Cbc
nivcrsliv of Cbi
libraries
MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
MYSTICISM
THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM
PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND
THE LIFE OF TODAY
THEOPHANIES. A BOOK OF VERSES
CONCERNING THE INNER LIFE
Published by E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY
MAM, AND^THE
J . > 1 '" * - .'
L
EVELYN UNDERHILL
Author of "Mysticism" "Concerning the Inner Life" etc.
NEW YORK
E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL, COPYRIGHT,
1928, Y,' S., P. DUTTON & COMPANY
.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED :: PRIN^Ep IN U. S. A.
' , f * *^ * * f ' r '
. r ^ r
O O
I
15*6
IN MEMORIAM
F. v. H.
O DIES AETERNITATIS CLARISSIMA; QUAM NOX
NON OBSCURAT, SED SUMMA VERITAS SEMPER
IRRADIAT; DIES SEMPER LAETA, SEMPER,
SECURA, ET NUMQUAM STATUM MUTANS IN
CONTRARIA! L.UCET QUIDEM SANCTIS PERPETUA
CLARITATE SPLENDIDA, SED NON NISI A LONGE
ET PER SPECULUM PEREGRINANTIBUS IN TERRA.
PREFACE
T OOKING back in middle life upon my childhood
I ^ and young age, I see in them two great literary
landmarks. The first is a book called Reading without
Tears, which, when I was six, fulfilled the promise of
its name. The second, more ferocious in its methods,
was administered at the age of fourteen. Its inaccurate
title was The Anxious Enquirer after Salvation Directed
and Encouraged. Man and the Supernatural is an
amateur attempt to apply the methods of the first work
to the subject-matter of the second, in other words, to-
offer the fundamentals of religious philosophy in a palat-
able form. An experience extending over a good many
years has made it clear to me, that anxious and indeed
eager inquirers into the meaning, credentials, and prac-
tices of what is generally called 'religion* are steadily
increasing ; but that they often find a difficulty in assimil-
ating the answers which they receive from traditional
sources. The symbols and technical language of theology
seem to them at best incomprehensible, and at worst ab-
surd and unreal. Knowing little or nothing of the system,
of ideas which these symbols represent, they cannot give
them a content related to the experiences of ordinary
life. Within the last few years, several brilliant and suc-
cessful efforts have been made to help these seekers, and
provide a new map of the theistic universe, agreeable ta
the needs of modern men. But these attempts have
mostly been of one kind. They have envisaged one
special class of difficulties, and aimed mainly at reconcil-
vtt
viii PREFACE
ing the outlooks of religion and of science. This religious
naturalism, however, still leaves unsatisfied the deepest
cravings of the spiritual consciousness. These cravings
can only be met by a philosophy which shall include and
give meaning to those dim yet deep experiences of the
soul, those flashes of transcendental feeling which are of
the essence of personal religion; and shall link these
experiences with its doctrinal embodiments. They ask
for something which shall look beyond the superficial ,
explanations of psychology and shall harmonize the mysti-
cal, intellectual, historical, and institutional aspects of
man's spiritual life. This book is an attempt to suggest
the direction in which such a synthesis may best be sought.
Theologians and philosophers know well all that I
have tried to say here. But they have a habit of disguis-
ing the vital character of their knowledge, by dressing
it in strange hieratic garments which intimidate the un-
initiated: as 'physiological chemists' conceal under tech-
nical formulae priceless information about the human
body and how it should be fed. The result is that many
feel compelled to seek abroad that which is really stored
for them at home. There does seem, then, to be a need
, for a simple exposition of the principles of theism, and
the degree in which these principles are embodied in,
historical, institutional, and mystical religion. Therefore
I have tried to describe, in terms which I believe to be
consistent with Christian philosophy, some of the ways in
which that independent spiritual Reality which we recog-
nize as divine is disclosed to human beings and enters and
transforms their lives. This undertaking involves the
successive discussion of the spiritual significance of his-
torical process, of personality, and of symbols and sacra-
ments, as means by which the Transcendent truly enters
human life; and of the activity we call prayer, and the
PREFACE ix
transfiguration, we call sanctity, as the classic witnesses
to its presence within that life. History and confessional
literature, philosophy and psychology, contribute the ma-
terial upon which the various sections are based.
I am not so young as to suppose that anything which
is here written will be found entirely satisfactory by
others, or will long remain so even for myself. Men
move on, as Blake truly observed, though the states are
permanent for ever. From beginning to end every state-
ment and argument remains in my own mind tentative
and suggestive; however definite the literary form in
which it is cast. The one principle of the duality of full
human experience, man's implicit participation in Eternity
as well as Time, runs through all the chapters ; and is
applied in each to a different part of the religious field.
For I am convinced that the solution of our deepest
spiritual problems and. the real explanation of our valid
spiritual practices, is to be found in the right application
of this principle, and the corresponding rejection of all
merely immanental explanations of the world. Here is
the 'end of the golden- string'. Each will doubtless wind
it into a slightly different ball; but those who do so with
reasonable care will find that it leads to the gateway of
Reality. It is in order to emphasize this distinction in
kind between the successive life of Nature and the eternal
life of God, that the book has been called Man and the
Supernatural a title which will, I fear, invite the sus-
picions of many of those steady thinkers whose minds I
most respect; whilst attracting lovers of the abnormal,
whose approval I am less anxious to win.
The earlier chapters incorporate material which has
been delivered in the form of lectures at the University
of St. Andrews, at King's College, London, and at the
Church Congress of 1926. Chapters II, III, IV, and
x PREFACE
VIII, also embody the substance of articles on 'The
Authority of Religious Experience', on 'Our Relation
with Reality', and on 'The Supernatural', which have
appeared respectively in Theology, The Hibbert Journal,
and the Guardian. Chapter VII is based upon a paper
read before the Anglican Fellowship, and afterwards
printed in Theology. All this material, however, has
been completely recast for the purposes of the present
book. My grateful acknowledgements are due to those
authorities and editors who so kindly gave these various
opportunities of publicity.
More direct and profound are my obligations to
thinkers and seers, known and unknown, living and dead,
who have given me teaching, stimulus, and light. Most
of these debts are acknowledged in the footnotes: the
greatest of all, in the dedication. I also owe much to the
help, criticisms, and encouragement of many kind friends ;
and chiefly to Mrs. Plunket Greene and Miss Clara
Smith.
E. U.
Octave of SS. Peter and Paul, 1927.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE ..... Vii
CHAPTER
I THE POINT OF DEPARTURE: THE SUPERNAT-
URAL INSTINCT ....... I
II THE PARTICULAR WITNESS! SUPERNATURAL
EXPERIENCE * ......
III THE SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL . 50
IV THE SUPERNATURAL SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS :
HISTORY AND ETERNITY . . . . . 76
V THE SUPERNATURAL SELF-GIVEN IN PERSON-
ALITY: INCARNATION ..... IO8
VI THE SUPERNATURAL SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS:
SYMBOLS AND SACRAMENTS .... 143
VII THE SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE :
(a) Prayer . . . . . . 176
VIII THE SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE:
(b) Sanctification ...... 212
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........ 243
INDEX .......... 248
xi
MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
MAN AND
THE SUPERNATURAL
CHAPTER I
THE POINT OF^ DEPARTURE: THE SUPER-
NATURAL INSTINCT
Je ne crois pas manquer de respect a la lumiere en recherchant
ses premiers reflets jusque dans la nuit.
PIERRE CHARLES
II n'y a pas d'ennemi plus profond et plus dangereux du
Christianisme que tout ce qui le rapetisse et le rend etroit.
ABBE HUVELIN
Theology is not bound to graze in a paddock.
A. SCHWEITZER
I WISH to write a book about the fundamentals of
that which we usually call 'religion*. Not about the
varieties and peculiarities of individual 'religious exper-
ience'; for these varieties and peculiarities seem to me to
receive a degree of detailed attention entirely out of pro-
portion to their importance. Hundreds of students of
'religious psychology' can now pass an examination in the
phenomena of conversion or the degrees of prayer; but
few have anything solid to say about that view of reality
which the fact of conversion and practice of prayer require
of us, and without which these things are meaningless.
Roughly speaking, the existence of religion is capable
of, and constantly receives, two opposite explanations.
2 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
It may represent the gradual development and propa-
gation of an initial mistake : may be, in fact, a department
of dream-psychology. Or it may represent the confused '
and still incomplete human apprehension of a real fact
and a real world. We can view it, and. write of it, from
either point of view; but hardly without descending on
one side or the other of the fence which divides them.
Religion, to put it shortly, is either an illusion or a revela-
tion: a retreat from, or an approach to, reality. I think-
that it is a revelation; and that ability to receive at least
some of this revelation is the essential character of man.
It is this view of reality and man's relation with it a :
relation implicit in the whole drift of religion, and ex-
plicit in its acute manifestations of which I wish to
write. This will involve, it is true, some discussion of
special experiences; for much of our material comes to
us in this form. But it will also lead us to consider the
general philosophical landscape which these experiences
seem to require, if the mind is to make sense of them ; and
the nature and need of those institutions, practices, and
symbolic constructions which embody and carry forwarif
through history the fragmentary spiritual discoveries of
the race.
Such a book must be, to a great extent, the expression
of personal conviction and experience. It cannot be writ-
ten with entire scientific detachment. It is at least as
much the result of meditation as of the industrious study
of facts; and all fruitful meditation has an emotional
colour of its own. But the faithful report of personal
conviction has acquired in our days something of the value
which scientific expositions of theology seem to have lost.
Such expositions are now seldom interesting to people out^
side the professionally religious class ; whilst those willing
to disclose with candour what they really think about
'* JHE POINT OF DEPARTURE 3
religion, b. id above all what meaning they really attach
to its my?"* ious terminology, may hope for a more gen-
eral attentx' .. These chapters then represent the result
of personal meditation on the great assumptions, problems
and practices which Christian theism involves: and, if I
should appear to speak hazily and sometimes dogmatically,
this is because I am trying to describe something which
has gradually loomed up and become ever clearer to me,
but has not yet finished coming clear.
Human religion begins with the spectacle so startling,
if we could but view it with detachment of a self-con-
scious spirit emerging, he knows not how or why, from
the flux of physical life ; contemplating that flux and find-
ing himself unable to be satisfied with it; and thus realiz-
ing his implicit relationship with, and need of, something
other than the apparent physical world. It shows us this
peculiar creature parting company with his animal rela-
tions, and beginning a blundering search for the hiding
place of that haunting Presence which seems to speak to
him from the burning bush. Thus, after many bad
guesses, by dint of trial and error, we see man achieving
the Idea of God.
It is clear that from the moment in which man thus
reaches in however vague and crude a way the Idea
of God, he ceases to live in and respond to a merely
physical world. Perfect adaptation to that world is
no longer his standard. His implicit relationship with
something other than the physical becomes more or less
explicit ; a genuine correspondence begins to be established
between this living and unstable creature, and a stable
Reality beyond the reach of sense. The history of religion
first appears to us as the history of this special human
craving to discover the relation in which we stand to the
eternal reality of the universe ; this embryonic instinct for
4 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURA^
the transcendent. It begins with the vague sense of un- "
explained powers conditioning us. It leads/up to the""
acknowledgement of affinity and dependence <kmtained in
the great saying of St. Augustine, 'God is the only reality;" 7
and we are only real in so far as we are in H!is order and
He in us' a marvellous thought, surely, f&r the little
human creature to achieve. ;
We may put all this in a more controversial way, "
and in language which many people will resist, by saying
that human religion marks the point of contact between
natural and supernatural orders; and that it is on the
fringe-region between those orders, that the spirtual con-
sciousness of man flickers to and fro. The word 'super-
natural' is now out of fashion, having been cheapened by
careless use; and modern thought is hostile to the dualism
that it suggests. But those who dislike this antithesis of
nature and supernature must still concede that in all its
permutations, growth, rising, and falling, even in its
worst corruptions and extravagances, religion does main-
tain one fundamental character: that of witnessing to a
living and abiding Reality which is distinct from and be-
yond the world. It cannot be set aside as one of the devices
by which the abstraction called Nature bribes or fright-
ens man into becoming his natural best: for it often
enters into sharpest conflict with that natural best. Nor
can it be explained as a consoling fantasy ; for its ultimate
demands are the hardest that humanity has to meet.
Once he is religiously awakened, we always find that
man becomes strangely and dimly aware that a demand
is made on him and a gift is offered to him, which can-
not be expressed in natural terms: and aware too of
his own status, as a creature who is somehow capable
of relations with a more than natural world. This is
what religion says, and says all the time. We may
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 5
think, that it is struggling to state a supernal truth, or
that it is perpetuating a lie born of the nightmares of
primitive man. But if a lie, then we are left without
any theory able to account for all that is involved in
the mere existence of human spirituality its heroism,
devotedness and transfiguring power, its persistent and
difficult orientation to an other-worldly end though it
is easy enough to explain or discredit its lower manifesta-
tions, if these are taken alone. Indeed, even the natural-
istic critics who do thus discredit it are driven in the end
to adopt the standards of value of that very conception
of life which their theories reject: for all morality worthy
of the name has arisen under the influence of religious im-
peratives.
Moreover, when we have conceded the worst that the
totems, taboos, and fetishes seem to require of us, when
we have explored the psychological dust-hole and con-
sidered without prejudice its most objectionable exhibits,
we are still faced by the great conundrum which con-
tinues to baffle the most ingenious naturalist: the ques-
tion why it is that the Idea of God is here at all, or why
mammals of a certain type should be incited thus to seek
communion with an unseen Power. No one has ever
explained why or how a merely physical universe should
or could breed these persistent other-worldly cravings, and
evolve these strange interminglings of spirit with sense:
or how it is that a world littered with the unpromising
products of primitive credulity should yet be able to
produce either with or without their assistance the
moral splendour and heroic actions of the saints. This
is the central problem of religious history; and no philos-
ophy which leaves it out can claim to be dealing honestly
and completely with the actualities of human life. To be
useful to us, such a philosophy must find a place and an
6 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
interpretation for these certain facts: for the spiritual
life as we know it in history, with its risings and fallings,
its mistakes and its triumphs, in all its non-utilitarian
beauty, its austerity and its charm. The recorded and
criticized experiences, achievements and peculiarities of
men and women living that life have at least as much im-
portance as the distinctive experiences and discoveries of
the musician or the man of science. For it is these first-
hand experiences in their totality, and not the doctrines
and speculations of academic theology, which are in the
last resort our most valid evidence of the existence, near-
ness, richness and overwhelming compulsions of a super-
natural world. Here is the starting-point: in this
profound human sense of an over-plus of reality, of some-
thing beyond the physical. We can allow this, long before
we feel called upon to make any choice among the
thousands of religious schemes in which men have given
body to this instinct and tried to satisfy its demands.
There has seldom been a period in which religious
experience has been more vigorously studied than it is
at the present time. People explore its peculiarities,
compare and contrast its various expressions, search out,
describe and try to explain its most eccentric manifesta-
tions. But that which makes religious experience inter-
esting and important is not its eccentricity, but its uni-
versality: the fact that it represents the persistent effort
of the race to approach Reality an effort which meets
with a partial success. Religion cannot matter at all,
unless it matters supremely: unless, as a distinguished
psychologist has not hesitated to say of it, it is 'the most
important thing in life'. 1 Its claim to be heard rests on
the fact that there are, and always have been, men and
women for whom this effort to approach or respond to
1 William Brown: Mind and Personality, p. 268.
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 7
Reality has been the ruling passion of existence ^-persons
who possess in a greater or less degree what is called an
'immediate experience of God', and try to live in con-
formity with this vision and the further fact that the
experience of these persons does not contradict, but deep-
ens and gives precision to the obscure religious conscious-
ness of the race.
We look at the long and varied history of human
religion; and what we find in it, side by side with
many fallings short, aberrations and absurdities, is the
embodiment in particular personalities of this or that
element in the whole concrete richness of eternal truth.
We see the constant reappearance in various degrees
of purity of the same certitudes and same cravings:
certitudes and cravings which the physical world cannot
produce and cannot satisfy. As the evidence accumu-
lates, so it becomes more and more difficult to evade
the conclusion that there is a literal sense in which man
must be a
'Swinging-wicket set
Between
The Unseen and Seen',.
though much that comes through from the unseen side
of the gate is pressed and distorted by its narrowness.
What then do these facts, which we cannot ignore
if we want to look squarely at human experience, imply
for us? What is their bearing on our conception of
Reality, of life, and of ourselves- those three mysteries
which we cannot solve and cannot escape? Here is
the human soul, constantly asking of the other Reality
over against us the eternal question which was formu-
lated by St. Francis: 'What art Thou? and what am
I?' And there are the innumerable religions and phi-
losophies of the world, propounding their answers. Some
8 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
of these answers are based on Part I of the question; and
are so abstract and theoretical that they merely change
the form of the mystery, the shape of the shadow which
is cast upon the veil. Other of the answers are based
upon Part II of the question; and answer it in a form
that hardly finds a place even for man's best and none
at all for his persistent sense of a better that lies beyond
him. But: now and again the whole question is answered
with a startling thoroughness, certitude and distinctness;
as in the sudden saying of St. Ignatius : 'I come from
God, I belong to God, and I am destined for God 1*
That saying covers both the nature of Reality and the
meaning of man; and at once makes the little theatre of
his life the scene of a supernatural mystery. It is un-
fortunate that such an affirmation is now commonly
classed as devotional, and tucked away into a corner,
whence it cannot affect 'practical life'. But it is not
really devotional. It is practical, even scientific; and in
making it the key to that interpretation of existence which
it is the business of the Spiritual Exercises to drive home,
St. Ignatius showed far more intelligence than piety.
Neither those who ask, nor those who provide answers
for these fundamental questions seem fully to have real-
ized the strangeness of the fact that the questions are
asked again and again. But could the human race and
human history be seen from outside by an intelligent
personality which had never heard of the religious sense
an observer possessing both width and depth of vision,
and so able to see the whole human world intensively and
yet relatively, as one might see a tiny ant-heap in the
solemn cosmic forest surely it is the oddness and 'un-
naturalness' of our spiritual longings and experiments
which would strike him first? For here we have a small
ephemeral animal; one amongst the many various crea-
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 9
tures evolved upon, and anchored to, one of the smaller
fragments in an uncounted stellar universe. And this
fragile, ever-changing little creature, whose birth and
death conform so perfectly to the rest of the physical
routine, and whose visible existence is unlikely to outlast
seventy or eighty journeys round the sun, is yet possessed
of an innate sense of the Unchanging. His limited fac-
ulties seem to have been wholly developed in response
to the threats and invitations of the ever-changing physi-
cal world, and trained to assist him to live and breed in
it ; yet he refuses to be satisfied by those given aspects of
reality which are so plainly present to his senses, and are
all those senses know. Alone among the jostling crowd
of related organisms which surround him, feed him,
threaten him and fear him, he is found again and again
rejecting the obvious and inescapable landscape to which
he is adapted, and seeking persistently for something
unseen.
Our detached observer would therefore perceive an
animal possessing a mental machine which has been de-
veloped through correspondence with a sensual world, and
is indeed only truly adequate to its data and requirements.
Yet he would see this machine deliberately turned by its
controlling entity away from and beyond that sensual
world to which it is fitted, and set tentatively and rather
clumsily to seek for contact with another order of real-
ity: and this for no utilitarian purpose, but in obedience
to a craving which it could not understand. He would
see man, at various stages of his racial childhood and
adolescence, choosing out of his environment some power
or object as yet inexplicable to him, on which to fasten
his creaturely sense of dependence and impulse of adora-
tion. A mountain, a river, a stream, thunder and light-
ning, sun, moon, or fire; the mysterious power that gives
io MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
fertility, brings pestilence, presides over birth and death.
anything standing over against the mind, as an ensign
and reminder of that Reality which is always felt but
never understood. And as mind, becoming more clearly
conscious, achieved a more and more perfect control of
its animal home; so the symbols and acts through which
it apprehended the Infinite would be seen to expand in
majesty and meaning. He would also see that no other
member of the animal creation looked out upon the nat-
ural scene with this sense of incompleteness, or showed
any signs of discovering within and beyond it the demand
and attraction of another level of life.
If this dispassionate observer had the power of distin-
guishing the significant from the obvious, he might dis-
cover as he continued his intent contemplation, that the
small creatures over-running the surface of this little
hurrying world produced now and again an individual
who did not merely feel the queer, vague, other-worldly
hunger, but also seemed capable of a certain other-worldly
knowledge. He would perceive that, with a daring and
confidence at once august and absurd, this ephemeral
crumb of life actually sought and claimed a personal
communion with the ultimate Reality. The relation
which such an onlooker would see to exist between this
possible possessor of supersensual knowledge and that ulti-
mate Reality the place, that is, of religious genius on
the scale of created intelligence, and the degree of truth
to which it can attain are matters on which it is useless
for us to speculate. All we are concerned to know is the
strange and yet certain fact, that the human species does
produce minds which are able and anxious to transcend
that sense world, in which and for correspondence with
which they have been developed. The way in which
they can best do this is the ultimate problem of practical
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE n
religion. The reason why they should wish to do it at
all is the central interest of speculative theology. But
the facts themselves cannot be denied; and can never
be squared with a merely naturalistic philosophy.
Perhaps our observing mind would presently perceive
that something more was involved in the phenomena
on which he looked than a strange craving, more or
less acutely realized, and a more or less complete satis-
faction of it. He might see that the up-stretching of
these little animals to Something Other did not originate
within their dim and half-real lives, and could not prop-
erly be described in terms of development from within.
On the contrary, it was always called forth, occasioned
and met by an inpouring from beyond the apparent thea-
tre of their life; and was indeed a response to, rather
than a seeking of, an Absolute Reality which already
transfused and sustained them. And further, he would
see that this correspondence of the childish human spirit
with its true and living P atria was not sterile. It started
and maintained a veritable growth and transformation.
There was, on the part of some of those fugitive creatures
in whom the supernatural sense developed, a gradual yet
actual absorption and bodying forth of that Infinite Real-
ity, which yet so immeasurably transcended the vague and
limited minds of men.
He would see, in fact, the production of sanctity.
Thus, by sharing both the limitations and the privileges
of the created, he would learn the three primary truths
which seem to govern man's dim or vivid experience of
the Infinite: GocPs initial movement and invitation,
man's return movement to God, and sanctity, God-
likeness, as the possible term of his~spiritual growth. He
would feel the ever present activity of an unchanging
Life beyond yet within life, recognized in and through
12 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
the various hints and incarnations of the temporal order;
and would see the seeking spirits of men to be themselves
bathed and upheld all the time in and by that very Ocean
of Spirit for which they seek and crave.
Aware from another angle than ours and doubtless
in another manner not only of this everywhere-present
transcendence, but also of the majesty of its creative
expression in the universe, once more the paradox of
those dimly seeking and yet finding souls would amaze
him: the gentle drawing-out of these little, half-real
spirits from the seething world of organic life. Seen
thus, it might perhaps be that the other-worldly com-
plex of meekness, heroism and love which is called Holi-
ness, would seem to him the most deeply significant and
enduring character of the life on which he looked: for
in this alone he would see, completely developed, the
result of a full and faithful correspondence between the
embryonic human spirit and its supernatural environment.
And he would find that it was actually one of these tiny
and ephemeral creatures, born of that small and cooling
planet, who had found the words of awe and amazement
in which this paradoxical relation of Infinite Spirit soul
might be expressed:
*When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that thou visitest him?' 1 '
This little parable will have served its purpose if it
draws attention to certain constant factors in our human
experience, which naturalism can neither deny nor explain.
It reminds us that religion, as seen from the human side,
is a branch, and perhaps even the most significant branch
of anthropology : that any attempted explanation of put;
1 Psalm viii. 3, 4.
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 13
nature and meaning which ignores it is distorted and in-
complete. It reminds us further that the facts of religion
neither those we despise nor those we approve taken
alone, but all together in their richest developments re-
quire something more than the emergence from within
the organic world of a fresh quality or power, a mere
unpacking of that world's portmanteau, another episode
in the endless drama of Becoming. They involve, beyond
this, the awe-struck response of the creature to some-
thing wholly other and over-against itself; something
given, an Existence independent of all man's conceiving,
which already contains within Itself both the question
and the answer of Reality. Whatever our own philo-
sophic convictions may be, we are forced to acknowl-
edge that somehow or other a series of events began,
which ended in the strange recognition of a contrast and
a relationship between 'man's nothing-perfect and God's
all-complete'. The religious history of man, minute as
its best achievements must be over against the Ultimate
that it seeks, does show us at an infinite number of
levels and in an infinite number of ways, this mysterious
surge of created life towards that which lies beyond and
yet within itself ; its response to the attraction of Eternity.
