The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
(2) Man has a deep-seated necessity to purify himself by detachment,
not only from things that are illicit but even from those that are
essential and towards which he is bound to practise a deep and warm
attachment. There is no shadow of theoretical or ultimate contradiction
here: to love one’s country deeply, yet not to be a _Chauvinist_; to
love one’s wife tenderly, yet not to be uxorious; to care profoundly
for one’s children, yet to train, rebuke, and ever brace them, when
necessary, up to suffering and even death itself: these things so
little exclude each the other, that each attachment can only rightly
grow in and through the corresponding detachment. The imperfection
in all these cases, and in all the analogous, specifically religious
ones, lies not in the objects to be loved, nor in these objects being
many and of various degrees and kinds of lovableness, nor in the right
(both effective and affective, appropriately varied) love of them:
but simply in our actual manner of loving them.--No wonder then that
Quietism, face to face with the false alternative of either Attachment
or Detachment, chose Detachment, (the salt and the leaven of life) and
not attachment (life’s meat and meal).
(3) Man has a profound, though ever largely latent, capacity and need
for admiration, trust, faith; and does not by any means improve solely
by direct efforts at self-improvement, and by explicit examinations
of his efforts and failures; but, (a little from the first, and very
soon as much, and later on far more), he progresses by means of a
happy absorption in anything clean and fruitful that can and does
lift him out of and above his smaller self altogether.--And such an
absorption will necessarily be unaccompanied, at the time, by any
direct consciousness on the part of the mind as to this its absorption.
And, religiously, such quiet concentrations will, in so far as they are
at all analyzable after the event, consist in a quite inarticulate,
and yet profound and spiritually renovating, sense of God; and they
will have to be tested, not by their describable content, but by their
ethical and religious effects. “Psychology and religion,” says that
great psychological authority, Prof. William James, “both admit that
there are forces, seemingly outside of the conscious individual, that
bring redemption to his life.” “A man’s conscious wit and will, so far
as they strain after the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and
inaccurately imagined, whilst the deeper forces of organic ripening
within him tend towards a rearrangement that is pretty surely definite,
and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and
determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with by efforts
of too direct and energetic a kind on our part.”[137]--No wonder
then that Quietism, finding this element of quiet incubation much
ignored and starved in the lives of most religious souls, flew to the
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