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
And those crude early experiences and analyses certainly point to
what, even now, are our most solid reasons for belief in Immortality:
for if man’s mind and soul can thus keenly suffer from the sense
of the contingency and mutability of all things directly observed
by it without and within, it must itself be, at least in part or
potentially, outside of this flux which it so vividly apprehends
as _not_ Permanence, _not_ Rest, _not_ true Life. Let us overlook,
then, and forgive the first tumultuous, childishly rude and clumsy,
mentally and emotionally hyper-aesthetic forms of apprehension of
these great spiritual facts and laws, forms which are not, after all,
more misleading than is the ordinary anaesthetic condition of our
apprehending faculties towards these fundamental forces and testimonies
of our lot and nature. Not the wholesale rejection, then, of even those
crude Dionysian witnessings, still less of the already more clarified
Orphic teaching, and least of all of Plato’s great utilizations and
spiritualizations can be required of us, but only a reinterpretation
of those first impressions and of mankind’s analogous experiences, and
a sifting and testing of the latter by the light of all that has been
deeply lived through, and seriously thought out, by spiritually awake
humanity ever since.--And we should remember that the history of the
doctrine among the Jews is, as has already been intimated, grandly free
from any such suspicious occasions and concomitances.
2. _Two Philosophical Difficulties._
Yet it is precisely this latter, social, body-and-soul-survival
doctrine which brings the second group of objections, the philosophical
difficulties, to clear articulation. For thus we are unavoidably driven
to one or other of the equally difficult alternatives, of a bodiless
life of the soul, and of a survival or resurrection of the body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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