That religious history seems to move between two
poles. On the one hand, there is the moulding action,
the initial call and pressure, of the everywhere present
and unchanging Reality. On the other hand, there is the
need and craving of man; gradually awaking to a more
and more vivid consciousness, a more and more pas-
sionate desire of that Presence in which he discerns the
plenitude of knowledge, joy and peace. These com-
pleting opposites inform our spiritual experience; though
we may acknowledge that they appear in it always
imperfectly and unequally apprehended, always mixed
14 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
with and disguised by our natural instincts and cravings,
thwarted by animal impulse, and dragging with them
many disconcerting legacies from our sub-human past.
These great general facts of an existent, active super-
sensual order calling man's awakened spirit to transcend
the world of sense, and of that spirit's desiring but dif-
ficult response facts gathered up by Aquinas in the cele-
brated phrase which defined man as 'a contemplative
animal'- ought surely to dominate the world-view of
religion. They are, or they should be, the sky that over-
arches and the air that bathes the special landscape of
theology. And indeed it is mainly for want of the
humbling sense of that unmeasured sky, and of the pres-
ence of that warmly generous fresh and living air, that
this landscape of theology so often seems dry, petty, and
unreal. Those whose business it is to recommend one
special form of religious belief and practice, or to ex-
amine in isolation one type of religious experience, ur-
gently need this profound yet general sense of the super-
natural, as an antidote to their natural trend to theologi-
cal contraction and stuffiness.
1 How grand it would be, were these persons compelled
as a part of their training to share for a while the position
of our imaginary observer! Then they would be forced
to consider the background of Eternity, and in relation
with the solemn pageant of the universe or such frag-
ments of that pageant as we can yet perceive rtheir
always geocentric and often parochial piety. Then they
might cease to feel that religion stands or falls by the
poor and variable rationalizations of men; might grasp
the fact that its stammering utterances convey at best a
fragmentary apprehension of That which Is, and see
that there is nothing inherently sacred in the particular
sort of religious shorthand in which they try to describe
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 15
their particular series of supernatural certitudes. This
shorthand, hardly ever transcribed into the vernacular
or fully and simply explained, has now become one of
the great obstacles to faith. Its crisp mysterious
characters repel the uninitiated, who are left without any
clue to its relation with the alphabet of everyday life;
concealing from all but students of doctrine and those
rare persons able to read the score of the supernatural
music, the unchanging and objective truths with which
religion deals.
'Divine things', said St. Thomas Aquinas, *are not
named by our intellect as they really are in themselves,
for in that way it knows them not; but they are named
in a way that is borrowed from created things.' 1 Yet
in spite of this warning voice, popular theology has
brought us to a pass in which thousands of persons spend
their lives, like the unconverted Augustine, in 'reproving
the saints for thinking what they never thought'. 2 They
are repudiating a God and a spiritual order which
Christian philosophy has never proclaimed ; but which have
been arrived at by understanding the condensed and sym-
bolic statements of dogmatic religion in a crude and.
absolute sense. No one reminds them now, as St. Cath-
erine of Genoa reminded her disciples, that f all that can
be said about God is not God, but only certain smallest
fragments which fall from His table.' 3 They forget that
theological terms at best can only represent the struggles
of other men to communicate their limited yet ineffable
experience of the Given: that 'revealed religion' in its
most intensive form, is yet necessarily revealed to the
human race through human minds immersed in human
l SHtnma Theologica, Pars. I, Q. 13. I.
a St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. VI, cap. 4.
8 Vita e dottrina, "jjb. Quoted by von Hugel in The Mystical Element
of Religion, vol. i, p. 277.
16 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
history, and takes colour from the medium through which
it has passed. Nor do they dwell over much on the
probable results of demanding from the symbols of chem-
istry or mathematics, the childish standard of realism
which they exact from the liturgies and creeds. Hence
an inquiry amongst educated agnostics and unsectarian
theists, as to what they suppose Christians to mean by
such terms as Trinity, Incarnation, Grace, Heaven and
Eternity, would bring startling evidence of the nature
of the doctrines which these honest doubters so earnestly
and in many cases so properly disbelieve.
Within the religious world itself the result of this
popular neglect of origins and meanings has been hardly
less deplorable. Ignorant of the real character of its
own aims, credentials and beliefs, and frightened by
criticisms which it has not learnt how to refute, Christian
interest has concentrated with increasing determination
on the social and ethical obligations and advantages of
faith. It has lost the old, deep sense of man as essentially
a citizen of
'Two worlds immense,
Of spirit and of sense . . .'
a creature capable of reacting to both these orders of
reality, and only living his .full life when moving freely
between them. And contemporary Christianity has paid
for this exclusively horizontal development, by an impov-
erishment of that nobly transcendental temper, that right-
ful other-worldliness, which is or should be the very
heart of religion ; and which alone can satisfy the spiritual
hunger of men.
When St. Augustine exclaimed 'My life shall be a
real life, being wholly full of Thee!' 1 he proclaimed in
1 St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. X, cap. 28
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 17
these words the power of the human soul to transcend
its physical environment: and gave human personality
and human religion a content and objective beyond the
span of 'social Christianity'. He felt, as the spiritual
genius always does feel, that the natural world and the
natural creature taken by themselves are only half -real;
.and that a life which merely consists in the correspon-
dence between them leaves the soul's innate thirst for
reality unquenched. In God alone he found that full
reality; the plenitude of Eternal Life which 'fully Is*.
And his sense that this real life, this Being, was also in a
measure accessible to man's spirit, carried with it the;
corollary that in so far as we and other creatures lack
such completeness of existence, we 'are' not. The true
demand and invitation of religion, therefore, is not that
the human mind shall believe something, but that the
human spirit shall be something. That it shall respond
to the call of this Supernatural Reality, shall receive its
generous dower of light and grace, and move on and
grow up into a fuller being and more abundant life. And
the real history of religion is the unfinished history of
man's efforts and discoveries, his surrenders, triumphs and
mistakes in this field.
'I perceived', says St. Augustine again, 'that I was far away
from Thee in the land of unlikeness; as if I heard Thy voice
from on high saying "I am the Food of the full grown: grow,
and thou shalt feed on Me. Nor shalt thou change Me into
thy substance as thou dost the food of thy flesh; but thou shalt
be changed into Me" . . . and I beheld all things beneath Thee
and saw that they are neither wholly real nor wholly unreal.
They are real in so far as they come from Thee unreal, be-
cause they are not what Thou art. For that alone is truly
real which abides unchanged.' 1
These words, if we will move away from the unreal
temper in which we usually read 'devotional books', and
1 St. Augustine : Confessions, Bk. VII, cap. i o
18 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
will look at them with innocence of eye, must surely
amaze us. They set before us, in its most intense form,
the living heart of all religion: the fact of man's craving
for and implicit experience of the Spaceless and Change-
less Reality of God.
CHAPTER II
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS: SUPERNAT-
URAL EXPERIENCE
It is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses,
and another to have experience of it also; it is one thing to
have ideas of "the holy" and another to become consciously
aware of it.
RUDOLF OTTO
When thou saidst, Seek ye my face: my heart said unto
thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.
PSALM XXVH. 8
The voice, the exceeding great cry, of that unquenchable
passion, of that irrepressible aspiration, whereby the soul of
man shows forth its truest dignity and highest virtue in seeking
the better to know and love and serve its Highest and Invisible
Object.
H. P. LIDDON
AS we look backwards along history, and around us
t\ at the social complex of which we form part, we see
two distinct kinds of direct witness to a Reality beyond
the natural order: two levels at which human religion
appears and endures, and must be taken in account. We
see first the general and widespread religious cravings
and convictions of humanity; cravings and convictions
which, however inadequate their immediate objective may
be, yet by their existence mark us off from our animal
relations, and testify to a compelling passion that con-
tributes nothing to the physical well-being of man. There
is the undeniable human capacity for feeling mystery and
awe our 'sense of otherness' and the compulsion that
19
20 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL?
seems laid upon us, to work up and embody these intui-
tions in some concrete system that can be grasped and
used by the mind.
All this, so indubitably present however we explain
it, does even at its crudest seem to constitute a dim,
emergent, yet most real knowledge of Godi The heathen
in his blindness already sees in the wood and stone an
intimation of Reality which the microscope refuses to
reveal. But beyond this, there is that rare and special
sort of individual development and experience which is
virtually present wherever life touches heroic levels, and
which reaches its height in the genius of the saints. There
is the constant appearance throughout history, of persons
with a strange capacity for self-donation to supernatural
interests, and a strange inability to be satisfied by any-
thing else. The saints are surely as much a part of
human history, and their investigation is as much a
branch of human science, as any other tribe or type of
men. We cannot leave them out because they are so
difficult to fit into a rational scheme. Yet their special
discoveries, sacrifices and experiences are unrelated to the
physical progress of the race. In them we seem to see
the latent spiritual sense of man, his unique capacity for
unearthly love, emerging and becoming regnant. They
bring into focus the vague and generalized racial instinct
for Reality.
We may say that human religion in its widest sense
begins in that general and vague experience. But it
is renewed, fed, deepened and enriched by a wide variety
of special experiences; and by the material which these
experiences bring in. Between these two extreme points
is unfolded the whole spiritual history of man: and the
claim of that history to be regarded as truly central to
an understanding of the meaning of human life, rests on
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 21
this double foundation of a corporate and a particular
experience. We cannot reasonably regard it either as a
vestigial relic of man's primitive fears and guesses, or as
the peculiar aberration of certain distracted x minds: be-
cause the saints give meaning and precision to the reli-
gious instincts of the crowd, and the crowd supports and
guarantees the certitude of the saints.
We are further reassured by the fact that here religion
seems to follow the same path of development as the other
great movements in which the restless mind of man
reaches out towards a wider knowledge of his mysterious
environment. The secret drive towards artistic creation,
the speculations of philosophy, or scientific adventure and
research these forms of exploration too, do and must
take their departure both from a general and a particular
response to some felt attraction and demand; a response
on the one hand vague if insistent, on the other more
vivid, passionate and precise. Therefore in studying
man's knowledge of, and relation with, the universe, we
are justified in giving a large place to the existence and
the declarations of spiritual genius. Indeed, we are
bound to do so; for here, so to speak, are the laboratory
specimens on which our practical work must be done.
Here is the only human type which claims to speak
from observation and experience, not from deduction and
speculation, of the realities beyond sense.
The mystics to give them their short, familiar name
are meri and women who insist that they know for
certain the presence and activity of that which they call
the Love of God. They are conscious of that Fact
which is there for all, and which is the true subject-
matter of religion ; but of which the average man remains
either unconscious or faintly and occasionally aware.
They know a spiritual order, penetrating, and everywhere
22 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
conditioning though transcending the world of sense.
They declare to us a Reality most rich and living, which
is not a reality of time and space ; which is something other
than everything we mean by 'nature', and for which no
merely pantheistic explanation will suffice. These men
and women therefore give precision and an objective to
that more or less vague thirst for the Infinite and Un-
changing which, even in the rudimentary form in which
most of us yet possess it, is surely the most wonderful
of all the possessions of man: that sense of another and
unearthly scale of values pressing in on him: that strange
apprehension of, and craving for, an unchanging Reality
utterly distinct from himself, which is the raw material
of all religion. And it is through the work done by
spiritual genius, its power of revealing to others at least
something of that which it finds and feels, that average
men obtain in the long run all their more vivid convic-
tions in respect of the transcendent world ; as through the
work done by artistic or scientific genius they learn some-
thing of the significance and structure of the physical
world.
As only the wide-open aesthetic faculty of the great
artist seems able to perceive and exhibit to us a sense-
world which is truly adequate to our cravings; and only
the profound intellect of the great philosopher can satisfy
the insistent demands of reason for a rational universe;
so only the intuition of the great mystics seems able to
know, and give to others in some measure, a spiritual
universe and reality which is convincing, all-demanding,
utterly satisfying, in its dimly felt and solemn spaceless-
ness, its thrilling attraction and aliveness. This supernal
reality these mystics do truly give, or at least suggest to
us not as a possibility of speculation, but as a personally
experienced concrete fact, which we are bound to take
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 23
into account when estimating our sources of information
about the world. Thus, as from the great poet we learn
the full possibilities and the transcendency of Poetry, it
is from the saint that we learn the full possibilities and
the transcendency of Religion. We cannot say that he
'understands' it, any more than the brightest and most
devoted dog 'understands* canine-human relationships.
None the less, incarnated in these special personalities,
with their singleness of aim and peculiar sensitiveness, are
the racial organs as it were, through which humanity has
received the greater part of its fragmentary news about?
God.
*O Thou Supreme'! exclaims St. Augustine. 'Most secret
and most present; most beautiful and strong! Constant, and
incomprehensible ; changeless, yet changing all ! ... What shall
I say, my God, my Life, my holy Joy? and what can any man
say when he speaks of Thee ?' 1
That is surely the voice of the realist, absorbed in the
contemplation of a given objective Fact. We do notj
speak thus of those compensating fantasies which are
woven from the stuff of imagination and desire, and which
accommodate themselves so obligingly to our human needs.
And again, when St. Catherine of Siena cries 'I have not
found myself in Thee, nor Thee in myself, Eternal God I*
we recognize a craving and a capacity for a Reality beyoncl;
the bounds of sense. If it had not been for the delighted,
reports and declarations of the mystics and saints, their
insistence on its overwhelming actuality, and their heroic
self-dedications to that which they have seen, we, little
half-animal creatures, could never have guessed that this
objective Fact was there, and accessible in its richness
and delightfulness to men. Still less could we have sup-
posed that the life of conscious and devoted correspon-
1 St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. I, cap. 4.
24 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
dence with this achieved and all-penetrating Perfection,
which is the essence of personal religion, was possible to
the human soul.
Those saints and mystics are the great teachers of the
loving-kindness and fascination of God. Watching them,
we become aware of that mysterious give and take between
His Spirit and man, by which human personality is trans-
formed and changed: and of the fundamental fact that,
in all such give and take, the Divine action comes first.
Since we are finite creatures, those ultimate values which
convey to us something of the Infinite and Eternal can
never be apprehended by our own efforts. They must
be given, or infused ; and the mystics, and those who know
the secrets of contemplative prayer, have been convinced
at first-hand of this great truth. God's impact on the
soul always seems to them to involve, first, a gift, next a
demand, and last the response, gradual growth, and ulti-
mate transfiguration of that soul. This profound sense
of something really happening, something done to it and
to be done by it, sharply marks off all true religious
experience on the one hand from vague spiritual feelings,
on the other from those changes in man, and discoveries
by man, which merely develop from within marks off
in fact, the work of nature from the work of grace.
We turn, then, from general considerations to see what
it is that happens to those men and women in whom the
'supernatural sense' has thus developed and become
regnant; what it is that they find and feel.
The continued existence in history of a type thus pecu-
liarly sensitive to those spiritual impressions which the
majority of men seem unable to receive persons who
have in some degree that which is loosely called the
'mystical sense' is a fact which the most hardy natural-
ist can scarcely deny. Human history has produced the
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 25
religious genius as certainly as. it -has produced the phi-
losopher or the poet ; and the attempt to explain him away
in terms of pathology does not get easier as time goes
on. Now every other type of human genius is found on
analysis to desire, apprehend, enjoy, and reveal a genuine
Reality other than himself; and to grow in understanding
and creative power through devoted attention to this-
given Real. The painter afid sculptor must maintain a
selfless and purifying' contact - with external beauty,
their art is to -^eep clear of feverish dream. The phi-
losopher seeks to apprehend real Being by means of dis-
interested and logical thought. The musician is con-
trolled by reverence for really existent rhythms and har-
monies. So does the peculiar genius for the Supernatural.,
considered without prejudice, require for its explanation, a
real inciting cause and for its development a real response.
If we should know little of the reality of God without
the witness of saints, without the Living Absolute we call
God Jt is incredible that those saints could exist at all.
Life means correspondence with environment; and no
lesser environment could conceivably occasion or give
meaning to their characteristic response.
'I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is radiant;
for in Thatness I have seen beyond Thatness, in Company
I have seen the Comrade Himself.' *
'Thou wilt keep him in peace, peace, whose mind is stayed
on thee.' 8
'In thy Presence is fulness of joy; and at thy right hand
are pleasures for evermore.' *
*And I said Lord, I have called on Thee inwardly and
desired to have my joy in Thee. I am ready to forsake all
things for Thee. Thou, verily stirredst me first to seek Thee.'*
1 One Hundred Poems of Kabir, p. 54.
2 Isaiah xxyi. 3.
* Psalm xvi. n. ,
*De Imitatione Christi, Bk. Ill, cap. 23.
26 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
*What reason hadst Thou for creating Man in such dignity?*
exclaims St. Catherine of Siena: 'The inestimable love with
which Thou sawest Thy creature in Thyself and didst become
enamoured of him, for Thou didst create him through love
and didst destine him to be such that he might taste and enjoy
Thy Eternal Good.' 1
Does not this strange capacity for supersensual enjoy-
ment and supersensual devotion, pointing so steadily
beyond the natural world, mark a fresh stage in the devel-
opment of human personality? These things have been
said by creatures living on this little planet: creatures
whose physical ancestry leads back through the swamp
and jungle, to the beginnings of animal life. Yet they
point beyond the planet and beyond natural life as we
know it; and declare another level of existence to be
accessible to man. The name we give to individuals
who speak and feel thus, and the way we try to account
for them, are unimportant. The important thing surely
is that they are there; and that their mere existence as a
human type, let alone their heroic and selfless activities,
witnesses to an independent Object both inciting and
answering their other-worldly desires: a God Who 'se-
cretly initiates what He openly crowns'. 2
As the fish could not have come into existence without
water, and the bird guarantees the supporting through
invisible air, so I think we may reasonably claim that
the undying fact of sanctity guarantees God. It wit-
nesses to work really done, a give-and-take truly estab-
lished, at levels beyond the normal conscious field. La-
belling can neither add to nor detract from the authority
of those in whom this happens: an authority which is
founded in the strangely realistic character of their dec-
larations, the fundamental unanimity existing between
them, and the fact that they transcend, but do not conflict
*Dialogo, cap. 13.
a F. von Hugel: Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion,
Series II, p. 225.
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 27
with the findings of the general religious sense. We
-may and should find great differences in the -quality and
extent of their achievement: but the claim to an em-
pirical though never complete knowledge of a transcenden-
tal Reality unites them all, Christian and non-Christian
alike. They are, in the phrase of Ruysbroeck, not only
ghostly but also God-seeing men; and in some this first-
hand apprehension is developed to a surprising degree of
precision and richness. Thus these experimental theists
inevitably furnish much of the raw material with which
the philosophy of religion has to deal; and they are so
numerous and so distinctive, that no theory of human
knowledge which aims at even approximate completeness,
can afford to neglect their witness.
That witness is twofold in character. First and
chiefly, they testify to the reality of the Supernatural by
that which they become under its 'declared influence;
the growth and expansion of their personality. Secondly,
by that which they find and feel; and which they try
to reveal to us, more or less, in their teaching. So as
a second stage in our study of the religious complex, we
may well consider in general terms what these two lines
of evidence amount to. We review our witnesses; and
examine their credentials, and the points in which their,
testimonies agree.
From the standpoint of intelligent naturalism, they are
strange witnesses enough. The spectacle before us is that
of a number of little creatures, apparently conditioned by
the sensual world and possessing the same physical outfit
and limitations as other men. Yet these little creatures
are impelled to seek with ardour and determination and
commonly with some success intercourse with a level of
reality entirely beyond the reach of the most sublimated
sense. We see this intercourse achieved in various ways
28 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
and degrees, along two apparently inconsistent routes ;
sometimes by a special use of those same senses, and some-
times by a deliberate abstraction from them in other
words, by sacramental and by contemplative methods.
Moreover this experience has observable results within the
natural world. It transforms again in various degrees
and ways those who are capable of it. Theology ex-
presses this in its own way, when it says that we have here
exhibited to us in a concentrated form the way in which
the Creative Spirit of God deals with the individual
human spirit; the sort of contact and communion possible
between them; the work done upon nature by grace.
A genuine theism is committed to the belief -in that
living, personal and spaceless Spirit, Who was defined
by St. Thomas Aquinas as 'God Himself inasmuch as
He is in all things everywhere and always'; the every-
where-present Reality, secretly and powerfully moulding
and conditioning all life. -. Though our normal human
consciousness does not of course include direct awareness
of that changeless Presence, Who is the true object of all
religion; yet that which we call mystical experience is
aware of it, more or less. In particular individuals,,
specially sensitive to supernatural influences, the field of
consciousness appears to be so expanded or so deepened as
to include though never steadily, completely and con-
tinuously the profound sense of the duality of human
life, the mysterious certitude of communion with that
God Who is present with His creation 'in such a way as ,
to be all in all, whilst remaining absolutely distinct from
all'. 1 Plainly the accounts given by those who are thvs
specially sensitive must be considered with respect: al-
though the material which they give to us is often most
clifficult to use. It seldom comes to us in a pure form,
1 Nicolas of Cusa: The Vision of God, cap. 12.
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS . 29
but on many counts, racial, traditional and psychological,
requires of us careful scrutiny, sifting and comparison
a fine discrimination between rightful criticism and arro-
gant rejection* A constant remembrance of the oblique
and partial character of all human knowledge, the history
and crudity of human speech, and so a constant refusal to
equate feeality even with the best experiences and declara-
tions *of men, is called for in those who would understand
it ; a constant agnosticism, too, as to the apparent certitudes
of our neat and normal world, the true causation of that
stream of events of which our experience is composed.
This attitude is the more needful because the mystical
type shares in the disabilities which characterize other
forms of genius. It discerns more than it can comprehend.
It cannot, save by allusion, communicate the substance
of its knowledge. We have always to remember the re-
lation in which the most widely open of contemplative
minds conceivable by us-^anchored, as it must be still, to
the conditions of physical life stands to those realities
on which its awestruck gaze is turned; and the drastic
process of translation which must be needed before any
fragment of its supersensual apprehensions can be im-
parted to other men. Mystical literature is full of this
sense of the over-plus, genuinely perceived by intuition
tut escaping all the resources of speech. 'Seeing we do
not see, understanding we do not understand, penetrating
we do not penetrate/ exclaims Richard of St. Victor. 1
'Brother, I blaspheme! I blaspheme!* says Angela of
Foligno to her secretary, as she struggles to find words in
jrhich to express her great revelations of God. Such
genius stretches human awareness to the utmost. It
passes beyond 'that encircling wall of Paradise where
apparent contradictions coincide', 2 and, because of the
1 Richard of St. Victor: Benjamin Major.
8 Nicolas of Cusa: op. cit., cap. 9.
3Q MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
strain involved in its special apprehensions^ suffers from
cruel reactions, distresses and obscurities.
Yet we need not feel surprised that the tiny human
creature, beset as it ever is by its animal limitations and
adjustments, is shaken through and through by the impact
of spiritual realities; that its contacts with the eternal
world are so tentative and so half comprehended by it ;
that sometimes the truth which it lives for may abruptly
capture consciousness and sometimes remain obstinately
out of reach; that its other-worldly joy sometimes gets
translated into the terms of emotions of an unspiritual
kind, and its desperate attempts to suggest the inexpress-
ible are not always fortunately conceived. We must
expect that the reports of religious genius shall vary
widely in detail, colour and proportion, as do the reports
of individual explorers concerning other levels of reality.
For even were the whole of their claim allowed, it would
still remain true that each such explorer shows us reality
partially, incompletely, and through a temperament a
temperament, moreover, which is immersed in history and
conditioned by it. His instinct for Eternity operates
from within the temporal order ; and by means of psychic
machinery which is accustomed to the stimulus of sense.
That which is truly given from a transcendent source,
must yet be apprehended and expressed within the his-
toric field.
The contemplative is seldom fully conscious of all that
this irreducible duality involves for him; and only in a
few rare instances seems able to distinguish, as does
Ruysbroeck in a celebrated passage, between 'God and
the light in which we see Him*. Yet his attitude towards
Eternity is essentially and inevitably that of the artist,
not of the mathematician; and his best declarations and
constructions will always have an artistic and. approximate
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS . 31
character, carrying with them a luminous fringe of sig-
nificance not amenable to speech. We mistake his office
if we begin to ask him for explanations. Therefore even
the report of the greatest contemplative saint is much
like that of the wise shepherd; who can tell us much
about the weather, but nothing about meteorology, and
often supports his rightful judgments by an appeal to
imaginary laws. For here, as in all the things that most
truly concern ' our small, emergent, still half-conscious
Jives, our knowledge, in its luminous and cloudy mass,
far exceeds any exact formulation that our science can
make of it. Since that knowledge comes to us through a
human consciousness either our own, or that of other
men it is and must be, largely translated into symbols
and imageSj and controlled by the machinery of apper-
ception. In proportion as the spiritual genius abandons
first the naive and then the deliberate use of image and
symbol and he is tempted to do this, as their inadequacy
becomes clear to him so does he abandon the only link
between pure intuition (supposing such pure intuition to
be possible to men), and our conditioned minds.
