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 this trinity of tendency can also be traced in Catholicism. Whole
Religious Orders and Congregations can be seen or felt to tend,
upon the whole, to one or the other type. The Jesuits can be taken
as predominantly making for the first type, for fact, authority,
submission, obedience; the Dominicans for the second type, for thought,
a philosophico-speculative, intellectual religion; the Benedictines,
in their noble Congregation of St. Maur, for a historico-critical
intellectual type; the French Oratory, for a combination of both the
speculative (Malebranche) and the critical (Simon, Thomassin); and
the Franciscans, for the third, for action and experimental, affective
spirituality.
And yet none of these Orders but has had its individuals, and even
whole secondary periods, schools, and traditions, markedly typical of
some current other than that specially characteristic of the Order
as a whole. There are the great Critics and Historians of the Jesuit
Order: the Spanish Maldonatus, the New Testament Scholar, admirable for
his time, and helpful and unexhausted still; the French Denys Petau,
the great historian of Christian Doctrine and of its development;
the Flemish Bollandists, with their unbroken tradition of thorough
critical method and incorruptible accuracy and impartiality. There are
the great Jesuit Mystics: the Spanish Venerable Balthazar Alvarez,
declared by St. Teresa to be the holiest mystical soul she had ever
known; and the Frenchmen, Louis Lallemant and Jean Joseph Surin. There
are those most attractive figures, combining the Scholar and the
Mystic: Blessed Edmund Campion, the Oxford Scholar and Elizabethan
Martyr; and Jean Nicolas Grou, the French translator of Plato, who
died in exile in England in 1800. The Dominicans have, from the
first, been really representative of external authority as well of
the speculative rational bent; and the mystical side has never been
wanting to them, so amongst the early German Dominicans, Tauler and
Suso, and many a Dominican female Saint. The Benedictines from the
first produced great rulers; such striking types of external authority
as the Pope-Saints, Gregory the Great and Gregory VII (Hildebrand), and
the great Benedictine Abbots and Bishops throughout the Middle Ages
are rightly felt to represent one whole side of this great Order. And
again such great mystical figures as St. Hildegard of Bingen and the
two Saints Gertrude are fully at home in that hospitable Family. And
the Franciscans have, in the Conventuals, developed representatives of
the external authority type; and in such great philosopher-theologians
as Duns Scotus and Occam, a combination which has more of the
intellectual, both speculative and critical, than of the simply
ascetical or even mystical type.
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