ETHICS
in order that it may be transcended, there tends to be a
raising of the barriers of separateness and an increase of
egotism.
Under the Christian dispensation, personality has
generally been developed in relation to the prevailing
doctrines of sin and of personal salvation at the hands of
a personal deity. The results have been on the whole
distinctly unsatisfactory. Thus, the obsessive preoccupation
with sin and its conse<juences, so characteristic of Pro-
testantism in the generations immediately following the
Reformation, only too frequently produced an obsessive
preoccupation with the separate self and its lusts for power
and possessions. Modern capitalism and imperialism have
a number of different causes; but among these causes
must be numbered the Protestant and Jansenist habit of
brooding on sin, damnation and an angry God, arbitrarily
dispensing or withholding grace and forgiveness.
It is interesting, in this context, to compare the orthodox
Calvinist attitude towards sin with that which was taken
up by such mystics as Eckhart or the author of The Cloud
of Unknowing. These writers did not minimize the signifi-
cance of sin; on the contrary, they regarded it as the chief
obstacle in the way of the soul's union with God. But
they saw that sin was the fruit of self-will and that self-
will, in Bradley's words, 'is opposition attempted by a
finite subject against its proper whole/ The important
thing, they perceived, was to get rid of self-will and to
cultivate, as quickly as* possible, a state of being, propitious
to knowledge of, and union with, ultimate reality* Such
a state of being, they found empirically, could be reached
by the practice of virtue and the raising of consciousness,
first to the level of self-awareness, then, by means of
meditation, to awareness of God. Obsessive preoccupation
with past sins, they perceived, could result only in pre-
occupation with the self which they were so anxious to
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