Thus when Angela of Foligno says: *I see all good;
and seeing it, the soul . . . ilelighteth unspeakably
therein, yet it beholdeth naught which can be related by
the tongue or imagined in the heart. It seeth nothing yet
seeth all things, because it beholdeth this Good darkly': 1
she succeeds in producing an atmosphere of ineffability,
but actually tells us nothing at all. The same is true of
her contemporary^ the author of the Cloud of Unknow-
Thou askest me and sayest, "How shall I think on Himself,
and what is He?" and to this I cannot answer thee but thus:
"I wot not."
'For thou hast brought me with thy question into that
1 Book of Divine Consolations: Treatise III, Vision 7.
32 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
same darkness, and into that same cloud of unknowing, that
I would thou wert in thyself. For of all other creatures and
their works, yea, and of the works of God's self, may a man
through grace have fullhead of knowing, and well he can think
of them: but of God Himself can no man think. And therefore
I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to
my love that thing that I cannot think. 51
Far nearer to human experience and needs is the more
humble and careful transcendentalism of Dionysius the
Areopagite; who teaches that 'the Mystery of Godhead,
which exceeds all mind and being', yet 'lovingly reveals
Itself by illuminations corresponding to each separate
creature's powers, and thus draws upwards holy minds
into such contemplation, participation and resemblance of
Itself as they can attain'. 2 Were this wholesome sense of
God's infinitely graded self-communications, and our hu-
man disability to receive the supernatural unmixed with
some natural alloy, fully assimilated by us; how many of
the difficulties and disputes which now stain the surface of
religion would fade away!
II
BUT our present concern is neither with divergence
of detail nor obliquity of presentation. It is with
the massive agreement which underlies the particular and
inevitable variations of man's spiritual experience and
expression: the solid witness of the mystics to an actual,
living, and enduring world of transcendental realities,
and to the relation in which this existent world stands to
the spirit of man. As the French mountaineer climbs
Mont Cervin, and the German ascends the Matterhorn,
yet for both the summit is the same: so we, becoming
intimate with them, and learning to penetrate below
1 Op. cit., cap. 6.
3 The Divine Names, cap. i.
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 33
divergencies of language and outlook, realize more and
more clearly that the mystics do all experience in differ-
ent ways and degrees one and the same sublime^. Reality.
We need not limit this statement to Christians. All
experimental theists have something in common. All,
in the words of Dionysius, are drawn by one Spirit into
such contemplation, participation and resemblance as each
can attain: and though their experiences differ widely in
depth and value, they do not rule each other out.
It is the intensely objective character of their declara-
tions, their insistence on the complete, inexpressible other-
ness and yet most vivid actualness of the Real, which
makes the mystics the great champions of religious realism.
'Not how the world is is the mystical, but that it is', 1
said Wittgenstein most justly; and 'not how God is, but
that He is', is the central and unanimous declaration of
the mystics. In the words of von Hiigel, 'Religion, in
proportion to its religiousness, is everywhere profoundly
evidential; it affirms real contacts with a Reality which
both occasions and transcends which exists independ-
ently of all these contacts. Presence, Is-ness, as
distinct from the Oughtness of Morals ; this is the deepest
characteristic of all truly religious outlooks'. 2 And fur-
ther study of these testimonies, supported perhaps by
careful introspection on our own part, drives home the
conviction that it is this 'Is-ness' and not save in a
most limited sense the 'Whatness* of the Supernatural,
which is the essence of such revelation as we are able to
receive. For nothing that the mystics contrive to say,
however impressive, really prepares us for the unmeasured
'Otherness' which characterizes even the smallest and
faintest of true religious experiences in ourselves.
The independent 'pre-existence of the Object of their
1 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 187.
Essays and Addresses, Series II, p. 248.
34 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
contemplation is, then, essential to the philosophy of
the mystics. For, thoroughgoing empiricists though they
be, a philosophy, a particular conviction about the nature
of Reality and of life, does emerge from and is required
by the sum total of their communicated experiences. This
philosophy has two terms: the two terms implied in all
religious realism God and the Soul. Spirit infinite,
perfect, and uncreate; spirit finite, imperfect and created.
These are its realities.
As to the assertions which it makes about these realities,
I will take six points which confirm and complete one
another; distinguishing the universe of religious exper-
ience from that of the 'natural' man. These great intui-
tions, facts and experiences must all come up for further
exploration and analysis as we go on. Here they are only
to be considered in so far as they help us to fix the charac-
teristics of that human type through which so much of our
news of the Supernatural has come.
The first three points refer to God, the supreme super-
natural Object, and declare:
(1) His Prevenience,
(2) His Perfection,
(3) His Eternity.
The last three refer to the soul's characteristic experiences
over against this Object, and we might call them
(4) Vocation,
(5) Prayer,
(6) Transfiguration.
(1) I take together those great objective declarations
of the mystics which assert the Prevenience, Perfection
and Eternity of God.
Men and women of spiritual genius all come before
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 35
us, not as the painstaking discoverers of something, but
as the astonished receivers of something. Virtually or
actually, they insist on the given-ness of all man's
apprehensions of Reality; the absolute priority of the
action of God over any and every action of the soul.
The -words of St. John 'We love him because he first
loved us* sum up, when fully understood, their whole
doctrine of mystical experience. This is a position com-
pletely opposed to all the speculations of personal ideal-
ism, all philosophies of mere development and change;
for it requires us to hold that the supreme and living
Object of the soul's desire Himself incites this desire as
a part of His scheme of human life, that indeed He is
in His immanental aspect the very source and occasion
of the creature's half-conscious drive towards His trans-
cendent aspect. Thus, feeling the power, the sweetness
and the wonder that overwhelm 'our strangely com-
pounded human nature when the sense of God enters
the conscious field, the mystics can exclaim with no sense
of unreality: 'O grace inestimable and marvellous worthi-
ness! O love without measure singularly showed unto
man.' 1
That to which they all witness, with -vhat one of
them called *a holy and marvelling delight', is just this
touching condescension of Infinite to finite, this profound
concern of Ultimate Reality with individual human life.
Their knowledge, they insist, is an 'infused' and not an
achieved knowledge. It is 'given'. It enters the soul
from beyond themselves; and carries with it the assur-
ance that what really matters is not this little soul's
minute merit or experience, but the being, the boundless
'grace* of that distinct and supernatural world, which thus
reveals some of its secrets to the desiring heart of man.
Imitatione Christi, Bk. IV, cap. 13.
36 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
C O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge
of God ! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past
finding out!
For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath
been his counsellor?
Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed
unto him again?
For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things:
to whom be glory for ever. Amen.' 1
This is the note that sounds in all St. Paul's letters,
and inspires his most passionate outbursts of admiration
and love.
Julian of Norwich, in her Revelations of Love, tells
us how she was shown in vision 'a little thing, the
quantity of a hazel nut'; and how she looked at it with
the eye of her understanding and thought, 'What may
this be?' And it was answered generally thus '// is
all that is made' And she continues: 'In this little
thing, I saw three properties. The first is that God
made it. The second is that God loves it. The third
is that God keeps it. But what is to me verily the
Maker and Keeper and Lover, I cannot tell'. 2
In this characteristic mystical experience, we see how
the whole emphasis falls on God's Reality, and not
merely on the soul's personal apprehension; and we see
too how chary is the true mystic of claiming definite
knowledge. Julian proclaims the vividly felt fact of
God's instant and all-penetrating Reality; His unspeak-
able richness and wonder, creating, loving and upholding
'all that is made' a fact so great, that against this un-
measured love and power and being, -the whole visible
universe seems 'the size of a hazel nut*. But when it
comes to saying what this tremendous Reality can mean
to her own little soul, words fail her.
Indeed that which, beyond all else, spiritual genius
1 Romans xi, 33-36.
Op. cit, cap. 5,
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 37
never fails to give us, is this realistic sense of the over-
plus of Reality; a perfection exceeding in its totality and
splendour all possible human apprehension. What we~
find is an experience in which personal and impersonal
values are combined within a richly living whole. Hence
the soul, struggling to convey its apprehension, uses by
turns yet never with complete satisfaction the language
of intimacy, the language of concept, and the language of
space. Thus God is felt to be a boundless, all inclusive,
all penetrating substance Ocean, Patria, Light. Again
He is Life, Joy, Peace; and, equally, a vivid personal
Presence Lover, Father, Friend. We shall not deal
fairly with the situation or get any idea of the underlying
richness which these stammering and always inadequate
terms try to express, unless we bring together all three
groups of metaphors; and, keeping ever in mind their
allusive and symbolic character, see in them the struggles
of the finite mind to suggest its experience of an ineffable
Fact.
It is to the writings of the contemplatives, and to the
mystical element present in all living theology, that we
owe our best conceptions of this richness and distinctness
of God; His infinite, spaceless yet vivid personality; the
paradoxical union of Unknowable yet intimately known.
In the words of Baron von Hiigel, the whole outlook
of the mystic requires 'belief in a Reality not less but
more self-conscious than myself a Living One Who
lives first and lives perfectly, and Who, touching me, the
inferior, derivative life, can cause me to live by His aid
and for His sake*. 1 All dwell with awe and worship
on the contrast between their own state and this holy
Reality of God. All have experienced in some measure
an Infinite, an Eternal Life, which is no mere unending-
*on Hugel: Eternal Life, p. 385.
38 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
ness, has in it no quality of succession, but is felt to be
*the All-inclusive, the Simultaneous, the Perfect, the
Utterly-Satisfying'. 1 To say this, is once more to assert
givenness: for where, within our poor little temporal
experience, could such concepts be discovered by the soul?
Religious genius, then, in all its varieties and fluctua-
tions, stands solidly against any and every merely sub-
jective or psychological explanation of religious facts, and
any and every merely immanental and pantheistic concep-
tion of God; asserting again and again His Eternal Per-
fection, independence and otherness. The one point on
which definite knowledge seems always to be implied or
claimed, is this changeless perfection, distinctness and
actualness of God: His rich simplicity and plenitude.
Whilst some may struggle to interpret their experience
in personal, and others in abstract terms; for both, the
ultimate Reality is absolute and complete. The real
mystical experience, as St, Augustine put it, seems, always
to be of 'something which is insusceptible of change*.
'"It is not enough," says Gerlac Peterson, "to know by
estimation merely, but we must know by experience, that the
soul looketh upon Him who looketh at all things past, present
and to come at one glance, and that He thus speaketh to the
soul.
" I stand firm, and remain without changing. If thou
couldst look upon Me, and see how unchangeable is My sub-
sistence, and that in Me there is neither before nor after, but
only the Selfsame, that I alone am: then wouldst thou too be
able to be freed from all unevenness and perverse changeable-
ness, and to be with Me in a certain sense the selfsame." ' *
(2) We are thus led to the second group of assertions
made by the mystics; assertions which are indeed already
involved in their very power of pronouncing upon the
nature of Reality. I mean all those which declare that
1 Ibid., Essays and Addresses, Series II, p. 208.
a> The Fiery 'Soliloquy with God of the Rev, Master Gerlac Peter sen,
cap. ii, p. 26.
PARTICULAR WITNESS
the human spirit can and does most directly and vividly
experience this infinite, all-sustaining, unchanging and
richly living God; though in widely varying ways and^
degrees.
Here the human passion for the Formula, the Law
the tendency to methodize, and attribute absolute value
to the system on which we arrange the observed process
of life becomes peculiarly dangerous. We are dealing
with human life, the most plastic, most beautifully various
and intricate, least standardized of any kind of life known
to us. And we are dealing with it, as it acts and exists
on that mysterious shore where the physical and meta-
physical meet. Therefore we must expect, and indeed
welcome, paradox in our efforts to tell at least the tiny
bit we know of this. We must not demand clarity, con-
sistency, surface logic. We must guard against the con-
stant temptation to concentrate on a striking feature of
the landscape and forget the great expanse of quiet un-
impressive fields. We must observe a due proportion
between the solemn background and the lovely detailed
foreground; the Eternal, and the human histories that
emerge from it. As botany, whilst its entrancing subject-
matter requires the existence of the world of rock and
soil that is dealt with by geology, does not necessarily:
tell us anything about that world's ultimate being or
ralson d'etre; so the existence and special characters of
sanctity require the existence of God, but do not explain
Him. Even at the point of apparent intimacy perhaps
most clearly at that point the over-plus, the incalculable
mystery, remains dominant; as Isaiah learnt, when he
saw the seraphim who were nearest to God veil their
faces before the awful Presence which asked for his
personal service and determined his career.
It is only in this, the truly scientific mood of humility^
40 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
and reverent agnosticism, that we can safely consider or
seek to classify within the three elastic headings of gen-
eral character, method and result, the experiences which
spiritual genius reports to us. Broadly speaking those
experiences (a) have a vocational character: () they
introduce the self into a life which is more and more
fully controlled by man's characteristic spiritual activity,
prayer: (c) they effect a fundamental transformation of
personality.
'When,' says Ruysbroeck, 'we follow the Radiance that is
above, reason with a simple sight, and with a willing leaning
out of ourselves towards our highest life, then we experience
the transformation of our whole selves in God: and thereby
we feel ourselves to be wholly enwrapped in God." l
Those few lines tell all that we know about the super-
natural life in man. If we remove them from the level
of religion to that of psychology if we regard them as
the struggle of a great and sincere mind to tell us some-
thing that has really happened to himself do they not
cast a new light on the mysteries and possibilities of our
personality, and the nature of the objective which is set
before human idesire?
They mean that the thing we know so vaguely and
tentatively as the human self is a yet unfinished bit of
creation. It is emerging from 'Nature/ but destined
for something other than Nature; and sometimes it
achieves its goaL 'Thou hast made us for Thyself/ This
experience of the Infinite Spirit, in which the finite spirit
finds its meaning and therefore its rest, is not achieved
but 'given'; yet being thus given, can be improved. By
giving it his attention, and acting in conformity with it,
'willingly leaning out towards his highest life', man can
change and enhance his whole existence; becoming, as
St. Augustine says, more real. This direct though dim
1 The Sparkling Stone, cap. 10.
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 41
and never full experience this loving apprehension which
is never comprehension yet answers man's perpetual^
craving for a principle of perfection and stability. It is,
in* its widely differing degrees of penetrative power and
richness, ranging between the extremes of abstraction and
personal communion, the mystical element found at the
heart of all great religions: and belief in its concrete
reality involves important consequences for our view of
the texture of existence and the higher reaches of huma.i
life.
(a) The first character which we note as peculiar to
man's experience of the Supernatural, is that which I
have called vocation. This experience in its essence^ is
not merely a revelation of new reaches of reality, an
enlargement of the field of consciousness. We might thus
describe our aesthetic or philosophic apprehensions; but
not our apprehension of God. This appears always to
contain, either virtually or actually, an element of de-
mand. The little creature is stirred and called by some-
thing over against itself, not only to a new knowledge
and intercourse, a new happiness and assurance, but alsa
to a new level of life and of action; a life and action
which, whether it fulfil itself in a humble or in a spectacu-
lar way, is yet definitely orientated to other-worldly
aims and carries other-worldly sanctions. This in itself "
involves an interference with human history, difficult to
explain on naturalistic grounds. The inciting Power
requires and obtains from its creature a "definite response,
set towards a definite end.
True mystical experience is therefore never self-com-
plete. It occurs at a point of penetration of the historical
by the Eternal; a penetration which, whether small or
great, sets going a series, always of psychological and
often too of physical events. Thus it never leaves
42 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
the human subject at the level at which it found him.
It appears as a transforming energy, which compels the <1
experient to conform to new standards and try to do
hard things. Whatever the language, tradition, or symbol
through which such a dynamic experience of the super-
natural comes to man, whatever its limitations or tem-
peramental form, the effects are always vital effects. The
ordinary sequence of natural life may continue; but it is
seen, now and ever after, in supernatural regard. The ^
soul suddenly perceives within that natural life further
unguessed possibilities opening before it; fresh heights
and depths of existence, and fresh opportunities of work
and of love, which require indeed insistently demand
its co-operation at every point.
We could illustrate this from every age of religious
history. Thus, in one of the most primitive yet most
impressive descriptions in literature of a pure supernatural
experience the appearance to Moses in the burning bush
the revelation of the numinous is immediately followed
by the compelling sense of vocation: 'Go, and I will be
with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt say'; 1
and the strange history of Israel, at once so natural and
so supernatural, begins. Thus, when Isaiah sees the
'glory of God in his temple/ that sudden majestic vision
of Reality first brings awe and abasement. He, the
faulty human creature, is overwhelmed by a sense of
shame and imperfection over against perfect holiness.
But this is only the preliminary to a painful, fiery purifi-
cation, preparing a call to service and an eager response:
Here am I. Send me'. 2 Thus St. Paul, suddenly
subjugated on the road to Damascus, passes directly from
Tevelation to command: 'Arise, and go into the city,
and it shall be told thee what thou must do.' 8 And
1 Exodus iv. 12. a Isaiah vi. 1-8.
"Acts ix. 6.
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 43
the supernatural touch is given, which sets going the
chain of historical events that created the Catholic
Church. Thus the same revelation compels St. Augus-
tine* to 'take and read', and presently demands that ap-
parent sacrifice of a promising worldly career which
turned a successful and self-indulgent young professor
into a Father of the Christian Church. 1 Again, Francis
of Assisi, praying in S. Damiano, is 'smitten by unwonted
visitations', and 'finds himself another man than he was
before'. At once he seems to hear the voice of Christ
saying to him : 'Francis, repair my house' ; and, 'trembling
and utterly amazed', he prepares to obey. 2 So too the
modern French mystic Lucie-Christine says of her first
great religious experience, that she suddenly saw with
her inward eye the words: 'God only!' and those words
were to her 'a Light, an Attraction and a Power'. 8 She
saw truth, she responded to it with delighted love, she
received a new dower of energy the power to live that
life of devotion in the world to which she was called.
Mind, heart and will were all enhanced.
Now take all these together. Take specially "the three
young Hebrews, severally destined to be a great law-
giver, prophet, apostle. Take the young African and
the young Italian, so decisively called from the world,
to vivify, re-spiritualize in -different ways, the Catholic
Church. Take the young French wife and mother,
called to sanctify the simple life of the home through
her prayer and love, and exhibit to our generation the
normality of the contemplative life. Through each of
these souls, something enters human history and changes
it. In all, we see clearly beneath superficial differences
the working of one power, evoking one general type of
1 St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. VIII, cap. 8.
'Thomas of Celano, Legenda II, cap. 6.
8 Journal Spiritnel de Lucie-Christine, p, u.
44 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
reaction. In each we have the same sequence of awed
apprehension, imperative vocation, generous unhesitating
response. The centre of the creature's interest is removed
to fresh levels. A new life, a new career is begun;
having at its heart, indeed in its very blood, a new
activity, a new ferment, distinct in kind and in intention
from all that belongs to the 'natural' life of men, but
leavening more and more that 'natural* life.
(b) The working of this ferment perhaps the most
mysterious and universal of all the instinctive processes
of human life the mystics alone show us in its fullest
development. It is that special activity of the spirit, so
apparently unrelated to the creature's physical being and
needs, which is called, in the most general sense, Prayer.
The evolution of prayer, from the naive petitions of the
child and savage to the adoring contemplations of the
saint, is surely one of the most curious and significant
chapters in the history of man's consciousness; one of the
greatest contributory testimonies to the actualness of the
spiritual world. It is indeed so curious and so important
that it will require special treatment by itself; and is
only introduced here, in order that we may note the
fact that this special activity, occasioned by God, directed
to God, and having no meaning whatever without God,
is developed by the saints and mystics to a surprising
richness and power.
(c) The final test of that valid experience of the
supernatural which is claimed by the mystics, is never
that which they tell us about Reality, but always that
which their special experience of Reality causes them to
be. It is in his growth, choice, work, sacrifice, endurance
all that he does with the raw stuff of his natural life,
and mostly in defiance of his natural preferences, in
and for the felt and loved Reality that man proves
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 45
his possession of a spiritual life. That life places the
heroic, the unearthly, the absolute, the non-utilitarian
love which is fed by prayer, at the very heart of exist-
ence; and steadily makes all other interests subservient
to this. And the result, when seen in its perfect form,
is such a complete sublimation of impulse, such a re-di-
rection of life, as makes, in the crisp language of St.
Paul, a *new creature'r though a new creature for which,
as a matter of fact, most of the old material is cleansed
and used again.
It is this transformation, accomplished in its fullness,
which makes the saint stand out as a special variety of
the race. Indeed, only those persons in whom that costly
and genuine change has at least begun to take place, have
any real idea of what religion means. The new line of
growth thus set going, with its increase in love and
creative energy- the real power of the saint to help and
redeem his fellows, the social radiation of his spiritual
force this seems to result, not from any mere negative
sinlessness, but from a certain real though still imperfect
sharing in the achieved perfection of Eternal Life. Thus,
from the admitted transformation and enhancement of
personality worked by a faithful and continued response
to. other-worldly demands, we obtain another series of
indirect testimonies to the realities of man's two-fold
nature ; and a scheme within which to place those isolated
heroic acts, those lovely unwitting responses to the secret
demands of holiness and love, which redeem the fabric
of the common life.
On this dual fact of something virtually or actually
perceived and loved beyond the world, and something
done because of it the balance struck between space
and tension, faith and works the soul's movement in
and through history and succession to the transcendent
46 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
yet truly present Goal of history and succession on
this rich paradox, the greatest spiritual teachers of the
race have insisted again and again. It is this two-fold
character of their testimony, which gives to the mystical
saints their extraordinary impressiveness. They do not
merely enjoy, but incarnate their apprehensions: bringing
them, often through desperate purifications and sufferings,
into direct relation within the stream of human existence.
Dramatizing within nature that which they apprehend
beyond nature, they make their very lives a sacrament.
We can watch them in history being transformed made,
in their own strong language, 'deiform' by faitnful re-
sponse to supernatural influences. It is from them that we
*v
have learned what adventures, sufferings and joys, await
the human spirit, when it definitely enters upon the super-
natural life.
Nor need we go to startling heroisms and asceticisms
for demonstrations of the intimate claim and presence of
this life. Every recognition of an Absolute is a sort of
religious experience, a sort of acknowledgement of super-
nature ; and this recognition may take the form of spon-
taneous action, rising from the deeps of personality in
apparent defiance of 'rational beliefs'. So with many sud-
den heroic acts. So with much patient devotion, done
without a clear conception of a 'Why', but under the
quiet pressure of a secret 'Must*. Hence it is often the
most homely and commonplace which bears most heart-
piercing witness to the unceasing pressure, incitement and
support of that unearthly love which theologians call
'grace'. The poor slum mother in her patient and appar-
ently hopeless self-spending, the willing sufferer who
transmutes pain into an actual source of spiritual strength
and joy, the inconspicuous sacrifices and the seemingly
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS
unrewarded labours of thousands of men and women,
hardly aware of the impulse which controls their lives:
these, equally with the specialized disciplines and renun-
ciations to which all fully religious souls are drawn,
witness to the concrete reality of the supernatural, and
its overwhelming authority for human life.
Thus we are led by diverse routes to the conclusion
that religious genius can and does give us special news
about metaphysical truth, which is not obtainable from
any other type of mind. For those who feel themselves
to be wholly enwrapped in God have at least a world-
view detached from mere succession, and startlingly dif-
ferent from that of the mass of men. They are poised
on a Reality which is no mere subjective satisfaction.
It is there first given, concrete, objective, vividly alive
and for them, and those who come to believe their
declarations, its existence must condition all lesser real-
ities. The fact that this Given Truth, so vividly felt in
full religious experience, is not present to the average con-
sciousness, is surely no argument against its actualness.
For if in the ordinary way, we cannot realize our physical
status, flying through space upon a whirling ball; but
owe our "very knowledge of it to the observations and
deductions of special minds then, surely it is not strange
that the fact of our spiritual status should lie far beyond
the common grasp. If we cannot really enter into and
appreciate the dim surrounding life of animals and plants,
how can we hope to enter into and appreciate the vivid
and intense reality of higher levels of being; above all, of
that Life within which all condition and comparison
cease? Here too we might expect, at least in the first
instance, to depend on those who have given all their
attention and love to these levels of truth, 'leaning out
48 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
of themselves towards their higher life* ; and only by
attending to their reports and directions, gradually learn
to see a little for ourselves.
I do not of course mean by this that we are committed
to uncritical acceptance of the reports of the mystics :
still less, that religion can safely be based on such reports
alone. Here we may and must impose the same tests
as those by which reason tests the reports of physical
science: namely, substantial unity of witness, the absence
of fundamental contradictions, and the power of uniting
in one system a large number of observed facts. In their
own words, the mystics may transcend reason but they
must not contradict it. Neither must they contradict,
though they may improve, the general religious and moral
sense of the group in which they arise. Moreover, the
reality disclosed by these experimental theists must in
some measure be valid for all. It must be wide as well
as deep: in Ruysbroeck's phrase, a 'world that is un-
walled,' not a ring-fenced enclosure marked 'Saints only*.
