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 if we look for individual contrasts, we can often find them in
close temporal and local juxtaposition, as in France, in the time of
Louis XIV, in the persons of Bossuet, Richard Simon, and Fénelon, so
strikingly typical of the special strengths and limitations of the
institutional, rational, experimental types respectively. And yet the
most largely varied influence will necessarily proceed from characters
which combine not only two of the types, as in our times Frederick
Faber combined the external and experimental; but which hold them all
three, as with John Henry Newman in England or Antonio Rosmini in Italy.
V. CAUSES OPERATIVE IN ALL RELIGION TOWARDS MINIMIZING OR SUPPRESSING
ONE OR OTHER ELEMENT, OR TOWARDS DENYING THE NEED OF ANY MULTIPLICITY.
Let us end this chapter with some consideration of the causes and
reasons that are ever tending to produce and to excuse the quiet
elimination or forcible suppression of one or other of the elements
that constitute the full organism of religion, and even to minimize or
to deny altogether the necessity of any such multiplicity.
1. _The religious temper longs for simplification._
To take the last point first. How obvious and irresistible seems
always, to the specifically religious temper, the appeal to boundless
simplification. “Can there be anything more sublimely, utterly simple
than religion?” we all say and feel. In these regions, if anywhere, we
long and thirst to see and feel all things in one, to become ourselves
one, to find the One Thing necessary, the One God, and to be one
with Him for ever. Where is there room here, we feel even angrily,
for all these distinctions, all this balancing of divers faculties
and parts? Is not all this but so much Aestheticism, some kind of
subtle Naturalism, a presumptuous attempting to build up bit by bit
in practice, and to analyze part from part in theory, what can only
come straight from God Himself, and, coming from Him the One, cannot
but bear the impress of His own indistinguishable Unity? And can there
be anything more unforcedly, unanalyzably simple than all actual
religion,--and this in exact proportion to its greatness? Look at St.
Francis of Assisi, or St. John Baptist; look above all at the Christ,
supremely, uniquely great, just because of His sublime simplicity!
Look at, feel, the presence and character of those countless souls
that bear, unknown even to themselves, some portion of this His
impress within themselves, forming thus a kind of indefinitely rich
extension of His reign, of the kingdom of His childlikeness. Away then
with everything that at all threatens to break up a corresponding
simplicity in ourselves! Poverty of spirit, emptiness of heart, a
constant turning away from all distraction, from all multiplicity both
of thought and of feeling, of action and of being; this, surely, is
the one and only necessity for the soul, at least in proportion to the
height of her spiritual call.
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