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
We have already noticed how children incline to the memory-side, to
the external, social type; and it is well they should do so, and
they should be wisely helped therein. Those passing through the
storm-and-stress period insist more upon the reason, the internal,
intellectual type; and mature souls lay stress upon the feelings
and the will, the internal, ethical type. So again, women generally
tend either to an excess of the external, to superstition; or of the
emotional, to fanaticism. Men, on the contrary, appear generally
to incline to an excess of the intellectual, to rationalism and
indifference.
Professions, too, both by the temperaments which they presuppose, and
the habits of mind which they foster, have various affinities. The
fighting, administrative, legal and political sciences and services,
readily incline to the external and institutional; the medical,
mathematical, natural science studies, to the internal-intellectual;
the poetical, artistic, humanitarian activities, to the
internal-emotional.
And whole races have tended and will tend, upon the whole, to one or
other of these three excesses: _e.g._ the Latin races, to Externalism
and Superstition; the Teutonic races, to the two Interiorisms,
Rationalism and Fanaticism.
2. _Co-existence and succession of the Three Elements in history
generally._
The human race at large has evidently been passing, upon the whole,
from the exterior to the interior, but with a constant tendency to
drop one function for another, instead of supplementing, stimulating,
purifying each by means of the other two.
If we go back as far as any analyzable records will carry us, we
find that, in proportion as religion emerges from pure fetichism,
it has ever combined with the apprehension of a Power conceived, at
last and at best, as of a Father in heaven, that of a Bond with its
brethren upon earth. Never has the sacrifice, the so-to-speak vertical
relation between the individual man and God, between the worshipper
and the object of his worship, been without the sacrificial meal, the
communion, the so-to-speak lateral, horizontal relations between man
and his fellow-man, between the worshippers one and all. Never has
religion been purely and entirely individual; always has it been,
as truly and necessarily, social and institutional, traditional and
historical. And this traditional element, not all the religious genius
in the world can ever escape or replace: it was there, surrounding
and moulding the very pre-natal existence of each one of us; it will
be there, long after we have left the scene. We live and die its wise
servants and stewards, or its blind slaves, or in futile, impoverishing
revolt against it: we never, for good or for evil, really get beyond
its reach.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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