The relation which they tell us that they experience must
be the intense form of a relation already implicit in the
spiritual nature of man. If this experience of religious
genius has value for us, it must be because it is not a
thing apart; but rather represents the highest point
reached in the vast upward surge of human consciousness
to that which lies beyond and above itself, and for which,
nevertheless, it craves.
And surely, as a matter of fact, the experimental
certitude of the great contemplative does crown, and is
supported by, the whole mass of that transcendental feel-
ing, that insistent refusal to be satisfied with the here-
and-now, the impermanent and the fleeting, which takes
sometimes a philosophic, sometimes an aesthetic, and some-
times a religious form. To call this 'absolute feeling' is
THE PARTICULAR WITNESS 49
to beg a great philosophic question. It seems better to
mark its utter distinctness from all our reactions to the
sense-world by calling it 'supernatural feeling' : for I
believe most firmly that, if we are ever to achieve a truly
fruitful religious philosophy, this will only be done by
bringing back into the scheme that deep sense of an
independent .spiritual world over against us, which this
term in spite of its many unhappy associations still
implies.
/
I
\
CHAPTER III
THE SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL
Tu, amor meus, in quern deficio, ut fortis sim, nee ista
corpora es, quae videmus quamquam in caelo, nee ea, quae non
videmus ibi, quia tu ista condidisti nee in summis tuis condition-
ibus babes . . . sed tu vita es animarum, vita vita rum, vivens
te ipsa, et non mutaris, vita animae meae.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The signs are multiplying that man will return, with such
improvements as may be wisely desirable, to that wonderfully
rich outlook of the Golden Middle Age, wher'e God's outward
action moves on two levels the natural level and the super-
natural level a Good and a Better or Best two kinds, and
not merely two degrees, of goodness.
F. VON HUGEL
Lo, God's two worlds immense,
Of spirit and of sense,
Wed
In this narrow bed;
Yea, and the midge's hymn
Answers the seraphim
Athwart
Thy body's court!
FRANCIS THOMPSON
T ET us now go back to the diagram of the universe
" ' in other words, the philosophy which . seems to
be required alike by the diffuse and corporate, and by the
intense and individual religious experiences of mankind:
indeed, by the experience of all souls who have, under
whatever symbolism, truly felt and responded to the at-
traction of an absolute Reality. What we have to find
is a metaphysical landscape, a way of seeing the world,
50
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 51
which shall justify the saint, the artist and the scientist,
and give each their full rights. Not a doctrine of water-
tight compartments, an opposition of 'appearance' to
'reality'. Rather, a doctrine of the indwelling of this
visible world by an invisible, yet truly existent, world of
spirit; which, while infinitely transcending, yet every-
where supports and permeates the natural scene. Even
to say this, is to blur the true issue by resort to the de-
ceptive spatial language which colours and controls our
thoughts, and translate the dynamic ancl^ spiritual into
static and intellectual terms.
The first demand we must nfake of such a diagram
is, that it -shall at least safeguard, though it can never
represent, all the best that man has learned to appre-
hend of the distinct and rich reality of God. This, I
think, will be found to mean that it cannot be the
diagram of the philosophic monist. For that which above
all a genuine theism requires of our human, ways of
thinking, is the acknowledgme'nt of two sorts of stages of
reality, which can never be washed down into one: of a
two-foldness that goes right through man's experience, and.
cannot without impoverishment be resolved. We may
call these two sorts of reality, this two-foldness, by vari-
ous names Supernature and Nature, Eternity and Time,
God and the World, Infinite and Finite, Creator and
Creature. These terms do but emphasize one or another
aspect of a total fact too great for us to grasp, without in-
fringing the central truth of its mysterious duality: for
'God', as Plotinus says, 'never was the All. That would
make Him dependent on His universe'. 1
Certainly we may, and indeed must, hold that there
is intimate contact between these pairs of opposites.
Spiritual reality is not, and never can be, cut off from
l En. V. 5. is.
52 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
the world of sense: were it so, we could never have
guessed its existence. There is at every point and on
every level a penetration of God of His world; a truth
which underlies the Christian doctrines of the Holy Spirit
and the sacraments. 'What place is there within me,
whither my God cannot come?' says St. Augustine: 'I
should not exist, were Thou not already within me.' 1
But once we are tempted to define that Absolute God
and this derivative world in any sense which reduces
them merely to two aspects, parts or stages of a reality
that is ultimately identical two ways of regarding one
'spiritual universe' we are moving away from the con-
ception of that universe which is required by all full
human religion, and especially by Christianity.
'Imagine' says Plotinus again, 'that a stately and varied
mansion has been built ; it has never been adandoned by its
Architect, who yet is not tied down to it. He has judged it
worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that can
serve to its being, in so far as it can share in being, or to its
beauty. . . . This gives the degree in which the cosmos is en-
souled, not by a soul belonging to it but by One present to
it ; it is mastered, not master, not possessor, but possessed.' 8
Man has always dimly felt this doubleness in his
experience; but has not always rightly defined its char-
acter, and put the cleavage where it really comes. He
has insisted at one time or other on the distinctness and
opposition between matter and spirit, between good and
evil, between appearance and 'reality'. But physical sci-
ence is bringing the first pair of supposed opposites into
ever closer harmony; whilst the second pair, though based
on a true and terrible distinction, is blurred by our un-
stable and childly self-interested views as to that which
is evil and that which is good. The domestic proprieties
and religious solemnities of Polynesia become sinful when
transplanted to the European scene; popular theologians
* Confessions, Bk. I, cap. s. a En. IV. 3. g.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 53
have seen in influenza an argument for original sin; and
impassioned gardeners can find evidence of evil in every-
thing that thwarts their horticultural designs. Yet if the
life history of the microbe disturbs the chemical balance
of its host, or the slug desires to use the delphinium
for purposes of diet, and we for purposes of aesthetic con-
templation, .surely these misfortunes merely involve the
competition of two differing wills' set on one object, and
no moral judgment whatever. And the third pair of
opposites, logically explored, land us in philosophic
scepticism. Through none of these points can we safely
draw the boundary between our two experienced worlds.
In one of his last-published utterances, Baron von
Hugel observed that 'Religion has no subtler and yet
also no deadlier enemy in the region of the mind, than
every and all monism': and this because 'The Other-
ness, the Prevenience of God, the One-sided Relation
between God and man constitute the deepest measure
and touchstone of all religion.' 1 That is of course a
statement which many students of philosophy will resist;
but when we consider what monism implies, and compare
its declarations with those which religion requires, we
begin to perceive the gulf that divides them. Monism,
says Professor Whitehead, conceives God as the 'ultimate
individual entity' within which the actual world is a
phase that 'apart from God is unreal. Its only reality
is God's reality. The actual world has the reality of
being a partial description of what God is. But in itself
it is merely a certain mutuality of appearance which is
a phase of the Being of God.' 2 Thus this philosophy
slurs the religious distinction between Creator and Crea-
tion, and is essentially an attempt to accommodate Reality
to the simplifying instinct of the childish human mind.
lr The Mystical Element of Religion, 2nd ed., vol. i. p. xvi.
3 A. N. Whitehead: Religion in the Making, p. 69.
54 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
But the persistent witness of the saints and I do not
limit this word to the canonized members of the Christian
Church to the 'otherness' and utter distinctness of God,
and of that supernatural life to which at least some souls
are called, can never be reconciled with a metaphysic
which obliterates the fundamental distinction in kind
between nature and supernature, the successive and the
abiding. ! With the deepening of his religious sensitive-
ness man soon comes to feel that 'the solution of the
riddle of Space and Time lies outside Space and Time'; 1
and that although this solution may always be beyond,
him, yet the world in which it is hidden is also his home.
He has an instinct for transcendence which only the
Transcendent can satisfy. Hence, human religion in its
fullness always requires 'A clear looking forward into an
otherness or difference towards which, outside ourselves,
we tend as towards our blessedness. For we feel an
eternal yearning toward something other than what we
are ourselves.' 2 Therefore the religious mind which
capitulates to the enticing simplicities of monism, usually
finds in the end that it has capitulated to pantheism in
disguise; and that the richest experiences of the spiritual
life are shut from those who give up this specific religious
emphasis on the otherness and self-sufficing transcendence
of God.
This emphasis is the unmistakable mark of first-hand
spiritual experience, wherever found:
'Unlike, much unlike,' says a Kempis, 'is the savour of the
Creator and of the creature, of everlastingness and of time,
of light uncreate and light illuminate." 8
'God,' says Augustine Baker, 'is nothing of all that I can
say or think, but a Being infinitely beyond it, and absolutely
incomprehensible by a created understanding. He is what He
1 L. Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 185.
3 Ruysbroeck: The Sparkling Stone, cap. 9.
*De Imitations Christi, Bk. III. cap. 39.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 55
is, and what Himself only perfectly knows, and so I believe
Him to be, and as such I adore and love Him." 1
'In the Divine Nature,' says Lueie-Christine, 'is something
peculiar in kind, which characterizes it, and which is infinite
in its superiority to any idea which we have of spirit. How
then is the soul able so to recognize that which she has never
seen, exclaiming "It is God I" that it is absolutely impossible
for her to doubt of it? For, not only has this mysterious Being
nothing in common with created beings, but the soul sees that
which He is/ in a very simple way and without means of com-
parison. And it is this sight, however limited and imperfect,
which makes her exclaim "It is God!" and this cry of the soul
is enough alone to manifest the existence of God and our
divine origin.' 2
Such a modified dualism as this seems then essential
to us, if man's most living apprehensions of Reality
are to be given intelligible form. It is true that we are
not compelled to regard this duality of Nature and Super-
nature as ultimate r but this is of slight importance, since
ultimates are beyond our grasp. At this point it is perhaps
enough if we say that we are obliged to divide our appre-
hensions, in order the better to apprehend them. We
need a philosophic scheme which marks the absolute dis-
tinctness in kind between the richly personal yet spaceless,
Reality of God and, depending on this, the derived real-
ity of the God-possessed ^and all that is not God or
thus God-possessed: between Supernatural and Natural
worlds. All religion, in its beauty and its queerness, its
noble self-oblation and perverse fanaticism, arises out of
this one fact; that man really is a creature of the border-
land, who without ever abandoning his utterly creaturely
character, is yet inherently capable of living in both these
worlds one by 'nature', the other by 'adoption', as the
theologians say.
The first clause of the Lord's Prayer at once commits
us to the view that we are creatures of supernatural
affinities; and that our real status cannot be understood
Wisdom, p. 511.
8 Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine, p. 1x2.
56 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
merely as a development from within the natural order
which only tells half the truth about the soul. Man can
be a clever animal, or he can become a saint. But his
second possibility cannot be actualized by mere emergence
and self-development from within; by any self-impelled
transcendence. It requires the free 'gift of Eternal Life,'
from without. In other words his spiritual life,
while it unfolds within the time-stream, involves a per-
sistent appropriation and assimilation of a non-temporal
and abiding life; a 'wholly other' order, penetrating and
moulding the world of succession, and found operative
on all levels of history, but nowhere so clearly craved for
and discovered as in the religious field. This world, this
life, is for God indeed 'natural', but for man in his present
status 'supernatural'. Here our laws and generalizations
cease to be applicable; for we are in the presence of the
perfect freedom and spontaneity of God.
Those philosophic minds which spring to arms directly
the word 'dualism' is mentioned, might reflect upon
the fact that nothing but our own unimaginative conceit
supports the belief that the unsearchable riches of Reality
are in essence as simple and as amenable to our human
ways of thinking, as the monist would make them out to
be. Richness, variety, subtle and unnumbered differences
of degree, quality and nature, are the characters of all
existence as we know it. Ultimate identity is an abstrac-
tion, which the mind tries to impose upon an obstinately
and delightfully diversified and many-levelled world. But
this and all other simplifications of experience seem far
more likely to lead us away from, than into, the truth:
and land us in an arid, clever diagram with at best a
certain pantheistic flavour, but which has no food for
hungry souls in which the strange passion for the Absolute
is awake.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL '57
The mystics at any rate, in spite of certain excesses
of language which should be read in connection with
their completing opposites, steadily reject thisjimplifica-
tion. Again and again they insist on the fundamental
and experienced distinction though not the separation
between God and His world, between Spirit even at its
homeliest and Nature even at its best. In so doing they
appear to offer a valuable corrective to three aberrations
which constantly appear in the history of religious
thought, and are specially prominent at the present time*
These are the tendencies, -first, to demand from our re-
ligious constructions an excess of this-world utility; next*
to ask of them an excess of simplicity ; and finally, to con-
centrate on the element of succession .and change, to the
exclusion of the element of permanence.
(1) First, as to the utilitarian tendency in current
philosophies of religion; the rejection of other-worldli-
ness, the contempt for all that is implied in asceticism, the
subordination of faith to works, the immense attention
paid to man and very trifling attention paid to God, the
anxious determination that both world and individual
shall get something out of religion. This progressive an-
thropocentricism is manifested in the almost exclusive
emphasis now placed by many teachers on what is called
'social Christianity' really altruism with a little evan-
gelical varnish and in the ever-increasing willingness to
adopt pragmatic standards in matter of doctrine, and to
reduce devotional practice to a branch of applied psy-
chology. It can only end by taking the very heart out of
religion rightly understood, and thus destroying the source
of its own energies.
This temper of mind, in so far as it is allowed to be
central, is decisively opposed by the impassioned theo-
centricism which is characteristic of all high religious
58 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
experience; by the declared certitude of the mystics that
there is indeed a Reality which transcends in worth and
beauty, and above all in attractiveness, every lesser reality
mediated by the sense-world; a reality which alone gives
these lesser realities their interest and their claim. It is
for this that they 'leave all things that they can think,
and choose to their love that thing that they cannot
think'. 1 For them, in the last resort, only God and His
interests matter. As one of their latest representatives
exclaimed, they 'lose themselves wondering at HimV
Their essential creed is contained in the favourite prayer
of St. Francis Deus meus et omnia! So the heart of
human religion, wherever it appears in its strength and
purity, is always adoration ; and this because of that strong
certitude of a one-sided relation with a transcendent Ob-
ject, which is characteristic of every full awakened soul.
For religion, Becoming even that 'becoming better'
which looms so large in its exhortations is always a
secondary interest: our modern talk of self-fulfilment
fades into silence before its quiet insistence that the only
real fulfilment is self-loss. Its main concern is with
Being: with a living and achieved Perfection within
which all lesser perfections arise, and which gives to the
time-process all its worth. The central aim here is
therefore not the mere obtaining of some measure of the
Infinite to help the best interests of the finite creature,
or the finite world. It is rather such an unconditioned
humble giving of the finite creature to the interests of
that Infinite, as is expressed in the life of prayer, in the
8evelopment of heroic virtues, and in the performance of
those non-utilitarian acts of love and sacrifice which point
beyond this world.
When St. Augustine said, 'This is the happy life : to
1 The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. vi.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 59
rejoice concerning Thee unto Thee !' x he put into words
.a religious ideal to which neither 'social' nor 'affirmative*
Christianity is able to attain. He felt, as all deeply
spiritual souls have felt, that human life taken by itself
is incomplete; and derives all its worth from something
'given 1 and other than itself. Hence the purposes of
God, and of .religion as a graded revelation of the things
of God, infinitely transcend and perhaps radically differ
from any scheme based on the perfectibility of this world.
Utopia and beatitude are not the same. The true con-
cern of religion is therefore first with this transcendent
order: even though its very best apprehensions can only
touch the fringe of that Reality which gives to the 'nat-
ural* such realness as it is found to possess.
Such a faith as this, finding its focal point so far
beyond the natural man's horizon, could never have been
conceived or practised without that overwhelming certi-
tude of the distinct self-existence of that Infinite One,
which it seems to be the special province of religious
genius to bring into human thought. In so far as their
spiritual outlook remains full and healthy, those who are
most conscious of God and of a certain deep relation
between His Spirit and man's soul, always refuse to wash
down this relation to mere self-mergence, or to adopt
any sort of pantheistic solution of the problem of Reality.
Their spiritual greatness might almost be measured by
the extent in which they realize and safeguard their own
creaturely status and the pre-eminence and distinctness
of God. jThus Ruysbroeck says of his own highest
apprehension of Reality, that in it 'the bare understanding
is drenched through by the Eternal Brightness, even as the
air is drenched though by the sunshine,' yet that even here
'the creature feels in its inward contemplation a distinct-
1 Confessions, Bk. X, cap. az.
60 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
ness and an otherness between itself and God . . . there
is here an essential tending-forward, and therein an es-
sential and abiding distinction between the being of the
soul and the Being of God. And this is the highest and
".finest distinction which we are able to apprehend.' * If
we translate that from terms of religious mysticism into
terms of philosophy, it surely requires an outlook which
is utterly incompatible alike with monism and with sub-
jective idealism.
(2) We are brought thus to the second point on which
the findings of spiritual genius oppose prevalent ten-
dencies in religious philosophy; that is, their firm refusal
to simplify over-much their conception of God. / Influ-
enced no doubt by the successes of physical science, many
thinkers now take for granted that the more spiritual facts
and experiences we can assume under one so-called law,
the nearer we are getting to truth: whereas the only
thing to. which we are actually getting nearer is philo-
sophic tidiness -a. bad trap for seekers after reality. We
have no real reason, other than a scientific arrogance which
has its absurd aspect, for supposing that such arbitrary
simplifications are in accordance with the mind of God.
Indeed, considering our limited outlook and the blurred
and patchy character of our apprehensions, the insistent
paradoxes and apparent contradictions of experience are
surely more likely to approach objective truth, than is
any neat conceptual scheme which comforts our little
minds by evading these difficulties. Here the mystical
witness to the richness and reality of Supernatural, the
element of unsearchableness, the sense of awe, which
grows ever deeper with the soul's advance, rebuke again
and again our mania for simplification, our love of easy
spiritual slogans, and the pious naturalism to which all
1 Ruysbroeck: The Book of Supreme Truth, cap. u.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 61
this must lead. 'A comprehended God is no God* says
Tersteegen.
(3) (That pious naturalism seems at present to tend
to such an exclusive discovery of God in Nature, such -
an exaggerated emphasis on process, succession, and emer-
gence, as shall, in effect, equate the life-force with the
Spirit of God; and represent the spiritual life of man
as simply a natural development from within the world
'-the crown of creative evolution. Our generation, in-
toxicated by theories of evolution and development bor-
rowed and very often bowdlerized from natural sci-
ence, seems to have gone headlong for that which a deeper
philosophy, enriched by the experiences of the saints,
recognized long ago as only one of the two movements
of Reality. It has developed a superstitious cultus of
continuity; which, it is felt, must somehow be made to
stretch without a break all the way from the amoeba to
the Absolute. It has even brought that Absolute itself
within the natural scheme, and identified it with the
process of Becoming. This sort of diffuse and ill-consid-
ered immanentism, which draws its intellectual energy
from the more extreme utterances of Croce and Gentile,
unfortunately inspires much of that current religiosity
which is occupied in converting the strong meat of religion
into a patent food for hungry but dyspeptic souls. But it
represents a conception of reality with which that concrete
certitude of God which awes and delights the great
mystics, or even the rudimentary life of the Spirit as most
truly experienced by our struggling selves, can never
come to terms. In its extreme form it is indistinguishable
from pantheism e.g. as when a philosophic essayist was
lately betrayed by the attractions of Neo-Hegelianism
into defining God as 'a self-imparting life striving up-
wards to full expression in the development of human
62 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
consciousness', and the philosophic goal as 'the appre-
hension of Reality as a comprehensive unity, expressing
itself in a universe that comes to consciousness in man.'
Such an assumption as this that Infinite Holiness
is finding its fullest expression in the mental development
of our doubtfully satisfactory race this masterpiece of
racial conceit of course makes^dbnsense of all the greatest
religious experiences of man.i^ For those experiences, one
and all, require the veritable existence of a real and
independent Object eternal, perfect and utterly tran-
scendent Spirit as their precedent cause ; and steadily de-
mand of us not only self-improvement and self-develop-
ment, but an abject humility and adoration too. We are
a long way here from the awe-struck gladness of the super-
naturalist; from the invitation of the liturgy to join with
all those higher forms of consciousness beyond our ken
Angels and Archangels and all the Company of Heaven
in acknowledging that Mystery of Holiness which fills
with its glory the heavens and the earth ; from St. Augus-
tine's 'My God, my Holy Joy!'; from the repeated
ejaculation of St. Francis 'My God and all! what art
Thou and what am I?' Yet surely it is in these
altogether apart from the theology represented by them
that we hear the real accents of the spiritual life, at
once profound and na'ive; grounded in humility, yet full
of the delighted sense of God. And it is only this outlook,
so characteristic of all sanctity, which can save us from
the snares lurking in systems of 'spiritual evolution' if
these are taken alone]- 1
II
IF then we allow that the persistent witness of religious
genius corrects speculation on these three points, and
in so doing testifies to a greater, deeper and richer
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 63
interpretation of the Universe as possible to the human
soul if we accept the mystic as a Revealer, a person
dealing in his own way with genuine realities, and offer-
ing, no less than the mathematician or the scientist,
genuine material to philosophy if his greatest declara-
tions do constitute a damaging criticism of monism, of
naturalism, of 'actual' and 'personal' idealism, and of any
thoroughgoing philosophy of change what is the positive
reading of Reality which those declarations require?
They require, I think, such a two-fold scheme or
diagram as shall embrace both the eternal and the suc-
cessive, both Being and Becoming: in the language of
.religion,, both Grace and Nature. Holding, not as philo-
sophic ideas, but as dimly understood yet deeply exper-
ienced acts, those completing opposites which we call
the transcendent and immanent, the personal and imper-
sonal aspects of God, the spiritually awakened soul ab-
solutely needs, if it is to describe its felt relation with
Reality, both movements. It needs the eternal, abiding
Reality, its pre-existence, perfection, beatitude, and given-
ness ; and also the serial changes in our finite selves which
that all-penetrating Reality evokes. For the mystics,
without ontology human life is meaningless. Dealing
honestly and loyally with the material they give us, we
shall be bound to confess that the trilogy of Matter,
Life, and Mind, the whole immensely deepened and ex-
panded reality we call Nature, still leaves out something
which though always partially, and never steadily can
be apprehended by man : something which is yet perfectly
conveyed in the exclamation of the Psalmist: 'Lord, thou
has been our dwelling place in all generations!' All the
great records of religion whatever the language they
may use are full of this sense of the mercy, grace, gen-
erosity of the existent and living One; a Home that is a
64 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Father, and a Father that is a Home. They assert a real-
ity truly penetrating and supporting us; and yet over
against which, in all his deepest moments, man feels him-
self to be placed.
Perhaps at our present stage of growth, with its im-
perfect and unlevel consciousness, it does not much matter
how this doubleness is conceived by us, so long as it is
deeply and humbly felt: for the ultimate object of every
religious exercise is to bring one or another aspect of it
home to the soul. Perhaps too the distrust often felt
by religious men for the so-called 'scientific universe*
arises not so much from its apparent support of mechanis-
tic determinism, as from its obliteration of dualism. Over
and over again these persons of religious experience exist
on the actual yet unknowable richness, the over-plus, of
God's self-giving perfection, the smallness and relativity
of man's best experiences of Him: and yet, the wonder
and joy that there should be an experience at all. Reality
is apprehended by them in such a manner, that awe and
attraction are merged. In their own language, humility
and love become inseparable aspects of one state. The
numen of Otto, with its characters of ineffable mystery,
awefulness and fascination 1 does not cover all the ground
of this specific supernatural experience. It leaves out
that close, all-penetrating, intimate and cherishing aspect
which links the wonder of God to a heart-breaking home-
liness, and transfigures awe with confident love. '
'For as the body is clad in the cloth,' says Julian of Norwich,
'and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh, and the
heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Good-
ness of God and enclosed. Yea! and more homely; for all
these may waste and wear away, but the Goodness of God is
ever whole, and more near to us without any likeness." a
*R. Otto: The Idea of the Holy, caps, ii to vi.
8 Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Lovs, cap. vi.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 65
This note is struck again and again in the genuine
records of religious experience: and represents a factor
in man's profoundest apprehensions of the Universe, for
which monism can hardly find room.
*O God, thou are my God; early will I seek thee:
My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee
In a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.'
*I was as a beast before thee,
Yet thou art continually with me.' *
(Our modern knowledge of man's history has given a
new poignancy to that.)
'I cried unto thee, O Lord: I said,
Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living.' 2
'He said- unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my
strength is made perfect in weakness.' a
Strange ideas, are they not, to be distilled from the
brain of a developed vertebrate who possesses all his
future possibilities packed within himself? Strange;
yet so persistent that they point either to a gigantic col-
lective hallucination, or else to the perpetual presence
with and through us of a really existent and operative
supernatural Reality. A God whose Being is distinct
from that natural world of succession which is the
apparent theatre of our human life, and yet most deeply
penetrates it; a free and intensely living order, a P atria
of spirit, where the forces which we faintly know as
Will and Love are present in perfection, and unlimited
in power.
