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 lastly, a lay lover of religion speaks throughout, a man to
whom the very suspicion that such subjects should or could, on that
account, be foreign to him has ever been impossible. A deep interest
in religion is evidently part of our very manhood, a thing previous
to the Church, and which the Church now comes to develop and to save.
Yet such an interest is, in the long run, impossible, if the heart
and will alone are allowed to be active in a matter so supremely
great and which claims the entire man. “Where my heart lies, let my
brain lie also”: man is not, however much we may try and behave as
though he were, a mere sum-total of so many separable water-tight
compartments; he can no more fruitfully delegate his brains and his
interest in the intellectual analysis and synthesis of religion, than
he can commission others to do his religious feeling and willing, his
spiritual growth and combat, for him.--But this does not of itself
imply an individualistic, hence one-sided, religion. For only in close
union with the accumulated and accumulating experiences, analyses and
syntheses of the human race in general, and with the supreme life and
teaching of the Christian and Catholic Church in particular, will such
growth in spiritual personality be possible on any large and fruitful
scale: since nowhere, and nowhere less than in religion, does man
achieve anything by himself alone, or for his own exclusive use and
profit.
And such a layman’s views, even when thus acquired and expressed with a
constant endeavour to be, and ever increasingly to become, a unit and
part and parcel of that larger, Christian and Catholic whole, will ever
remain, in themselves and in his valuation of them, unofficial, and, at
best, but so much material and stimulation for the kindly criticism and
discriminating attention of his fellow-creatures and fellow-Christians
and (should these views stand such informal, preliminary tests) for the
eventual utilization of the official Church. To this officiality ever
remains the exclusive right and duty to formulate successively, for the
Church’s successive periods, according as these become ripe for such
formulations, the corporate, normative forms and expressions of the
Church’s deepest consciousness and mind. Yet this officiality cannot
and does not operate _in vacuo_, or by a direct recourse to extra-human
sources of information. It sorts out, eliminates what is false and
pernicious, or sanctions and proclaims what is true and fruitful, and a
development of her own life, teaching and commission, in the volunteer,
tentative and preliminary work put forth by the Church’s unofficial
members.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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