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 finally the modern, Scientific contribution, intensely
impersonal and determinist, directly neither metaphysical nor
religious, but more abstract even than the Greek view, in the
mathematical constituent of its method, and more concrete in a sense
than Christianity itself, in the other, the sensible-experiment
constituent of its method. The most undeniable of abstractions, those
of mathematics, (undeniable just because of their enunciation of
nothing but certain simplest relations between objects, supposing
those objects to exist,) are here applied to the most undeniable of
concretions, the direct experiences of the senses. And this mysterious
union which, on the surface, is so utterly heterogeneous, is itself
at all explicable only on mental, metaphysical assumptions and on the
admission of the reality and priority of Mind. It is a union that has
turned out as unassailable in its own province, as it is incapable
of suppressing or replacing the wider and deeper truths and lives
discovered for us respectively by Hellenism and Christianity.
Only in the case that man could but reckon mathematically and observe
with his senses, or in the case that man were indeed provided with
other faculties, but that he found Reality outside him and within him
to be properly apprehensible by the mathematico-experimental process
alone, could there be any serious question of such a final suppression
of by far the greater and deeper portion of himself. Instead of any
such deadlock the facts of these last four centuries bear out the
contention that neither can the religious life suppress or do without
the philosophical and the scientific, nor can either of these other two
lives suppress or permanently do without its fellow or without religion.
But all this and its detailed practical application will, I trust,
become much clearer as we proceed.
CHAPTER II
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF RELIGION
INTRODUCTORY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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