(Thus, adopting this two-fold scheme, we provide places
as we can hardly hope to do in any other way for
all the best intuitions and discoveries of men. ) We escape
too the temptation, inherent in naturalism, to wash down
our highest values, our most mysterious other-worldly
1 Psalm Ixiii. i : Psalm Ixxiii. 22. 2 Cor. xii. 9.
9 Psalm odii. 5.
66 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
glimpses of the Perfect, to one dead level of 'Spirit in.
the making.' We achieve a universe in which the su-
preme spiritual virtue of humility can flourish. Under
such a scheme we can afford to accept the fullest affirma-
tions of naturalism, but not its negations; and by placing
these majestic affirmations within the more majestic land-
scape of Eternal Life, we can persuade science itself ta
deepen our awe, and make history and development the
channels of revelation of a God who transcends history
and development.
It is true that our contacts with this Reality, this God,
are primarily set up through history and through nature.
By means of things and events, we discover That which
lies beyond things and events: or, to use the language of
religion, God comes to us through natural means. But
the essence of the supernaturalist position is an insistence
that the discovery is not merely the discovery of this
world's deepened meaning: it is rather the discovery of
Something other than this world, and which alone makes
this world worth while. So in the wonderful passage in
which St. Augustine interrogates the natural order:
'I asked the earth, and that answered me: I am not it;
and whatsoever are in it made the same confession. I asked
the sea and the deeps, and the creeping things, and they
answered me: We are not thy God, seek above us. I asked
the fleeting winds, and the whole air with his inhabitants
answered me, That Anaximenes was deceived; I am not God.
I asked the heavens, the sun and moon and stars: Nor, say
they, are we the God whom thou seekest. And I replied unto
all these, which stand so round about these doors of my flesh:
Tell me concerning my God ; since you are not He, tell me
something of Him. And they cried out with a loud voice: "He
made us!" My question was my thought; and their answer
was their beauty.' 1
And if we ask the same question of history, and the
transcendent personalities emerging in it or of such
^Confessions, Bk. X, cap. 6.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL
examples of moral loveliness and non-utilitarian heroism
as have come within our own range the answer is the
same. They '. all point beyond the world ; and in their
beauty and self-immolation so far exceeding the natural
necessities of the case testify to that deeper Reality in
relation with which alone we can hope to develop the
true meaning, and capacity of human life. Of all these
we can surely say :
'As in God they must have their root if their values are
to survive, so in God they must find their consummation if
their promise is to be fulfilled. For nature, limited by natural-
ism, can find for them neither a beginning nor an end which,
is adequate to their true reality.' *
Why is it that we are so strangely moved when we
hear of such a life as that of Dr. Schweitzer, the brilliant
scholar who heard and obeyed a supernatural call ta
humble service in the African forests; or the amazing
career of Charles de Foucauld, the self-indulgent young,
aristocrat, called imperatively to a life and death of
lonely self-immolation in the Sahara? When we think
of these lives, against which common sense could say so-
much, most of us feel either a most poignant and admir-
ing envy, or else that interior discomfort which leads
us to turn as soon as we can to something else. Why
is this, unless it be that they point decisively beyond the
world, and rouse our latent sense of a supernatural call?
Do they not suggest to us that we may have made the
mistake of the unskilful psychoanalyst, accepted a merely^
natural interpretation of the assigned end of our human
striving, and so harmonized our own lives at too low a
level; leaving out just those objective realities towards
which the mystics orientate their lives, and so missing the
clue by which alone history can be understood?
1 A. Balfour: Theism and Thought, p. 32.
68 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Many will say that all this is in the nature of specula-
tion and specialism; and does not bear much on the reli-
gious philosophy and needs of the ordinary man. But I
do not think we can get rid of it quite so easily as that.
For if it be true, as the mystics insist, that we are thus
the creatures of a double order, of spirit and of sense
if the supernatural be unalterably present here and now,
reaching and being reached by us in and through the
visible world, setting up heroic standards, and making
heavenly claims then, this fact is true for all, though
doubtless in very different degrees. The call of the Ab-
solute is then heard in every invitation to sacrifice; and
its savour is discerned in all self-oblivious deeds. 'I was
a stranger, and ye took Me in: naked, and ye clothed Me.'
Therefore the truth or falsehood of our religious
constructions, from the simplest to the most complex,
must be measured by their ability to minister to this
double situation, and bring the supernatural life by nat-
ural channels to the soul. Our philosophy too is gravely
defective if it fails to include both orders, and we are
stunted and imperfect if we fail to respond to them;
for our full life must consist in a balanced relation, a
give-and-take, with both. It requires us to acknowledge
the push of indwelling Spirit working through develop-
ment, and urging all the many-graded efforts and self-
expressions of men; yet also, the moulding influence of a
transcendent and achieved Perfection the inciting cause
of all our deepest longings and most heroic activities.
We only begin to grow up from the animal to the truly
human, when forced to deal with visible facts, achieve-
ments, and difficulties outside ourselves; the things and
problems of a truly objective world. So too, as regards
that further stage of growth that truer and fuller rela-
tion to Reality to which the experiences of religion seem
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 69
to point us, we can only hope to emerge from the merely
individual into the fully and richly personal, in dealing
with, and receiving food and stimulus from, a really
existent spiritual environment truly other than ourselves.
The perpetual demands of pure religion for self-
annihilation, self-loss, which sound so arid and perverse
until we realize them as one half of a completed whole
surely these are simply demands for a recognition of
the truth, that God alone is the meaning, origin and
goal of human personality; and that any creed which
puts man and man's importance at its centre, is doomed
to shipwreck against the massively superhuman realities
of the spiritual world.
'This Object Uhcreate is so far beyond and above all created
being," says Berulle, 'that it is for us to lose ourselves and sink
ourselves in Him rather than know Him; and rather to become
His by His own secret operations than by means of our thoughts
and particular conceptions.' x
This demand for self-naughting is present in Christianity
side by side with the gentlest and most genial under-
standing of the weakness and unsteadiness of men. In
such annihilation rightly understood not loss of individual
character is contemplated, but rather the subjugation and
so the enhancement of its best elements; which grow and
shine the more, in all their variousness, by the mergence
of their deepest being in the living Source and Food of
personality. This involves a view of personality incom-
patible with any theory of the self as an enclosed monad ;
another point on which philosophers must take some
account of the witness of spiritual genius. For here we
are presented, within the frame of history, with the
spectacle of persons in whom this self-mergence and trans-
figuration has been accomplished; ami who show us, so
1 (Euvres, p. 1383.
70 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
far as man has yet achieved it, the result of the correct
relation of finite to Infinite Spirit. It is a result best
defined in the words of the New Testament: 'For God
hath not given us the spirit of fear ; but of power, and of
love, and of a sound mind'. 1 Not the terror-struck pa-
ralysis of the tiny creature confronted by the Holiness of
God; but a wonderful enhancement of each aspect of
its being, the filling up of its small capacities to the
brim:
'Each faculty tasked
To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was
asked.'
The active and heroic careers of the greatest among
the saints notoriously witness to this possible transforma-
tion of personality : to the fact that a deeply felt and trust-
ful correspondence with that which we call the Super-
natural Order is the condition under which we shall best
correspond with the natural order, and do the work it
demands. We may be sure that their best intuitions are
relative and sidelong glimpses of a Truth we cannot see
face to face, and the passion of love it inspires in them a
faint shadow of the energy of love which is ceaselessly
poured out upon the world; that nothing in fact which
they say or feel must ever be confused with ultimates.
Nevertheless, in their massive agreements, most of all in
the power over circumstances which they develop, their
unearthly self-forgetting charm, their transfiguring in-
fluence on other lives ; in all this, they convince us of their
own contact with immense spiritual realities. And these
realities, though our own consciousness seldom opens wide
enough to apprehend them, none the less ceaselessly con-
dition every detail of our own lives.
In an impressive passage Baron von Hugel has ob-
*2 Timothy i. 7.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 71
served that his long and deep studies had brought him
to feel, not that we can isolate as 'mystical' any one sort
of experience and awareness, but rather that all our acting
and thinking, however little we may ourselves perceive it,
is only fully explicable as determined by 'the actual influ-
ence of the actually present God'; as the unseen planet
Neptune, truly present, was the cause of those deflections
through which at last he was found. 1 This is a thought
which chimes well with that idea which Lord Balfour,
in his Theism and Thought, has called the concept of a
'guided universe'. 2 It may represent the line along which
Christian philosophy will best escape the Jtangles of
monism. ' The mystics, and those who share in lesser
degrees their special qualities, are then those who feel
and know more fully than any other type of mind the
truth suggested by these words. Such feeling and such
knowledge do and must fluctuate: for here intuition,
moves upon those 'coasts of peace' where the historically
conditioned creature touches the fringes of Eternity by
means of that most actual, yet undefined aura of aware-
ness, which extends beyond the sensory field. But those
who have known the mysterious wonder of that contact,
remembering our humble origin and half-animal status,
will be the last to be disconcerted at this. What matters
is, that the Eternal Fact apprehended does not fluctuate,
as our chain-like lives, now dim, now vivid, pass across it.
And as these lives, under the twofold influences of spirit-
ual food given from without and organic development
working from within, expand into greater realization of
their own meaning, more complete self-surrender to its
purposes so, and only so does the true human person-
ality grow up. Thus only can it escape the childishness,
pettiness and lack of direction so startlingly apparent in sa
1 The Mystical Element of Religion, and ed., vol. i, p. xxiL
8 Op. cit., p. 37 etc.
72 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
many adult lives, and exhibit all its latent possibilities.
Drawing strength from a source of power beyond itself,
and released from its pre-occupation with corporate or
individual self-interest and self-preservation, it then be-
comes a source of power in its turn.
Lord Balfour, in the book from which I have already
quoted, insists strongly on the double character of all our
knowledge and convictions about life; its evolutionary
and its transcendental sides. What he there says of
the distinction between the historical and the 'rational'
sources of such knowledges and beliefs, and the occasional
collisions between them, can be applied with even greater
appropriateness to the problem presented by man's
spiritual life: 1 for both strands are so plainly present
in it.
There is first the natural and historical strand, develop-
ing in and through the life of the race, and conditioned by
our past, and very largely too by our relation with our
.physical surroundings; the tendencies and outlooks we all
inherit. These tendencies and outlooks, as we cannot
doubt if we be theists, are themselves, in so far as they
be innocent, due to the guiding action of creative Spirit;
truly immanent in history and the processes of growth.
'Religion', says Troeltsch, 'with its common goal in the
unknown, has also a common ground in the Divine
Spirit, ever pressing the finite mind onward towards
further light and fuller consciousness a Spirit which
indwells our finite Spirit.' z Through and in history,
then, Reality does come to us. Therefore such manifesta-
tions of natural religion are not to be rejected by us,
even though they be inevitably mixed with outgrown
primitive elements, errors, and memories. Indeed, it is
in religion more than elsewhere that these primitive
1 Op. cit., p. 21 etc. * Christian Thought, p. 32.
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 73
characteristics of our inherited knowledge are seen most
plainly and sometimes painfully.
But over against this real though partial truth of
immanent Spirit and organic growth, is a whole realm
of belief and knowledge not to be accounted for in the
terms of naturalistic development. This realm of certi-
tude points beyond the world. It is concerned with ab-
solute values, and that abiding Perfection in which they
find their meaning and their end. Here that stream of
change which is the field of our 'natural' experience is
transfused and enveloped by the strange intuition of
Eternity 'in which nothing is fitting but all is at once
present, and out of which flows all that is past and to
come'. 1 This intuition does not emerge from within
man's natural experience, but rather breaks in on it from
another order; and does not invite him to be merely his
natural best, but something quite different. The mani-
festation, it is true, is given in and through history; for
otherwise we, immersed in history, could not conceivably
receive it. And it is given by means of great spiritual
personalities revealers, prophets, saints. But it is not
conditioned or limited by history. Revelation, grace,
given-ness, power, are its key-words : not merely evolution,
growth, self-expression, development. [In theological
language, God's movement towards man is in this regard
considered as the precedent cause of man's possible move-
ment towards God. And in the degree of his response to
this breaking-in of Spirit, this attraction, this grace, man
discovers himself to be a spiritual thing.
'Amavit Deus Comgilum
Bene, et ipse Dominum.'
That ancient couplet, which told the whole story of
a saint, tells also, in the language of our human nature,
1 St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk, XI, cap. n.
74 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
the most deeply felt relation between Supernature and
the soul. Surely we have here a conception within which
;all levels and degrees of genuine religion, from the most
naive to the most lofty, are at home; and which still
leaves room for more vivid apprehensions, more profound
relations, than any which man has yet attained. For
this conception looks beyond all theories of evolution or
development, as telling only half the truth. It points to
the direct influence and immense transfiguring possibilities
of God's free action; and rebukes the human tendency
to systematize the workings of His power within our
world, and impose on Him the limitations of our narrow
and shallow world consciousness. Thus it witnesses most
splendidly to the freedom, aliveness, and spontaneity of
God, the rich possibilities of His creative love, and the
inadequacy of all patterns, diagrams and theories by which
man, out of his tiny store of knowledge, seeks to interpret
the universe and forecast His dealings with the world.
Going back then once more to the question with which
we began what philosophy, what reading of Reality
is required by man's deepest experiences, and how are
we to conceive the relation of that Reality with our-
selves what must the answer be? Perhaps something
like this. Man's full relation with Reality, in so far
as we are able to apprehend it, can only be expressed
by a double formula and developed by means of a
idouble movement. For it means his ever fuller corres-
pondence both with Eternity and with time, and therewith
a widening out of human experience and responsibility
beyond the span of the 'natural'. It means the push of
indwelling Spirit working through development towards
an ever richer and more various inflorescence of life.
But ft also, and essentially, means the moulding influence
of a transcendent and achieved Perfection; the inciting
SUPERNATURAL AND THE NATURAL 75
cause of all man's deepest longings and most heroic
activities, the only source of all his keenest joys. In
religious language, this means both Revelation and His-
tory, both Grace, and Nature, both Prayer and Works.
It declares the fundamental religious truth, that the
complete redeeming of that which we call nature can
only be the work of Supernature. Thus, where it is.
actualized, this outlook completes and unspeakably en-
riches the great landscape which the human soul is able,
when fully awakened, to contemplate ; and brings into our
personal life a stimulating and humbling element. For
it means the eternalizing of all our small and homely
activities, placing them within ah environment which
gives them a dignity and a meaning beyond themselves;
and it also means the humble acceptance of the food of
Eternal Life in and through this-world conditions. It
means in the realm of religion the sheer flight of the soul .
to God, its supernatural joy, home and end ; and yet
also the meek and patient discovery and service of that,
very God in natural and homely ways. Thus is our.
apparently aimless life of succession redeemed by relating
it with eternal facts; and, as in Herbert's poem, the
swept room and the action of the sweeper are both alike
'made fine'.
CHAPTER IV
THE SUPERNATURAL SELF-GIVEN IN
PROCESS : HISTORY AND ETERNITY
La lumiere s'abaisse du plus haut des cieux jusqu'au plus
has de la terre mais sans s'aviler; elle penetre tout mais sans
s'infecter; elle s'unit a tout et s'incorpore a tout, mais sans
se meler; le purete, la simplicite, la nettete et la dignite de son
etre etant telles que dans ces conditions corporelles elle a les
conditions spirituelles et ne regoit aucun interet et variete en
soi-meme par la variete des choses ou elle est unie.
PIERRE DE BERULLE
The universal law of history consists precisely in this, that
the Divine Reason, or the Divine Life within history, constantly
manifests itself in always-new and always-peculiar individuali-
zations and hence that its tendency is not towards unity or
universality at all, but rather towards the fulfilment of the
highest potentialities of each separate department of life.
ERNST TROELTSCH
TF we allow that, at least for our human ways of
*- thinking, there are two levels of reality, two dis-
tinct worlds ; then it surely falls jwithin the province of
religion to discover those ways and degrees in which the
'supernatural' world that bathes and supports us, and
which is its special subject-matter, is revealed to human
consciousness and enters into relation with men. Although
it is from the mystics that we get the most vivid and
personal accounts of such experienced relationship, we
cannot limit the workings of the Transcendent in human
life to their special contacts with God. It is essential
if only as a check on subjectivism that the special
76
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 77
experience and declarations of these individuals be sup-
ported and corrected by some more general conception,
and some .more general intimations: that we should be
able to think of '{hem as somehow deeply connected with,
and even supported by, the common life of average men.
The spiritual peaks, however great the distance that
separates them from the ordinary level, and however
strange, remote and lonely they may seem, must still rise
from the earth and form part of it. They must not
hang like cloud mountains in the air.
This seems to mean that man's total experience from
within Nature of the Reality which is other than Nature,
must be an experience of which some corporate history,
tradition and practice on the one hand, and yet some
secret personal communion on the other hand, must each
form part; but never the whole part. It must have, like
other sorts of life, a growing and sensible body as well
as a living soul; an organic as well as a pneumatic side.
Religion therefore needs not only those individuals who
are capable of Isaiah's apprehension and self-oblation, or
St. Paul's energetic love: persons able to ask in its fullest
sense the mighty question of St. Francis, or formulate the
answer of St. Ignatius. It needs also an articulated
society, and a theory of existence, from within which
such individuals can emerge as specialists and not as
freaks; and which can therefore support, guarantee, and
be enriched by their experience. In spite of the supposed
antithesis between organized and personal religion, the
supernatural life in man requires for its fullest existence
and its richest unfolding both a general and a particular
apprehension.
To speak for a moment the language of theology,
'natural religion' alone cannot give a complete account of
our knowledge of God. It is too general, vague and
78 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
dim. Yet 'revealed religion* alone loses its credentials,
unless the special vivid insights and experiences of the
historic Revealer be supported by the general fact of
that everywhere possible if limited apprehension of God,
which is the substance of 'natural' religion. And again,
the intense and largely incommunicable certitudes of
personal religion as seen in the saint and the mystic, re-
quire -if we are indeed to accept them as guides to
Reality the support of some general contributory con-
sciousness; some concrete appearance, and embodiment
in history, of those truths which the soul apprehends in the
deep silence of contemplative prayer. These three theolo-
gies natural, historical, mystical are at bottom but the
partial and oblique demonstrations within our little
human sphere of the same august and superhuman Truth.
Perhaps they are best thought of by us as the graded
self-givings of that one living and eternal Spirit, Who
is Light and in Whom is no darkness at all, in, through,
and for our finite spirits; fragments from the richness
of an infinite store, adapted to our limited human capaci-
ties and needs. Man receives authoritative news of the
spiritual world through more than one channel, and
must react to that world in more than one way, if he is
not to cramp his soul.
We may even extend the field within which these
intimations of the supernatural can operate, beyond the
rich nucleus which we call 'religion'. It is reasonable
and often useful, though it may not be adequate, to
regard the unearthly passion of the religious genius as a
response at a special level, and in a special way, to the
same ultimate attraction as that which is felt in another
manner by the philosopher and the artist. All three
witness to the refusal of the fully awakened human
spirit to be satisfied by a physical environment and an
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 79
animal life; or identify reality with the time-series that
conditions us.
'The approach to God,' says Professor Alexander, 'may
be made in various ways: through the phenomena of nature,
through the pursuit of truth, through art, or through morality.
Being one function of human nature, the religious sentiment
does not exist in isolation from the rest, but is blended and
interwoven with them; and all our experiences may in their
various degrees be schoolmasters to teach us the reality of
God.' *
The mediaeval story of the monk who wandered from
his cloister into the heart of the forest, enticed by the
song of an invisible bird, and listened to that music
in an ecstacy which lasted for a hundred years, is the
spiritual biography of many an artist and philosopher
as well as of the saint. Each is struggling to convey
to us, often without an adequate vocabulary, some idea
of the insistent hints and glimpses he is receiving of a
Reality wholly other than ourselves: the timeless P atria
in which or Whom we live and move and are. The
artist reaches out towards this Ultimate through the
senses; the philosopher through the intellect; the mystic
in another manner. But all three are seeking under
symbols a metaphysical satisfaction: the 'only substance
of That which Is'. All three bring us in the end to
the profound human rejection of a universe of mere
succession. To say this is not to discredit the claim of
experimental religion to a more complete and valid
knowledge than can be reached by any other path : for
it is only the great religious revealer who has yet been
able to give us an experienced principle of stability in
which the human soul can fully rest, and to link this
abiding reality securely with the world of change.
Perhaps at this stage we shall better understand the
1 S. Alexander: Space, Time, and Deity, vol. ii. p. 402.
8o MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
general reference and underlying implication of art,
philosophy, and religion if we consider the special case
of that which we call Romance.
Romance is the heightened significance, the glow, the
'otherness', with which human beings tend to endow
the plain narrative of human life. To explain away
Romance by attributing it to a naive preference for
'2d. coloured' rather than 'Id. plain' is to beg one of the
deepest questions raised by existence. For why, after all,
does the human self like indeed, long for this kind
of colour, unless it appeals to an appetite which nothing
in the untouched natural order can satisfy? These
naive efforts to transfigure the time-world are like the
first adventures of a child with a paint-box ; crude in-
timations of the emerging passion for beauty. They
have no practical value. They help neither the preserva-
tion of the individual nor the propagation of- the race.
They are entirely incompatible with all that we mean
by 'animal' life; we need go no further than the Book of
Tobit or the Odyssey to discover that man cannot be
described in animal terms alone. The tendency to roman-
ticize history is at bottom the tendency to supernaturalize
it; to make it the vehicle of transcendental feeling, to
achieve at least a diminished ecstacy, some contact with
the Ultimate, by means of the series of changing events.
For Romance is history which is suffused by eternity ; J '
and is thus a witness to that more perfect synthesis of
Changeful and Unchanging which is the essence of
religion. If religion requires ontology to give it mean-
ing, Romance requires ontology too. Almost any of its
characteristic products is enough to assure us of this.
'Right so departed Galahad, Percivale and Bors with him;
and so they rode three days, and then they came to a rivage,
and found the ship whereof the tale speaketh of tofore. And
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 81
when they came to the board they found in the middes the
table of silver which they had left with the maimed king, and
the Sangreal which was covered with red samite. Then were
they glad to, have such things in their fellowship; and so they
entered and made great reverence thereto; and Galahad fell
in his prayer long time to Our Lord, that at what time he
asked, that he should pass out of this world. So much he
prayed till a voice said to him: Galahad, thou shalt have thy
request; and when thou askest the death of thy body thou shalt
have it, and then shalt thou find the life of the soul. Percivale
heard this, and prayed him, of fellowship that was between
them, to tell him wherefore he asked such things. That shall
I tell you, said Galahad; the other day when we saw a part
of the adventures of the Sangreal I was in such a joy of heart,
that I trow never man was -that was earthly. And therefore
I wot well, when my body is dead my soul shall be in great
joy to see the Blessed Trinity every day, and the Majesty of
Our Lord, Jesus Christ. So long were they in the ship that
they said to Galahad: Sir, in this bed ought ye to lie, for so
saith the scripture. And so he laid him down and slept a
great while; and when he awaked he looked afore him and
saw the city of Sarras.' 1
I have chosen this passage because we see in it certain
well marked characters of great romantic literature,
which bear out the view that we have in such literature
a real product of the transcendental sense. Sensitive
readers always notice in it a curious sense of slowing-
down, the partial replacement of succession by duration;
hints of a neighbouring deep stillness, the yet veiled pres-
ence of another kind of life. We can find these qualities
conveyed in the free working of the creative imagination,
as in La Belle Dame Sans Merci : or even, in a less extent
and at a lower level, in some of the early plays of
Maeterlinck. We also find them operating along that
dangerous strip of country where fact and fact-like legend
meet. Take, for instance, the story of another journey,
where we surely recognize in a sublimated form tHe
amalgam of romantic narrative and spiritual truth.
'When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the
star which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came
1 Malory: Le Morte Darthur, Part IV, Bk. XVII, cap. ax.
82 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
and stood over where the young child was. When they saw
the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. And when
they were come into the house, they saw the young child with
Mary his Mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and
when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him
gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.
The Bible of course provides us with some of the
greatest examples of this romantic transfiguration of
events; and much of its rich meaning is lost to those
who refuse to apply this method of interpretation, and
acknowledge the part played by it. But safer instances
may be found in abundance in mediaeval literature; and
supremely in such a work as the Little Flowers of St.
"Francis of Assist.
'St Francis being much weakened in body through his sharp
abstinence, and through the assaults of the devil, and desiring
to comfort the body with the spiritual food of the soul, began
to think on the immeasurable glory and joy of the blessed in
the life eternal; and therewithal began to pray God to grant
him the grace of tasting a little of that joy. And as he con-
tinued in his thought, suddenly there appeared unto him an
Angel with exceeding great splendour, having a viol in his
left hand and in his right the bow; and as Saint Francis stood
all amazed at the sight of him, the Angel drew the bow once
across the viol; and straightway Saint Francis was ware of
such sweet melody that his soul melted away for very sweetness
and was lifted up above all bodily feeling; insomuch that, as
he afterwards told his companions, he doubted that, if the
Angel had drawn the bow a second time across the strings,
his mind would have left his body for the all too utter sweetness
thereof.' 3
Such transfigurations of the actual, such penetrations
of a described series of moments by a rapture, awe, mys-
tery and loveliness which seem to belong to another
order than this, come, says one of the most profound
literary critics of our day, from 'the transcendental
element in human nature . . . the shadowy Companion,
1 Matthew ii. 9-11.
*The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assist. 'Of the second reflec-
tion on the most holy Stigmata.'
