Hence there is and ought to be a double movement
of the soul. And this double action does not continue on the same
plane, but the moving, oscillating soul is, according to the faithful
thoroughness or cowardly slackness of these its movements, ever either
mounting higher in truth and spirit, or falling lower away into the
sensual and untruthful. For these its ascensions are “effortful,”
painful, gradual; they are never fully finished here below, and they
nowhere attain to that absolute knowledge which is possessed by God
alone.[5] “We ought,” he tells us, “to strive and fly as swiftly as
possible from hence thither. And to fly thither is to become like God”;
but he adds, “as far as this is possible.”[6]
And there is, lastly, an unfailing faith in an unexhausted,
inexhaustible, transcendent world of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness,
which gives of itself, but never gives itself wholly, to that
phenomenal world which exists only by participation in it; and in
a Supreme Goodness, felt and half conceived to be personal and
self-communicative, as the cause of all that is anywhere beautiful and
one and good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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