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 83
the invisible attendant who walks all the way beside
us, though his feet are in the Other World'. 1 Here
the 'programme music* of narrative literature is shot
through by the 'absolute music* of spiritual literature;
and, in consequence, some little hint of all that lies beyond
us filters in.
God, said Brother Giles of Assisi, is like a great moun-
tain of corn; and even the greatest of the saints is only
a sparrow, picking up a grain here and there. Other
birds too bring their grain from that mountain, and wit-
ness in their own manner to its richness and reality: the
mysterious overplus of Being, beyond the conceptual range
of our various but limited minds. Thus we need not
despise even the contributions of the torn-tit, or refuse to
admit them to the total of our knowledge of the super-
natural world: for 'every good gift and every perfect
gift* partakes of the Ultimate and 'comes down from the
Father of lights'. 2 We are obliged to think of man's
access to the Infinite in these clumsy ways, to alternate
between personal and impersonal, concrete and fluid im-
age, because of our conceptual limitations. But however
we think of it, we shall never escape the fact that in so
far as God is known at all, He is necessarily only known
because and in so far as He is experienced. And this
experience is not as realized by us through the shifting
veils of creation simple, uniform, and absolute. It is
subtle, many-levelled, various and approximate; and at
the best inevitably incomplete. We climb to reality by
a rope of many strands, each giving strength to the rest.
Our total experience of the Supernatural, then, is both
corporate and individual; both historical and metaphysi-
cal. It is sensual, intellectual and spiritual. It requires
the explication within societies of truths which have first
. l Arthur Machen: Hieroglyphics, p. 118.
James i. 17.
80 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
general reference and underlying implication of art,
philosophy, and religion if we consider the special case
of that which we call Romance.
Romance is the heightened significance, the glow, the
'otherness', with which human beings tend to endow
the plain narrative of human life. To explain away
Romance by attributing it to a naive preference for
'2d. coloured' rather than 'Id. plain* is to beg one of the
deepest questions raised by existence. For why, after all,
does the human self like indeed, long for this kind
of colour, unless it appeals to an appetite which nothing
in the untouched natural order can satisfy? These
naive efforts to transfigure the time-world are like the
first adventures of a child with a paint-box; crude in-
timations of the emerging passion for beauty. They
have no practical value. They help neither the preserva-
tion of the individual nor the propagation of the race.
They are entirely incompatible with all that we mean
by 'animal' life; we need go no further than the Book of
Tobit or the Odyssey to discover that man cannot be
described in animal terms alone. The tendency to roman-
ticize history is at bottom the tendency to supernaturalize
it; to make it the vehicle of transcendental feeling, to
achieve at least a diminished ecstacy, some contact with
the Ultimate, by means of the series of changing events.
For Romance is history which is suffused by eternity ; J '
and is thus a witness to that more perfect synthesis of
Changeful and Unchanging which is the essence of
religion. If religion requires ontology to give it mean-
ing, Romance requires ontology too. Almost any of its
characteristic products is enough to assure us of this.
'Right so departed Galahad, Percivale and Bors with him;
and so they rode three days, and then they came to a rivage,
and found the ship whereof the tale speaketh of tofore. And
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 81
when they came to the board they found in the middes the
table of silver which they had left with the maimed king, and
the Sangreal which was covered with red samite. Then were
they glad to have such things in their fellowship ; and so they
entered and made great reverence thereto; and Galahad fell
in his prayer long time to Our Lord, that at what time he
asked, that he should pass out of this world. So much he
prayed till a voice said to him: Galahad, thou shalt have thy
request; and when thou askest the death of thy body thou shalt
have it, and then shalt thou find the life of the soul. Percivale
heard this, and prayed him, of fellowship that was between
them, to tell him wherefore he asked such things. That shall
I tell you, said Galahad; the other day when we saw a part
of the adventures of the Sangreal I was in such a joy of heart,
that I trow never man was that was earthly. And therefore
I wot well, when my body is dead my soul shall be in great
joy to see the Blessed Trinity every day, and the Majesty of
Our Lord, Jesus Christ. So long were they in the ship that
they said to Galahad: Sir, in this bed ought ye to lie, for so
saith the scripture. And so he laid him down and slept a
great while; and when he awaked he looked afore him and
saw the city of Sarras.' 1
I have chosen this passage because we see in it certain
well marked characters of great romantic literature,
which bear out the view that we have in such literature
a real product of the transcendental sense. Sensitive
readers always notice in it a curious sense of slowing-
down, the partial replacement of succession by duration;
hints of a neighbouring deep stillness, the yet veiled pres-
ence of another kind of life. We can find these qualities
conveyed in the free working of the creative imagination,
as in La Belle Dame Sans Merci : or even, in a less extent
and at a lower level, in some of the early plays of
Maeterlinck. We also find them operating along that
dangerous strip of country where fact and fact-like legend
meet. Take, for instance, the story of another journey,
where we surely recognize in a sublimated form tlie
amalgam of romantic narrative and spiritual truth.
*When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the
star which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came
1 Malory: Le Morte Darthur, Part IV, Bk. XVII, cap. ax.
82 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
and stood over where the young child was. When they saw
the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. And when
they were come into the house, they saw the young child with
Mary his Mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and
when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him
gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.'*
The Bible of course provides us with some of the
greatest examples of this romantic transfiguration! of
events; and much of its rich meaning is lost to those
who refuse to apply this method of interpretation, and
acknowledge the part played by it. But safer instances
may be found in abundance in mediaeval literature; and
supremely in such a work as the Little Flowers of St.
Francis of Assist.
'St. Francis being much weakened in body through his sharp
abstinence, and through the assaults of the devil, and desiring
to comfort the body with the spiritual food of the soul, began
to think on the immeasurable glory and joy of the blessed in
the life eternal; and therewithal began to pray God to grant
him the grace of tasting a little of that joy. And as he con-
tinued in his thought, suddenly there appeared unto him an
Angel with exceeding great splendour, having a viol in his
left hand and in his right the bow ; and as Saint Francis stood
all amazed at the sight of him, the Angel drew the bow once
across the viol; and straightway Saint Francis was ware of
such sweet melody that his soul melted away for very sweetness
and was lifted up above all bodily feeling; insomuch that, as
he afterwards told his companions, he doubted that, if the
Angel had drawn the bow a second time across the strings,
his mind would have left his body for the all too utter sweetness
thereof.' a
Such transfigurations of the actual, such penetrations
of a described series of moments by a rapture, awe, mys-
tery and loveliness which seem to belong to another
order than this, come, says one of the most profound
literary critics of our day, from 'the transcendental
element in human nature . . . the shadowy Companion,
1 Matthew ii. 9-11.
f a The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assist. 'Of the second reflec-
tion on the most holy Stigmata.'
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 83
the invisible attendant who walks all the way beside
us, though his feet are in the Other World'. 1 Here
the 'programme music* of narrative literature is shot
through by the 'absolute music* of spiritual literature;
and, in consequence, some little hint of all that lies beyond
us filters in.
God, said Brother Giles of Assisi, is like a great moun-
tain of corn; and even the greatest of the saints is only
a sparrow, picking up a grain here and there. Other
birds too bring their grain from that mountain, and wit-
ness in their own manner to its richness and reality: the
mysterious overplus of Being, beyond the conceptual range
of our various but limited minds. Thus we need not
despise even the contributions of the torn-tit, or refuse to
admit them to the total of our knowledge of the super-
natural world: for 'every good gift and every perfect
gift* partakes of the Ultimate and 'comes down from the
Father of lights'. 2 We are obliged to think of man's
access to the Infinite in these clumsy ways, to alternate
between personal and impersonal, concrete and fluid im-
age, because of our conceptual limitations. But however
we think of it, we shall never escape the fact that in so
far as God is known at all, He is necessarily only known
because and in so far as He is experienced. And this
experience is not as realized by us through the shifting
veils of creation simple, uniform, and absolute. It is
subtle, many-levelled, various and approximate; and at
the best inevitably incomplete. We climb to reality by
a rope of many strands, each giving strength to the rest.
Our total experience of the Supernatural, then, is both
corporate and individual; both historical and metaphysi-
cal. It is sensual, intellectual and spiritual. It requires
the explication within societies of truths which have first
1 Arthur Machen: Hieroglyphics, p. 118.
James i. 17.
84 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
been apprehended by the special powers of individual
souls; and the sharpened realization and representation
by those special individuals of the general certitude latent
in the crowd. It requires a race with ears to hear; and
also individuals of musical genius who can select and
adapt to the scale of humanity strains from that torrent
of melody which is, in its wholeness, so far in excess of
our span. Christianity, at once so historical yet philo-
sophical, so personal yet institutional, so practical yet
mystical, admirably demonstrates this.
All this means that, so far as man in his religion is
reaching out towards the meaning of the universe, and
towards a Something Other which expresses itself to
him through that universe, then we may expect that
he must explore more than one channel of revelation.
Therefore the opposition which is often set up between
these various channels of revelation is artificial, and
destructive of the true balance of his spiritual life.
Nevertheless man, thus receiving in more than one way
intimations of that Reality which yet is One, finds, di-
rectly he tries to reduce his intuitions and experiences
to order, that some division and classification is forced
upon him. And we, who are now trying on a small
scale to discover the character of human relation to
the Infinite, must also divide before we seek to unite.
Especially four ways among the many in which the
human creature experiences the fact of God, and God
is self-disclosed to men, stand out before us.
First, in History we find the Supernatural penetrating
Process and revealed through it.
"V
Next, in Incarnation and, depending from this, in
the fact of sanctity we find the Supernatural penetrat-
ing Personality and revealed through it.
Thirdly, in Sacraments and Symbols we find the
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 85
Supernatural penetrating created Things, and reveale<|
to the soul through the channels of sense.
Last, in Prayer we find the Supernatural in immediate
contact with created spirit; self-revealed and self-active
within the Individual Soul.
Each of these four great ways of access to God has
often been embraced and explored in isolation; and ex-
alted at the expense of the rest. The sacramental and
the spiritual, the historical and mystical, the immanental
and the incarnational strands of the religious complex,
have been forcibly separated and placed in a false oppo-
sition. To treat them thus is to lose all hope of under-
standing them, for each one is only truly explained
through the others, and no one of them has meaning
alone; and if in this book these four ways of approach
are studied in succession, it is only in the hope of uniting
them at last in a stable synthesis.
In such a study History must inevitably come first;
since all these methods of contact between Infinite and
finite are experienced and developed by growing and
evolving creatures who form part of a historic process,
are themselves incidents in the slow unfolding of the
tale of organic life. Indeed it is easy but probably
far too easy to be accurate to think of the relation
between history and Eternity as the relation between
a tale and the Teller of the tale. So now we go on to
consider the way in which through History the unchang-
ing Object of religion finds and is found by men; and
the human beings borne upon the surface of one tiny
cooling planet in the truest sense 'inheritors of a dying
world' meet and lay hold of a Reality to which they
can give the names of Infinite, Perfect and Eternal One.
Human life, indeed all created life, appears to us as
existing in Time and conditioned by Time. It is sue-
36 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
essive: and so deeply coloured is all our thinking by
succession, that the strangeness of this fact is not noticed
by any but philosophic minds. Yet it may seem very
strange to the angels that our life and thought consist
in a ceaseless chain of mental and physical events. We
cannot stop; and such identity as we possess must be an
identity which endures by and through continual change.
The words which cluster round the concept of life
evolution, development, growth, variation, birth, matur-
ity, decay, death all carry with them and develop this
sense of mutability, of flux. Even the deep stillness ex-
perienced in contemplation does not constitute a true
escape from the time-series; but seems to be tranquil only
ty contrast with the more feverish pace of our normal
thought. Whilst it appears to be, and indeed may be,
tasting Eternity, it remains conditioned by history and
subject to time. 'Whether in the body, or out of the
tody, I cannot tell,' said St. Paul of his own ecstacy;
and that is the puzzle which haunts all the higher
ranges of the devotional life. But we know by the felt
contrast between our enslavement by succession and our
incurable thirst for the Abiding, that the world of change
alone cannot use or satisfy all the capacities of man.
Now religion, we have said, seems to us to begin in
this intuition of the Abiding; in this metaphysical thirst^
this dim yet real craving for ultimates. And this craving,;
if we look at its essence and not at its imperfect expres-
sions, already involves an implicit apprehension? even a
cloudy intimate knowledge of that which we agreed to
call supernatural reality: a Perfection transcending time.
It is always turned in desire, in terror, or in adoration to
a world that is other than this: a world in which succes-
sion has no place.
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 87
.'"I see Thee without beginning or midst or end!" exclaims
Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.'*
'Is alone,' says Plato, 'may properly be attributed to the
Eternal Essence.' 2
'That alone is truly real which abides unchanged', says
his pupil St. Augustine; describing, after nine unresting
years of active Christian life, the essential character of
his quest for God. 8
In such words as these we have, not merely a special
conclusion of philosophy, but a deep conviction renewed
again and again in all great spiritual souls: in Socrates
and Plotinus ; in Gautama and Mohamed ; in the Psalm-
ists and Prophets; above all, and in most exquisite ten-
derness of expression, in the Synoptic Christ. All these
souls invariably and instinctively look to and adore, not
some future possibility, some not-yet-finished idea of Holi-^/
ness; but an already existing Perfection. This abides
unchanged ; but the relation of the plastic and historically
conditioned soul ceaselessly changes. In the movement of
St. Augustine's life and feeling through many phases of
sensual and intellectual desire and satisfaction, yet never
outside the field of influence of that steadfast One, 'fixed
yet incomprehensible ; unchangeable yet changing alF *
we see exhibited the true relation of Historic to Eternal
Life:
'The difference within affinity between two, the deepest and
most real of all realities really known to us; our finite dura-
tional spirit and the infinite eternal Spirit, God.' 5
This cloudy knowledge of Eternal Life develops on.
man's side through a series of experiments, and by a
*Bhagavad Gita, XI. 16, 19. *Tim<stis t
* Supra, cap. i, p. 18 * Supra, cap. ii, p. 23.
F. yon Hugel: Eternal Life, p. 3.
88 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
method of trial and error; destined to establish at least
some partial truth about its nature, the relation which
is possible between it and mankind. We have seen that
at first he tends to incorporate it in those aspects of the
physical that he does not understand; and only with
deepening knowledge, and by the help of great revealing
personalities, gradually learns to conceive it in terms
which transcend his own immediate sensations and needs.
Even so, he drags with him in his ascent plenty of furni-
ture from his religious past, and adapts it with surprising
skill to the 'more stately mansions of his soul' ; thus laying
himself open at every stage to the various charges of
conservatism, superstition, and syncretism which formal
religion always has to meet.
So plain is all this, and so profoundly is religion as we
know it coloured by the historical process through which
it has passed, that many sympathetic students are unable
to see in it more than an immanental unfolding within
the time-stream of the spiritual consciousness of man; an
extension of his natural evolution, conforming to natural
law. The current view of Old Testament history,
tracking out the unfolding of the Hebrew religious con-
sciousness from its first crude intuitions to the heights of
prophetic inspiration in Ezekiel and Isaiah, encourages
this simplification; and harmonizes well with the general
outlook which is supposed by the unscientific to be charac-
teristic of natural science. Thus one of the best exponents
of Christian Modernism has said that: 'The essence of
religion, of the Christian religion as of others, is Spirit
working from within, not imposed from without'; 1 and
proceeds on this basis to develop the well-known but
deceptive antithesis between the religion of 'authority
-and institutions representing merely the conservation
1 Percy Gardner: Modernism in the English Church, p. 89.
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 89
of outgrown ' forms and that personal religion of ex-
perience and spirit in which all the seeds of progress
must be sought.
But this attractive simplification already comes into
conflict not only with the observed facts of religion,
but also with the philosophy of history in its richest
and deepest developments. For surely the differentia
of history, that which marks it off from, the general
process of organic nature which we see round us, is
exactly the breaking-in which we observe in it of some-
thing other than natural causation; and the difficulty
r
of understanding it comes from this apparent breach of
continuity, the resulting action and reaction of unique
personalities and events. When event and process reach
the human level and thus become history, they always
begin to exhibit peculiarities which point beyond them-
selves. Naturalism here ceases to be adequate as an ex-
planation of the observed process of life. Historic
religions, when we come to understand them, are the
supreme examples of this interweaving of the entirely
natural with something utterly beyond the natural; and
^Christianity is the most truly historical of all religions
because, whilst giving fullest value to all the acts and
experiences of human life, it yet insists that this human
life alone is not enough to exhibit the purposes of God.
Christianity neither flees from the world, nor capitu-
lates to the world. The double strand of which all
history is woven tradition and novelty is present in
it; and it is the vivid sense of this 'something more',
the breaking-in of the Transcendent upon the temporal
series, which Christian Apocalyptic is trying under its.
peculiar symbolism to express. In Christ's own teaching,
the immanental parable of the mustard seed cannot tell
all the truth about the Kingdom of God. 'Behold! the:
go MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Bridegroom cometh* tells us more. So too in the
Johannine vision, the pure river of the Water of Life
flows out of the very heart of the Supernatural for the
healing of the nations of the earth; and the New Jeru-
salem is not the result of even the most enlightened town-
planning, but 'descends out of heaven from God'. 1
But the Apocalyptic principle is not confined to re-
ligion. Secular history too shows us again and again
sanctions and imperatives, which we cannot class as
natural, emerging and exercising a determining influence
on human affairs. It shows us the face of the world
and the destiny of nations sharply changed by the action
of minds and wills that moved to and fro between
natural and supernatural regard; or obeyed an insistent
push that seemed entirely unrelated to the practical needs
and advantages of men. Again and again it suggests
that the life of man only exhibits its full meaning, its
specific character, in so far as some degree of this two-
foldness appears in him ; that he must partake of Eternity
as well as of time. History shows us successive events
contributing to the creation of heroic personality; and
the building-up of rich characters who seem to exceed
what nature could either produce or require, as St. Joan
of Arc transcends the political scene which conditioned
her career. It shows us great and daring thinkers emerg-
ing within an uncomprehending and often censorious
society and making gifts to it; patient scientists who
reap no personal advantage from the corner of the
universe which they unveil ; great men of action behaving
from within history upon heroic levels, and thus witness-
ing to attractions and obligations beyond the level of the
natural world. Plato and Marcus Aurelius Pasteur and
Darwin Lincoln and Livingstone all these manifest;
1 Rer. xxii. xa; xxi, xo.
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 91
within history the supernatural life. It shows us too
man's fever of creation harnessed to the service of music
and of plastic art. It shows us great ideas incarnated in
groups of men and in institutions ; and enduring, when the
groups and institutions degenerate and die.
History gets its real character from the often abrupt
and inexplicable appearance of such particular individuals
and unique actions and events : persons, actions, and events
which contribute to no utilitarian purpose, and seem to
require for their explanation something other than the
orderly unpacking of the world's portmanteau. It lies
before us like some closely woven fabric, in which .every
now and again, in defiance of the apparent pattern, there
comes a tiny golden thread some single perfect act
never to be repeated, some single perfect work of art.
More rarely, the texture is abruptly broken for the emer-
gence of a wonderful gold flower: a sudden burst of
beauty, heroism, or vision, involving many devoted lives.
These separate inspired moments of beautiful or heroic
action, these great flowerings of faith, sacrifice, or art,
give the little race of men their chief means of guessing
the existence of the 'secret and inviolate Rose'.
We only begin to understand history, as distinct
from biology, when we look at these, its noblest prod-
ucts; in which something of the non-successive, the
Eternal, is embodied and revealed. Then we perceive
it to use another, still imperfect image as a process
which meanders along the borderland between the animal
and spiritual realms; sometimes making a sudden surge
into free supernature, sometimes falling back into mere
nature, often exhibiting together in bewildering conjunc-
tion the characters of both worlds. History shows us
a succession which is naturally conditioned, and yet* is
ever open to invasion from another order ; a scene within
to
92 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
which Personality that more than natural thing- first
emerges and becomes regnant.
When we try to see all this as a whole, it is too intri-
cate for us. The woven fabric is like one of those
verdures which hung below the tapestry pictures in a
mediaeval hall. As we look at it, we seem to be gazing
into a jungle that thrills with life; life which emerges
at every level, from weed to tree and from brute to angel,
and is set at every pace. All there seems interdependent,
yet all is not of equal significance and worth; and,
gazing with a more concentrated attention, we gradually
learn to distinguish those strands in history which most
clearly manifest the presence of Eternal Life. In the
solemn beauty of the death of Socrates, and far off. in
time though very near in spirit in the unhesitating, quiet
sacrifice of Captain Oates; in the half-mystical fervour
and heroic endurance of the first navigators, and in the
same non-utilitarian passion driving men to suffer for
the conquest of Mount Everest, we see the call of the
Supernatural, variously interpreted and variously obeyed
by men standing right away from a self-interested world.
Again, the age-long influence of a great political
vision arising within an individual mind, as in Caesar
or Justinian; the great secular benefits and civilizing
changes within the world, which trace their origin from
St. Benedict's refusal of that same world; the romantic
impulse to adventure which lay behind the first Crusade
or the voyage of Columbus, and the immense results
which flowed from these defiances of the self-preserving
instinct of man: all these, in their different ways, are
examples of the free emergence of novelty into history
through the gateway of human character. They are
genuine creations and movements of the life process;
yet have in them something, some quality or incentive,
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 93
that seems to enter from beyond the evolutionary scheme.
Nor is the guiding presence of the Supernatural seen
only in the emergence of great personalities. In the
history of the Hebrew nation so intractable to natural-
istic explanation in its mysterious mingling of political
disaster and spiritual growth, its bit by bit discovery of
God, its deepening sense of the supernatural preparing
and culminating in the appearance of Christ we seem to
see a special self -giving of the Universal by means of a
particular series a true historic embodiment of Eternal
Life. And summing up all this we may surely say, that
whenever historic process is found thus to embody absolute
value whether in great personalities or in the great
transfiguration of events it witnesses decisively to those
truths about the universe which the doctrine of super-
nature requires. Our instinctive grouping of history into
epochs, our distinction of 'great periods' and significant
moments, our description of its great figures as heroes,
leaders, prophets, enlighteners of other men, are implicit
acknowledgements of this. They point to a dualism even
here, in the very arena of practical life ; and warn us that
the strange complex, the unresting process within which
we seem to be captive, has its hidden aspect -is, as it were,
a dough within which some penetrating leaven is at work.
II
TF this means that history cannot be reduced to mere
* process, but is a field in which transcendent as well as
natural forces are truly active, it also means that religion
-as the greatest of all embodiments of this Trans-
cendent- does and must itself form a strand in history,
and have its historic aspect; even though its objective
lies beyond Time. Understood in its fullness, religion
94 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
must amount to an explanation of history. Though in
its inmost nature it is a response to, and even a discovery
of, the Unlimited and Unchanging; yet this discovery
it makes and must always make from within the limited
world of succession and change, and largely by use of
material found within the physical field. Full religion
cannot rest in the abstract; nor is it adequately conceived
as 'what the individual does with his own solitariness'. 1
It requires revealers, bridge-builders, men firmly .planted
in history who are yet aware of the Light bathing all
history: Gautama and Socrates, Moses and Amos, Paul
and Plotinus, and many more.
Here religion recapitulates, at its own level and with
peculiar clearness, that double process that interweav-
ing of temporal and eternal realities which gives to
history its special character and to our human life all
its entrancing interest and touching beauty. To the
queer human creature, compounded of sense and spirit,
so apparently immersed in and adapted to things, and
yet so persistently haunted by the sense of a Reality other
than things the experience of mystery, which afterwards
grew into the experience of God, could only come mixed
with and conditioned by things and events. Thus in
its origin religion was not, and could not be, a 'pure*
experience; nor has it ever since become a 'pure* exper-^
ience. And just where it has been most effective and
most profound, there have its human limitations been
most clearly and humbly felt.
Str John of the Cross, at the end of one of his great
mystical poems, exclaims suddenly 'How delicately Thou
teachest love to me!' Perhaps if we realized more fully
all that is implied in this utterance of one of the greatest
of the contemplative saints, so wide and deep in his ex-
1 A. N. Whitehead: Religion in the Making, p. 16.
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 95
perience of tKe realities of the spiritual world, we should
not be quite so hurried and full of assurance in con-
structing our clumsy diagrams of the delicate and subtle
processes of God; so rigid in our exclusions, so horribly
crude in our conceptions and demands. Perhaps this
saying might even give us the beginning of a vision of
God, as a Presence of unchanging Love and Beauty;
teaching the, race through history, and each soul through
and within those faculties which have been evolved from
our animal past. It might persuade us that a supercilious
contempt of history and the time-process, an effort to
achieve the Eternal by the mere rejection of the temporal,
is hostile to the truest and richest theism. Such a lofty
refusal of the common experience, such an attempt to
get out of our own skins and elude the discipline of our
humbling limitations, merely defeats its own end. Rather
the faithful acceptance of history, a genial sharing in
the experience of the race, is required of an incarnational
religion: a full use of, and entrance into, that general
scene within which the Eternal penetrates time, and the
little creature of time can ascend to consciousness of the
Eternal. Thus the right attitude of religion towards
history is that of complete and humble acceptance, not
rejection. Indeed, all the greatest supernatural exper-
iences of men are found when we investigate them, to
require and arise within a rich historical environment.
We saw, in considering the witness of the mystics, how
their special discoveries of the supernatural always arose
within the normal historic conditions of their life; the
divine communication flowing easily along the channels
provided by the human and natural scene. Though their
experience in its essence must be lonely because unshare-
able, no conscious break with history was involved in it;
and if we/ insist on cutting them out of the historic
96 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
fabric, their value for us is lost. Even Christ, in His
hours of communion with the Father on the mountain,
still brought to that profoundly solitary experience a mind
steeped in the Jewish tradition, a religious vocabulary
formed by the prophets and psalmists of His race, and
an emotional life developed by human relationships and
, responsibilities. He was and is at once utterly the child
of the Eternal, and the teacher and leader of time-con-
ditioned men. And it always remains true that from
within natural and historical conditions, not in repudia-
tion of them, the human soul drinks deepest of the Water
of Life.
So Isaiah sees the glory of God in the Temple; the
very home of a developed institutional and national
religion in its most rigid form. St. Francis kneels before
the Crucifix; the supremely concrete symbol of a thor-
oughly historic yet profoundly supernatural faith. St.
Thomas Aquinas, at the end of a life devoted to the
intellectual analysis of Divine Mysteries and the re-mak-
ing of Catholic philosophy, is suddenly lifted up to the
contemplation of ineffable Reality as he stands at the
altar saying Mass; the extreme expression of ceremonial
and dogmatic religion. Thus convinced from within his-
tory of all that lies beyond history, he does not abandon
traditional devotion, but only intellectual explanation;
and, returning to his cell, quietly puts his pens and
inkhorn away, saying, 'I have seen too much I shall
write no more.' x All these were men of their own time.
The contacts of their souls with the Reality of God
were conditioned by history, by their actual place in the
time-process: and the material within which they found
the Eternal revealed was historical material. Not his-
torical material in its 'pure* form for the Mass and the
1 Acta Sanctorum. Martii, torn, i, pp. 6726-7110.
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 97
Crucifix are no more like the Upper Room and Calvary
than the Temple of Isaiah's day was like the travelling
tent in which Moses and Aaron spoke to God but
material which had been subjected to the pressure of
change and development.
Plus ga change f plus c'est la meme chose. But the
point of that astute epigram surely is, that in order to
remain the same we are compelled to move; because
our natures are doubly conditioned by Eternity and by
Time, and all our acts have a two-fold reference. Thus
every deliberate attempt in religion to stop the clock, or
reascend the time-stream, defeats its own end. The little
sect which reproduces with care the methods of the
Apostolic Church really reveal less of the full Christian
secret than does a historic Church in the form which it
has, assumed under the pressure of historic change. The
'ancient wisdom' of Theosophy refuses to convey super-
natural value because like well-tinned asparagus, though
it may on the dish look very attractive it is only pretending
to be alive. But those who accept with simplicity, and
in spite of all its disconcerting features, that rich amalgam
of past and present, of tradition and novelty, which pro-
vides the historic expression of man's relation with God;
these will then find themselves able to press on through
the historic event or personality, and by a process appro-
priate to our half-animal human life to the conviction
of a spiritual and supra-sensible Reality expressing itself
in that historic event. All the factors which really con-
tribute to man's spiritual history have, like the humble
rush with which Virgil girded Dante, 1 this double nat-
ural and supernatural reference.
It is surely in this amalgam of the changing and the
Changeless this interweaving of History and Eternity
/ "i-Purgatorio, i. 94-105.
98 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
that the true peculiarity and nearly all the difficulty
of religion is to be found. Yet this two-fold character is
essential to it, if it is fully to meet the needs of men.
For were it, as George Fox believed, entirely dependent
on an individual and inward light; or, as convinced
traditionalists have insisted, entirely revealed in a closed
series of historic events then it would be inadequate
to the fullness of human life, which is founded in the
implicit conviction that there is both an outside and an
inside to things. The character which most distinguishes
man from all other forms of life known to us, is that he
is aware of, and enticed by, both the successive and the
Abiding. His spirit is so made and conditioned that it
cannot be fully fed or rightly grow, unless it has some
access, virtual or actual, to the Universal, Abstract and
Spiritual ; whilst also remaining in closest contact with the
particular, historical, and sensible. 'To understand some-
thing merely in general, not in particular', says St.
Thomas Aquinas, 'is to know it imperfectly' a saying
which, fully understood, covers the whole Christian
scheme. The abstract idea of witness must be embodied
for us in some particular thing that is white, if our
mind, trained towards the concrete, is to receive it. Yet
this white 'thing' depends for its quality on the universal
that it represents.
Hence, in the long run, one group of experiences with-
out the other must starve and distort the soul. For we
are all immersed in nature, in history, in succession; and
a great deal of our religion, like the rest of our experience,
is concerned with nature, history, succession but not all.
There is always present in it the claim of an Eternal
Reality which is not a reality of time and space: which
stands away from, yet everywhere conditions, life, mind
and change. Man has aptitude for both these levels,
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 99
i
and will not truly find satisfaction in one alone: for he
does not become a sacramentalist through peculiar and
'magical* beliefs, but is one by nature, tending always
to reach out to the universal through its particular em-
bodiments. And from this point of view, History is the
major sacrament.
On the one hand in his works of art and romantic
treatment of events, on the other in heroic lives lived
within the world of time, man shows his virtual realiza-
tion of this. Wherever we find the Transcendent, under
whatever name, entering the arena of human life and
inciting to disinterested contemplation or to selfless and
heroic deeds there, though not necessarily in the vest-
ments of religion, the Supernatural truly reveals itself
and gives gifts to men. Here intuition achieves a certain
reconciliation of those apparent opposites, the successive
and abiding, the natural and supernatural worlds. This
reconciliation, then, must also be expressed in our reli-
gious constructions, if they are to be adequate to our
spiritual life. These constructions must convey the
eternal Form, and that eternal Form in a way in which
man can apprehend it: that is, as revealed in historic
happenings and sensible things. In other words, the
complete religion of the human spirit must have soaring
theological vision and concrete historical embodiment.
It must seek and adore the Ultimate, without despising
the contingent; for it is required to give one rich Reality
under two aspects the universal and achieved, the par-
ticular and emergent. Rorate coeli desupen aperiatur
terra et germlnet Salvatorem.
'Eternal Life/ says von Hiigel, 'its practice and conception
can but suffer from any attempt to restrict the spirit's action
to one of its two movements-^-to abstraction and negation only;
or to cut religion loose from the mysteriously mighty stimulation
accruing to it, in and through the very tension and difficulties,
ioo MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
^
from historic personalities and the happenings and operations
in time and space ; or, above all, from the full, vivid conviction
of the distinctness from our own spirits, and of the supreme,
stupendous richness, of the life of the Spirit of God, the
Godhead.' *
Along this path a way is opened up towards a philoso-
phy of religion which will not merely permit but require
the fact and principle of incarnation, and its extension
in the apparatus of institutions, symbols and sacraments.
The mere existence of history witnesses to the fact that
succession, the contingent, does matter that it contains
a thread of meaning, includes more than one level of
reality. We insult history by regarding it as a form
of Maya', as the sweep of varied cloud armies across
an unchanging sky. This poor conception shows little
understanding of the richly woven fabric of the universe.
Yet we make nonsense of history if we capitulate to the
philosophy of change, and try to understand it apart
from that unchanging sky: or if we are tempted to shirk
its difficult interpretation by holding that all its bodying-
forths of the Eternal have equal rights. Surely by 'his-
tory* we mean that organic quality in the life of
the world, of human society, art, or any other complex,
which integrates and gives significance to the chain of
events and redeems them from mere unmeaning succes-
sion. Succession is the galloping horse which bears for-
ward a Rider whose identity is maintained throughout
the time-process: who, clothed with the Past, carries that
Past into the present, making of each new moment
something which is richly charged with all that life has
accomplished, and yet is wide open towards all its future
possibilities. It is because of this character of carrying
forward the achieved towards the unachieved that his-
tory requires, to make sense, a concept of End and Pur-
von Hiigel: Eternal Life, p. 120.
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 101
pose; even as science requires belief in the rationality of
the Cosmos, the uniform operation of Law. And since
we are each of us a part of this history, are carried along
by this process, and can never escape from it during
life, it is within history and in closest connection with
such End and Purpose, that God, the Supernatural, must
meet us. *
If we stand in a deep forest, and look up through the
branches to the sunshine seen in a broken pattern between
the countless leaves, it is possible to say and to feel that
the foliage hides the sky. Yet perhaps the living screen
lets through as much of that pure radiance as the little
dwellers in the forest can bear. We, immersed in the
forest, are entranced by these shining glimpses between
the leaves; with their assurance of the steady presence
'yonder* of an infinite light-flooded world. Without
this breaking in, this fragmentary revelation, we should
have no direct apprehension of the transcendent energy
and glory over-arching us, by which the forest lives. Yet
a deeper insight can learn to find that sunshine, that
same unearthly radiance seen by us in these dazzling
and broken yet 'religious' glimpses as the essential life
of each one of those leaves. We can come to realize
that all-pervading energy, poured in its abounding rich-
ness through space; penetrating all things yet steadfastly
continuing in itself, in the dual character of a given
Presence and self-imparting Power. And with the deep-
ening of our contemplation, with an ever more complete
and sympathetic entrance into the mysterious process,
the cyclic births and 'deaths of the many-graded forest
life, there comes to us a more profound sense of the
'otherness* of those secret forces in which that life is
bathed anil by which it is continuously created and
maintained.
102 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
It is truly the real radiation of the real sun, utterly
distinct from the earth and the tree a radiation un-
discerned by the senses, and of which the true character
remains unknown that causes and upholds the vivid
life and growth of the tree. Yet without the dazzling
vision of sunlight between the leaves, the lifting up of
the adoring soul to an apprehension of the 'something
other', beyond and yet within each cell of the forest
life, we should never have guessed that this 'something
other', steadily flooding our whole world with its in-
visible energies, was also fully present here. Thus do
the eyes of the man of prayer, turning back from Eternity
to history, find in history itself a new wonder and new
incentive to the deepening of his love and awe; feeling
through the entangled life and growth of men the all-
penetrating influence, the 'dark radiations 5 , of God. Yet
the transcendent glimmerings on the one hand, the intri-
cate organic embodiments on the other hand, leave the
overplus of mystery, the Deus incomprehensibilis unim-
paired.
* "Know, My dearest daughter," said the Divine Voice to
St. Catherine of Siena, "that no one can escape from My hands,
and you are not in yourselves, but only in so far as you act
through Me . . . open thou the eye of thine intellect to gaze
into My Hand and thou wilt see that the truth is as I have
said to thee." Then she, lifting her eyes in obedience to the
Supreme Father, saw, clenched in the hollow of His hand, the
whole universe.' l
Thus we are bound to think of history as having, like
the forest, its own, yet dependent, reality. It abides in
and feeds on the Eternal, truly present in it yet utterly
transcendent to it: and our chance of apprehending this
, Transcendent, this Supernature, is mainly through and
within history. To think otherwise to turn from God's
conditioned self-disclosures in the race, and demand a
1 Divine Dialogue, cap. 18.
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 103
separate and 'spiritual* illumination is to fall a victim
to a ludicrous individualism which the sight of the starry
sky might be sufficient to rebuke. Yet though God,
Supernature, be inalterably present with Nature or
rather, Nature within Him some distinct religious vision
of God over-against His Creation is needed, if His gen-
uine presence in history and men's hearts is to be known
at its full worth. Hence in the full life of religion,
tradition and contemplation both have their rights.
This fact of the importance of history, and of our
natural adaptation to its pace and its limitations, creates
the conditions within which the spiritual life of nan
must be developed; if it is to be healthy, humble and
secure. That life must have attachments to both orders,
and must move with suppleness between them: a fero-
cious other-worldliness maims our human nature almost
as seriously as a cheap capitulation to the 'world.' We
know, as yet, very little about ourselves; but what we
do know, if we try to be fair to all its elements, seems
best expressed in the statement that man is a thoroughly
natural yet also implicitly spiritual creature. At one
' end of the scale is the conclusion of biology that he is
simply 'one of the greater ground-apes.' At the other
end of the scale is the conclusion of religious philosophy,
that he is a creature with a capacity for God. Both can
produce evidence in support of their convictions ; and both
must be treated with respect. Taken together, they
suggest that man's relation with Reality is to be thought
of as an emergent and growing relation; a forward-mov-
"" ing, energetic push. He is subject to process, yet has
attachments to the unchanging. Though continuous in
some sense with his natural origins, in its higher reaches
his life involves intuitions, obligations, achievements, for
which biological process alone can never account. There
io 4 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
is, it is true, no point at which we can draw a line and
say with certainty: here the animal self leaves off, and
the human personality begins. Yet it is equally certain
that nothing in the greater ground-ape seems to lead
by logical stages to the Second Isaiah, or St. Francis of
Assisi.
The same paradoxical character .seems to mark that
stream of history in which we find ourselves; of which,
indeed, we are a part. This too, in so far as we can
make anything of it, appears as a mixture of determined
nature and free spirit of biological process and over-
ruling purpose of steady development and sudden nov-
elty. And this stream of history, though when we try
to think of it its richness and intricacy overwhelms us,
is only one tiny strand, perhaps, in the great fabric of a
guided universe. Yet plainly it is the strand with which
we are connected; and with which, therefore, we must
begin.
Thus we are faced once more by these two concepts,
both needful if we are to make any sense of our crude
experience: the historical, natural and contingent the
timeless, supernatural and absolute. They must be
welded together, if we are to provide a frame for all the
possibilities of human life ; and that life, whether social
or individual, must have both its historically flowing
and its changelessly absolute sides. The achievement
by man of self-consciousness at first merely utilitarian,
but now developed far past the practical level and its
requirements seems to be a stage in his further growth
towards consciousness of this double reality and double
obligation.
Such a vivid, warmly realistic consciousness of God
in His untouched perfection, richness and generosity, and
of the world with all its strife, demands and tensions,
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 105
is put before us in its loveliest, simplest, and yet deepest
form in the Synoptic portrait of Christ. It was epito-
mized in His two commandments, and expressed in a
life which alternated between solitary communion with
the Eternal and willing self-mergence in the stream of
human life. And again in the Christian Apocalypse, that
which entrances us and survives its mythical embodiment
is surely the same deep vision of two-fold Reality ; of the
absolute "world, the transcendent yet present 'throne of
God and the Lamb* over against the serial changes, the
conflicts and dooms of tinie. The eternal song of won-
der, joy and praise, offered by the angelic host to God,
persists through and transcends the vicissitudes of history,
the fall of nations, the pouring out of the vials of wrath
and suffering, the terrible working of the law of con-
sequence. Through and within all this, the man who is
*in the Spirit' can yet hear the voices of adoration which
'rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord
God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come'. 1
Doubtless in the mass of men this balanced conscious-
ness is still in the rudimentary stage. Yet it is implicit
in every genuine religious experience, and may in some
degree be made explicit by us all. Thus, when we go
from the jangle of streets filled with the solid roar of
succession, into the sudden hush of a silent church ; there,
experiencing the peculiar slowing down of consciousness,
the dew-like refreshment of the soul, which comes with
our surrender to its influence, we are surely tasting from
within history the food of Eternity and hearing the faint
rhythms of its song. If the contemplative spirit tends to
place here the focus of religion, whilst the active, more
deeply aware of succession, hears only the voice of the
world's need, the Christian theist in so far as he is
. iv. 8;
io6 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
aware of these two levels of experience is called upon to
strike a working balance between them ; to weave together
Eternity and Time. Thus alone can he rightly har-
monize the elements of life and achieve a stable relation
with reality.
If, then, we accept this view that Divine Reality
does indeed reach and teach us, not by one but by two
channels then, the man who is God-conscious (and I
use this phrase in its widest, not merely its pietistic sense)
is not called upon to de-naturalize in order to spiritualize
himself. This mistake has often enough been made in
the past ; but it is an essentially un-Christian solution, and
(distorts our relation with reality. It is indeed the glory
of Christianity that, alone among the great world-religions,
it fully accepts and utilizes this mingling of eternity
and history, spirit and sense. But man is most certainly
called by religion to actualize his relation with the eternal
order as well as with the world of succession to be, in
the succinct phrase of Aquinas, a Contemplative Animal ;
and it is hardly necessary to point out how seldom this
obligation is understood in a literal sense. We observe
that this inspired realist did not describe man as a Con-
templative Spirit. His words link the natural to the
supernatural; and imply that man is called to realize the
infinite purposes of God up to the limit of possibility,
from within the natural and historical situation in which
he finds himself. 'Thou hast made him a little lower
than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and
honour.' l On the faithfulness and vividness of our
response from within history to that which transcends
history, our spiritual development ultimately depends.
But if all this be true, then to what are we brought?
Surely to the position that the adequate revelation of the *
1 Psalm viii. 5.
SELF-GIVEN IN PROCESS 107
Supernatural to the human can only be through such a
strictly equivalent series of mental and bodily events,
as shall give historical expression to each eternal fact;
shall relate in closest union the supernatural and the
natural, and shall raise to the very highest levels of
reference the implicits of our two-fold experience. But
here we are led to that amalgam of history and eternity
which marks the greatest creations of art, and on from
creative art to sacraments; and at last to Incarnation,
the supreme art-work of the Infinite Love.
.CHAPTER V
THE SUPERNATURAL SELF-GIVEN IN
PERSONALITY: INCARNATION
It is a property of Love, to move and impel the will of the
lover towards the object loved.
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.
Man is not a reasoning animal: he is a seeing, feeling, con-
templating, acting animal. . . . Christianity is a history, super-
natural and almost scenic: it tells us what its Author is. by
telling us what He has done.
J. H. NBWMAN
With this ambigious earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.
But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball
Our race have kept their Lord's entrusted Word. . . .
O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.
ALICE MEYNELL
WE are being taught by modern physics that 'cosmic
astronomy' and 'atomic astronomy' complete and
explain one another. Each atom, with its electrons re-
volving round the central proton, is as truly a solar sys-
tem as the most majestic of the stars with its planetary
train. Its minute radiations and disturbances of the
108
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 109
ether are the same on another scale as the radiations of
Betel Geuse or Arcturus. Each of these imperfect human
glimpses into an inconceivable reality witnesses to the
same august and fundamental design.
It is perhaps in some such way as this that we may
begin to think of that which we call incarnational re-
ligion ; as disclosing, at our own level and within our
small planetary compass, the character and purpose of
the Incomprehensible God. It is a 'Cape of Good Hope'
jutting manward, in Otto's powerful metaphor, from that
vast uncharted continent of the divine 'which, as it
recedes, is lost to view in the tenebrae eternae?- Because
we are so nicely adjusted to our own narrow bit of the
cosmic scale our own rhythm of time and sense of place
the milky way and the electron, the speed of light
and age of stars, each seem to us equally foreign and
equally marvellous. Thus it is only within the tiny strip
that is our own that we can ever hope to establish a
relation with Reality. We are parochial little creatures:
God must meet us in our parish if He is ever to meet us
at all. If we are to 'behold His glory,' know and love
Him, He must somehow enter with His imperishable
loveliness the short life-cycle of ordinary men. We can-
not escape our own limitations, and go to Him beyond
the spheres.
Thus the very facts of theism seem to require some
revelation or self-imparting of the Ultimate in terms that
we are able to understand. For since man, when spirit-
ually awake, craves for God, but cannot know Him in
His spaceless reality; then the satisfaction of that craving
must be given to us here. It must come as 'a light into
'the world.' Only by adapting His self -disclosure to the
rhythm and pace of our history, could God reveal to
*Cf. The Idea of the Holy, p. 208.
I io MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
man the character and presence of His Eternity. The
Christian formula, which declares that His creative Word
'was made flesh and dwelt among us* simply expresses
this loving revelation of the Infinite in terms of the finite ;
and asserts that it took place, under natural and human
limitations, at the very heart of history itself.
It is true that our human intuition at its highest can
and does discover and deeply feel God over against us
and beyond us: as the eternal and utterly superhuman
Spirit of spirits, demanding our adoration and awe. This
absolute sense is indeed the foundation of all mystical and
philosophic religion. But if the Supernatural, the Ulti-
mate, is ever to exert not merely its daunting and fas-
cinating, but also its winning, redeeming and transfiguring
power upon our half-real and indetermined human nature,
it must be 'found, known and loved here: at our own
level, in our own way, by means of the phenomenal and
particular. The full religious outlook and true religious
growth seem always to need a loving contemplation both
of that transcendent Reality, and of its humble and con-
densed expression in space and time Amor Patris et
Filii. This felt need of a free movement of the Unlim-
ited to its little and limited creatures God Himself
coming the whole way to man is the foundation of all
historical and sacramental religion. It has been expressed
once for all in a phrase that is a poem : 'God so loved the
world that he gave his only begotten Son.' 1 The utter
distinction in kind between the Supernatural and natural,
which is felt more and more strongly by all great spiritual
souls, requires such a bridging of the gap, a willed and
truly 'loving* entrance of the Supernatural into nature,
if it is ever to reach and transfigure the hearts of men.
1 John iii. 16.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY in
Now that which we mean by personality represents
the highest form of existence which men have discovered
yet: the only one which does bridge the gap between the
natural and spiritual worlds.-' Personality is supremely
that product of the time-world which stretches beyond
time, and has already a certain capacity for eternal
things: and its development and enrichment seem to be
the very object of the disciplines and tensions of our
life. For a 'person' in the full sense is a true spiritual
organism capable of love and of creativity; possessing
wholeness, suppleness, freedom of response on all levels,
yet stretching backwards towards that mystery of Being
where life inheres in God. Along this live wire, then,
we might surely expect that God's fullest and most
searching self-disclosure would be made to us. 7, Christian-
ity contends that of all the categories known to us, per-
sonality alone, because of this implicit creativity and
freedom, this tendency to wholeness and perfection, lies
in the direction of God; therefore only through this
strange and fluid complex, so humbly conditioned and
fettered by the physical, and yet so unconditioned in its
possible range, could the Transcendent Other conceivably
penetrate and reveal Itself with our human world.
Moreover, such a revelation of the Perfect if the
uniqueness of the Divine is not to be impaired for us
by such a humble, here-and-now encounter must be
made supremely (though not exclusively) at one single
point in the time-process, and in one unique person. The
tendency of history, to throw up within the stream of
succession great personalities in whom universals are
embodied, will here provide a means for the emergence
of the Eternal in terms of human life : a particular
revelation in history, of the Absolute lying beyond history.
ii2 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt-
But it rides time like riding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss). 1
Thus our theism, if it is to be effective, must have
the character of revelation; and further, this revelation
must be made in history, and through man to men.
That which theology means by incarnation is surely just
this intense and concentrated disclosure of the essence of
Reality in personal terms, this exhibition of God by
means of human nature; an exhibition which is also an
act, so that here God is not only demonstrated but given.
St. John in his deep meditations saw the uttered Word
or Thought of the Eternal, which is Himself, achieve
complete expression once in human terms : 'and we beheld
his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.'
And since within the Absolute Godhead, Being Thought
and Act are one as the doctrine of the Trinity tries to
tell us this means an actual disclosure of God Himself,
Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine fully immanent within
the historic scene. Speaking thus, of course, we do but
choose from among the most powerful and mysterious
attributes of human nature Love, Thought, Will
signs which point beyond themselves to the infinitely mys-
terious and powerful processes of God. For since, as St.
Thomas reminds us, we call Him personal only by
analogy; even in this His most intimate approach to us,
we must ever be on our guard againt equating the image
with the fact.
Yet as in the wonderful poetry of Apocalyptic, when
the whole natural order in its splendour and apparent
1 Gerard Hopkins: The Wreck of the Deutschland.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 113
stability shakes and seems to crumble before the astonished
eyes of men, it is in personality that the Transcendent is
at last gathered up and revealed: so too in the most pro-
found experience of the soul. 'Then shall appear the sign
of the Son of Man in heaven' such a tiny thing, over
against the majesty and tragedy of the material universe,
so small and creaturely an embodiment of the unsearchable
mysteries of the Real. And the same lesson is driven
home by that lovely sequence of Masses with which the
Catholic Church ushers in Christmas Day. As the faith-
ful draw nearer and nearer to the full Divine manifesta-
tion, so they draw nearer and nearer to the simplest hu-
man things. Where Plato declared 'the true order of
going' to be a mounting up by means of the beauties of
earth, step by step towards the unearthly and celestial
Beauty; the Christian Church strong in her possession
of the Divine paradox compels her children to take the
opposite route. She declares the true movement of the
religious consciousness to be inwards, not outwards. It
moves from the abstract and adoring sense of God Tran-
scendent to the homely discovery of His revelation right
down in history, in humblest surroundings and most sim-
ple and concrete ways : bringing the adoring soul from the
utmost confines of thought la forma universal di questo
nodo to kneel before a poor person's baby born under
the most unfortunate circumstances.
Thus at midnight, the Introit of the first Mass declares
the ineffable generation of the Eternal Word, and the
Collect gives thanks for 'the shining forth of the "mys-
terious divine light from the bosom of Eternity.' At
dawn, the second Mass brings the worshipper a little
nearer to earthly needs and limitations 'To-day hath
a light shined upon us; for the Lord is born unto us!'
But when Christmas Day is fully come the note changes ;
114 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
*
and all the emphasis falls upon the realistic, human,
homely side 'Unto us a Child is born. Sing unto the
Lord a new song !' 1 So we have here a gradual con-
densation and a final self-revelation of the Infinite in
ever more homely, conditioned, and natural ways; and
in the Christmas Preface the object of all this is summed
up in a single wonderful phrase:
'Quia per incarnati Verbi mysterium, nova mentis nostrae
oculis lux tuae claritatis infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deura.
cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.' 3
And if we ask how the Infinite God was made visible;
the answer is, that this was not done with any mechanical
completeness, but through a living, growing, human per-
sonality that Christ, as the great Berulle boldly declared,
is 'Himself the primitive sacrament/
In its poetic elaborations of history and these began
almost at once Christian genius has not failed to em-
phasize the paradox of the Unlimited thus revealed within
humblest limitations.
*O magnum mysterium et admirabile sacramentum, ut ani-
malia viderent Dominum natum jacentem in praesepio.' 8
A carpenter's baby. Thirty years of obscure village
life. A young man, of whose secret growth nothing is
revealed to us, coming with the crowd to be baptized by
a religious revivalist. A refusal of all self-regarding or
spectacular use of that immense spiritual power and ef-
fortless authority which the records so plainly reveal.
Unlimited compassion especially extended to the most sin-
ful, blundering, sickly, and unattractive among men. A
self-oblivion so perfect that we do not even notice it.
^Missale Romanum-. In Nativitate Domini. a lbid.
8 Breviarium Romanum: In Nativitate Domini: ad Matutinum.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 115
A balanced life of fellowship and lonely prayer. A genial
love of, and yet a perfect detachment from, all human
and natural things. Unflinching acceptance of a path that
pointed to suffering, humiliation, failure and death. At
last, a condemned fanatic agonizing between two thieves.
These were the chief external incidents which marked
the full expression of the Supernatural in terms of human
personality. Yet within this sequence of transitory acts
all sensitive spirits felt and still feel the eternal state, the
interior life of Christ hidden in God, of which these
'mysteries' are the sacramental expressions in space and
time. Each scene in its own manner makes a sudden
rift, and discloses a new tract of the supernatural world ;
and this with an even greater and more humbling splen-
dour, with each advance of the seeing soul.
And indeed it is above all when we see a human
spirit, knowing its own power, choose the path of sacrifice
instead of the path of ambition: when we see human
courage and generosity blazing out on heroic levels in the
shadow of death; the human agony and utter self -sur-
render of Gethsemane, the accepted desolation of the
Cross, that we recognize a love and holiness which point
beyond the world. There we discern that mysterious
identity of Revealer and Revealed, that complete appro-
priation of personality to the manifestation of God, which
it is the special province of the Fourth Evangelist to em-
phasize. 1
^ says Berulle most justly, 'God the Incomprehensible
makes Himself comprehended in our humanity: God the Ineff-
able makes His voice audible in an incarnate Word : God the
Invisible shows Himself in the flesh which He has united to
the very nature of Eternity: and God, terrible in the blaze of
His splendour, makes Himself felt in His sweetness, kindness
and humanity .' a
l E.g. John xiv. 20; xvi. 27; xvii. ai, 23.
'Berulle: (Euvres, p. ai8.
n6 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
II
MEN have learned in various ways, and we still
learn, to recognize this self-expression of the Per-
fect in the terms of a life-process. Fusing as it does
two orders of existence, it is in itself a very difficult
recognition for human minds to make: nor can any one
soul hope to do so with completeness. Some by re-entering
history, and there finding the person and the deeds of
Jesus; some by the study and practice of His teachings;
some, through a sense of the continuing presence of His
exalted Spirit, are led to that adoration which only the
Supernatural can evoke. Along all these routes his-
torical, ethical and mystical God comes 'in Christ' to
the human soul. Yet all lead back to one real human
figure, appearing at a given moment of history on a par-
ticular spot of this planet. Through this point passed, as
through a prism, the 'shining radiance of the Father'; to
spread and to become the light of men.
The strangeness, the uniqueness of impression which
the Gospels manage to convey to us, abides in this natural
yet supernatural quality; in the portrait which they give
of a fully human nature, yet a human nature that, the
more we contemplate it, seems to be filled with, and
reach back into, something else. 'For Jesus lives within
and through nature the life of Supernature: and this
with a completeness in which our childish efforts, sacrifices
and heroisms are wholly explained and fulfilled. We
are brought into the presence of a Spirit for whom Real-
ity Itself is the Living Father; and who exhibits within
history, yet with no escape from the most dread incidents
of existence, the tranquil majesty and power of the In-
visible God. The human mind has circled about this
historic point, has fled from it and returned to it, has
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 117
found new meanings and new explanations for it; but
has never, once touched, been able to escape the sense that
somehow the Supernatural, the Absolute, is here revealed
in terms of human nature, and that its recognition 'saves*
the children of men. This felt and actual presence in
history of something given from beyond history, yet in
perfect union with every level of terrestrial life, is that
which Christology and incarnational philosophy have been
struggling for two thousand years to express/
It is essential to such a philosophy, and indeed to any
realistic view of human nature, that the revelation should
be regarded as given rather than achieved. So immense,
so unexpected an opening up of the superhuman could
only be effected by somewhat in itself superhuman: God
alone could thus disclose God. Thus along the path of
experience we again reach the conviction, if not the logical
demonstration, of the truth of the Johannine 'I and the
Father are 'one.' Here the whole personality does really
body forth, express, reveal in its heroic energy, its strange
deep gentleness, its fortitude and love, the supernatural
and eternal Reality. Studying the earliest biographers
and interpreters of Jesus, we find that it was neither His
moral transcendence' nor His special doctrine which
struck them most. It was rather the growing certitude
that something was here genuinely present in and with
humanity, which was yet 'other' than humanity. From
the beginning, the Christian claim that Christ is 'fully
human and fully Divine' meant and means the eSort
to formulate the deeply felt conviction that His person
and life do not simply manifest the fullest possibilities of
human nature evolving from within. In Him, we feel,
we see beyond the world 'Jesus from the ground
suspires' does not express all that the Incarnation means
for us.
. u8 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
The prominence given in the record of Christian ori-
gins to the Virgin Birth, Transfiguration, and Ascension
is not adequately explained by a reference to the human
love of the marvellous, and its tendency to confuse the
abnormal with the spiritual. All such episodes seem to
point to a deep conviction, that in the great moments of
our spiritual history something more than the normal
process of life is in question ; a higher term, beyond man's
limited idea of causation, intervenes and does or may
profoundly modify what we choose to call the 'natural'
scheme of things. Thus in Christian history some means
had to be found of expressing the truth, that the factor
which gave and gives this history its special worth came
from beyond the visible world; in other words, was
'supernatural'. Here, along the path traced by the suc-
cessive* and contingent, the absolute value of the universe
is brought right into human life. And, as a matter of
fact, the unconditional abandonment of those doctrines
which safeguard these conceptions quickly reduces Chris-
tianity to the humanitarian level ; and in so doing deprives
it of its attracting and transfiguring power. Such a
statement need involve no final decision as to which of
these episodes represents spiritual, and which historical
fact. But it does mean an appreciation of distance which
separates the great New Testament writers, with their
convinced transcendentalism and profound consciousness
of God's direct action upon and through human life, from
a merely ethical view of the demands and gifts of the
Gospel.
Thus it makes an absolute difference to our view of
the universe, whether Christ represents for us the supreme
j religious Object, or the supreme religious Subject. That
is to say, whether 'the lonely Man on the Cross' is sim-
ply one who personifies and experiences man's greatest
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY iigj
intuition of and surrender to God; or, whether the Ab-
solute God is here, under temporal conditions and in
intimate union with human personality, making Mis
greatest revelation to man through man. Certainly for
the Christian the Cross must be the supreme meeting-
place of both these movements; and thus, in a measure,
represents both God's movement to man and man's re-
sponse. But we have not really progressed beyond an
implicit immanentism, unless the objective view predomi-
nates; and the historic sacrifice is perceived as bringing
to us a revelation of the inmost quality of the universe,
the stuff of Eternal Life. If then the Christian theist
be asked. 'What think ye of Christ?' perhaps he is al-
lowed to answer 'The perfect embodiment of the Un-
changing and Eternal in terms of changeful human life;
God's self-revelation within history, as indeed wholly
other than ourselves .and yet not wholly unlike ourselves.'
The centrality of Jesus for the history of man>abides in
this fact: that in Him the life of succession is reinter-
preted in the terms of the Eternal Kingdom of God.
It is true that this revelation of the Supernatural, the
'good news' of the true relation between man and God,
first appears to Jesus Himself as made not primarily
through His person but through His message and 'bring-
ing in* of the Kingdom. He seems most often to con-
ceive His office as that of a proclaimer ; and the Kingdom
is felt to be something proximate, about to break through
from that Perfect which He realizes so keenly, to the
imperfect towards which he leans with such pitying and
comprehending love. It is not merely an ethic, but an
utterly new life lived in relation with the Holy Reality;
a life made possible by the fact that this Holy Reality
has a relation of protective self-giving and fatherly love
towards the souls of men. 'Fear not, little flock; for it is
120 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.' x
In and through His own person Jesus reveals to human
beings the closeness and dependence of their relationship
to this immanent yet personal God; and requires His
followers to put first that Kingdom in order that the
whole of life may be ruled by its reality. It is His clear
vision of the overwhelming claim and worth of this
supernal treasure, this Pearl for which no price can be
too great, which inspires the note of severity, of totality,
in His demands. This severity, which often shocks the
amiable and uninitiated, at once seems obvious to every
awakened spirit. Whatever it may cost the natural crea-
ture, the supernatural call when heard must be obeyed.
If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and
take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save
his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for
my sake shall find it.' 3
*Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath,
he cannot be my disciple.' 8
At first the little company left behind continue to be
(dominated by this Apocalyptic hope in the here-and-now
coming of the Kingdom. They inevitably translate the
supernatural revelation into sensible and historical terms:
and suppose the new life they experience to be a fore-
taste of some cataclysmic change within the world.
Hence the Parousia. But after a time they .begin to
realize that Jesus is Himself both the revelation and the
redeemer. 'In Him was life ; and the life was the light of
men/ By His appearance in the time-world, history is
already transformed and given ultimate meaning; and
by a sharing in His Spirit man already lives the super-
natural life. This delighted sense of spiritually awakened
1 Luke xii. 32. a Matthew xvi. 24, 35.
8 Luke xiv. 33.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 121
souls, that in the person of Christ something was given to
them which they had never had before, is reflected in the
names which they so quickly gave Him; and which gen-
erations of Christians have accepted and used again, as
telling at least something of the joy and wonder with
which they recognize a living Revealer who is one with
the Reality which He reveals. The compound Jesus-
Christ, already found in St. Paul's earliest letters, ex-
presses this sense of identity between the historic arid
transcendent, this natural yet supernatural quality. The
name Son, applied by Jesus to Himself, describes by
human analogy His own consciousness of a mysterious
identity with the Ultimate; as the phrase *I and the
Father are one' gives in six words the very essence of the
Christian revelation. 1
Indeed the figure of Christ stands so exactly on the
confines between divine and human so fully radiating
God, while remaining so completely man 'of a reason-
able soul and human flesh subsisting' that men have
never been able to decide in which category to place
Him. Meditation seems more and more to show us the
relation of history and eternity, our natural and super-
natural environment, brought to a point in His person.
The serial changes of man and the steadfast abidingness
of God seem to co-exist in Him; and every act and word
of His earthly life has, like His parables, a double ref-
erence. It shows us the perfect living-out of the life
of nature, so that men have been .quite satisfied to find
in Him the supreme ethical teacher and model of human
relationships; yet in and with this the achievement of
something utterly beyond Nature that state of soul and
consequent transfiguration of existence, which He calls the
Kingdom of God, and into which He brings His saints.
a On the significance of the primitive names of Jesas, see Vacher
Burch: Jesus Christ and His Revelation.
122 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
The brooding study of the Gospels brings us into grad-
ual familiarity with a life so utterly supernatural that it
could afford to take up and transform the least impres-
sive elements of the natural. There is an entire avoid-
ance here of spiritual loftiness; a deliberate condemna-
tion of the aloof attitude of the pious. It is perhaps the
homeliness and absence of fastidiousness, flashing out
again and again in our fragmentary biographies of Jesus,
which most truly guarantee His spiritual transcendence.
These witness to a spirit so deeply rooted beyond the
contingent as to flower in completest beauty in and
through the contingent; bringing 'eternity interpreted by
love* from the lonely mountain to the lakeside and the
dinner-table, and giving it with the same gesture of peace-
ful generosity to the prostitute, the paralytic, the faithful
-disciples, the little children and the curious crowd.
Jesus could move without disharmony from the Moun-
tain of Transfiguration to the house of Simon the Leper;
could redeem the most squalid sinner by the heart-break-
ing device of all-pitying love. He asked for the purity
of heart which alone can look upon Reality; yet behold
without disgust the poor little animal sins of our half-
made human nature, and in the most solemn hour of
self -imparting, could kneel and wash His followers' dusty
feet. 'He riseth from supper and laid aside his garments ;
and took a towel and girded himself,' says the Fourth
Evangelist surely here, if ever, recording a vividly re-
membered event. 1 That was a real washing, not a ritual
pretence. So too the first Eucharist was a real eating,
and Gethsemane, in which this most human and most
holy day was ended, witnessed a real and bitter agony: the
piercing anguish in which the creature's utter self-aban-
donment to the Eternal purpose must be faced and
J John xiii. 4.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 123
fulfilled. Did the rest of the Gospel perish, this series
of events alone would be enough to give us the secret of
the Supernatural disclosed through man to men.
This genius for the ordinary this sacramental and
transfiguring use of common life which colours all the
words and deeds of Jesus, was so deeply stamped upon
the memories of His followers that it has triumphed over
.all their natural instinct for the impressive and abnormal ;
and has given to us, not a Hierophant of the Mysteries,
but a patient Sower of the seed, a Shepherd, Healer,
Comrade, loved and loving Master: a Maker of yokes
on which the feeble staggering human creature can carry
the balanced burden of physical and spiritual existence.
Above all in the Resurrection narratives, where the hu-
man love of the sensational, even the bizarre, might surely
be expected to assert itself, we are kept in closest touch
with common things. The entrancing loveliness of the
story abides almost wholly in its insistence on the power
of the natural and ordinary to convey the supernatural
Presence, by the lake, in the garden, or the quiet room:
yet equally on the awed sense of 'otherness', the unworldly
reality of that which is thus conveyed and 'recognized in
the breaking of bread'. Moreover the fragments of our
Lord's teaching preserved by the Synoptics unite in em-
phasizing this stern and homely insistence on the realities
of life, as the material offered to men in which to find
the presence and fulfil the generous will of God. They
make plain His vivid love of the living and the simple,
His hatred alike of the fantasies and the formalities
which come so easily to the pious, and blur their contact
with facts. 1
The word 'teaching* so constantly an3 inevitably ap-
plied to the great discourses and declarations of Christ,
1 Cf. among many passages, Matthew xii. 2-13; aocv. 31-46; Luke xL
37-44-
124 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
often obscures the very fact which it is supposed to de-
scribe. For 'teaching', where it is effective, is not an
instruction but an exhibition and imparting of the teach-
er's own relation with reality. Thus Socrates is a classic
example of the genuine teacher. Plainly the value of
the teaching will be graded according to the extent and
the richness of that spiritual reality to which the teacher
is thus able to respond ; the degree in which he can make
the ways of God manifest to men. The teaching of
Jesus is the absolute example of this irradiation of the
particular by the universal light. It does not give a
code, and seldom prescribes exact solutions for specific
problems; but it interprets the whole of natural >and hu-
man life in supernatural regard.
Over against the spiritual Kingdom, Jesus perceived
men and women to be still spiritual babies; and held
that a recognition of their inherent childishness and capac-
ity for growth and chance took away the poison of their
sins, tumbles and mistakes. He declared the powerful
and vivid presence of the Supernatural, of God; con-
tinuously creating and cherishing, with an equal and fa-
therly love, the whole pageant of life. Not 'spiritual men*
alone, but the immature, sinful, sick, stupid and self-
interested; and not men alone, but the sparrows and the
lilies of the field. The discovery of this Reality was the
secret of the Kingdom; the hidden treasure that com-
pletely enriched the finder; the leaven that transformed
the whole of the meal. He taught with the authority"
of perfect knowledge not only this instant dependence
of the whole material scene upon the spaceless Love of
God, but the demand made on every awakened soul for
co-operation with it; using the talent, digging the vine-
yard, feeding and cherishing all who were in need. Al-
ready this Reality was fully present to man in every
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 125
appeal and opportunity of self-forgetting love, from the
homely cup of cold water to the heroic sacrifice of life:
and every movement of the human soul towards it, every
petition and faithful quest, every loving desire for com-
munion all asking, seeking, and knocking at the closed
door of Reality^ would meet with generous and self-
giving response.
But as we learn most of humanity, not by listening
to moral teachings, but by the living out of our mostly
vague and insignificant lives; so we learn most about
God, not by listening even to the deep and gentle teach-
ings of Jesus, but by the contemplation of the uniquely
significant and supernatural life in which His personality
reveals itself. It is true that the stage is narrow and
the drama is brief. But each incident, as we gaze, is
found more and more to body forth intense and inex-
haustible meaning; whilst arising, with no straining of
the situation, out of the common stuff of life. The
shifting process of creation, the unescapable curve of
human experience its emergence, growth, maturity and
death is ever in the foreground. Yet now this same
process is charged with supernature. It is 'fully human
and fully divine,' and at every point eternalized.
In the Gospels we are made to feel always dimly,
and sometimes acutely this eternalization of the tem-
poral; the sweet and solemn presence of that 'holiness'
which is more than and beyond beauty, but is yet of
the same order as beauty. We saw that by the adding
of beauty and strangeness to history we arrive at
Romance. By the adding of holiness to history we ar-
rive at that which Otto calls 'divination' an embodi-
ment of the supernatural 'incarnation'. 1 The great
work of art illuminates and unifies a wide tract of ex-
*Cf. The Idea of the Holy, caps. 18-20.
126 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
perience, by exhibiting its values ; and in so doing conveys
to us God, confers on us a measure of the creative point
of view. So does this supreme triumph of human person-
ality illuminate and harmonize the whole range and
meaning of human life ; and in so doing reveals God. The
consummate personality of Jesus, in all the rich fullness
of His sense of reality, His inclusive hold on the rugged
and the tender, His energy and His peace, stands over
against our jangled human character, as a Beethoven
sonata stands over against the jangled world of sound.
See how every now and then, in this apparently human
history, the Transcendent, the utterly unearthly, is
glimpsed through Him; and the 'creature* recoils in
awe. 'They were amazed', say the Evangelists again and
again. 'No man durst ask him anything/ 'Verily, this
man was the son of God !' says the Roman officer, watch-
ing that strange criminal die. Our blundering credal
formulae, with their instinctive clinging hold upon the
human yet their sense that the human category at its
highest here somehow becomes inadequate to the facts
manage little more than the constant reassertion of the
paradox which has baffled, and yet enslaved, the Christian
world. 'Perfect God'; the Divine Word breaking
through into Its creation, the utterance in human lan-
guage of Reality. 'Perfect Man'; the pattern of human-
ity, King of Saints. These completing opposites are here
fused in one figure; perfectly historic, yet transcending
the time-stream within which it emerged.
Ill
HERE then, by a living-in towards all the homeliest
aspects of earth, man obtains his deepest initiation
into Reality; and so his most complete liberation from
the drag of earth. We miss the whole meaning of the
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY .127
X
story if we try to wash out this supernatural colour.
Then, the most perfect portrait of the Inviolate Rose
ever woven into the strange brocade of history becomes
nothing more than an unusually attractive combination
of the warp and_wef t of human life.
Yet the chain of history is not broken by the emer-
gence of the life of Jesus; for that life emerges within
the thick mesh of a complex human society, at the meet-
ing place of Roman, Hellenic, and Semitic culture. It
touches homes and shops and fishing boats; fields, vine-
yards, villages. It is jostled by mixed crowds of Roman
soldiers, Jewish peasants, priests, pietists and excise-men,
traders, brigands, harlots, Hellenistic converts Europe
and Asia mixed together. Moreover, it is linked up with
the whole prophetic trend of Hebrew religion, and re-
uses much of its material. Jewish history, which alone
regards itself as the story of the dealings of the Infinite
with one small tribe of men, is the scene within which
this 'saving event' is prepared. Jesus is so deeply felt to
be conditioned by that history, that St. Stephen, in whom
the Church Catholic first comes to consciousness, can only
thus present Him ; 1 whilst His biographers insist that He
must have been born 'in the city of David* and that He
died with the words of traditional Hebrew poetry on His
lips. The Christian Church, grounding her Divine Office
on the Psalter, acknowledges this continuity; deliberately
immersing the consciousness of her children in the poetic
atmosphere into which Jesus was born, and from which
He took the clothing of His revelation.
Nevertheless this Life, on one side so profoundly his-
toric, manifests in a degree untouched by any other
historic life the controlling presence of something tran-
scending history; and, in its unfolding and its conse-
1 Acts vii.
128 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
quences, the constant double operation of tradition and
of novelty. It is a truism that the fact of something
utterly new entering the human world was the dominant
impression made- upon the early converts. This sense
of novelty, of a wonderful freshness, colours the first
records of the Church the new way, the new song, the
new covenant, all summed up in the great Pauline say-
ing: 'If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature/
The conviction of an emergence in human terms of the
Eternal and the Perfect so unlikely an invention for
the monotheistic Jew to entertain crops up perpetually.
We are given, says St. Peter, 'an inheritance incorrupti-
ble, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away' * something
'foreordained before the foundation of the world, but
manifest in these last times' 2 and in- consequence human
beings are now being 'called out of darkness into his
marvellous light' 3 a calling of which the first faint
whisperings began far back in geologic time, when the
semi-human creature looked with awe at the mountain and
the storm. 'Again, a new commandment I write unto
you, which thing is true in him and in you: because the
darkness is past, and the true light now shineth.' 4 So
the religious genius who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews
tries to tell us in allusive, but yet more striking language,
what he thinks the life of Jesus really means:
'God, \vho at sundry times and in divers manners spake in
time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last
days spoken unto us by his Son . . . the brightness of his glory
and the express image of his person." 3
Or, as Dr. Moifatt translates it, 'reflecting God's bright
glory and stamped with God's own character.' Could
the emergence of the Eternal within the historic series
be more clearly expressed?
1 i Peter i. 4. 2 i Peter i. 20. a i Peter ii. 9.
* i John ii. 8. c Hebrews i. i. 3.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 129
Thus when human thought, warmed by human love,
Jirst got to work on the facts which were found to
transfigure human life wherever received; the forced
conclusion of the matter was, that here something other
than the development of history was involved. Here,
by all sensitive "spirits, the moulding influence of the
Transcendent is vividly experienced; the Supernatural
reaches man, and man's world, as never before, along
the path of human personality. And if this be the true
way of seeing things; then, in the bold language of
St. Catherine of Siena, philosophy itself can afford to
regard the person of Jesus as a 'Bridge' between God
and man, whereby 'the earth of humanity is joined to
the greatness of the Deity.'
'So the height of the divinity, humbled to the earth, and
joined with your humanity, made the Bridge and reformed the
road. Why was this done? In order that man might come
to his true happiness with the angels. And observe that it
is not enough, in order that you should have life, that My Son
should have made you this Bridge, unless you walk thereon.' 1
There is here presented to the emergent human soul
in its present close union with the physical, a Something
also in closest union with the physical on which its
childish appetite for Reality can feed, its instinct of
adoration be spent. Christian worship, though it has to
a point its parallels in other incarnational religions, is
in this respect alone in its austere beauty, completeness,
and life-changing power. The soothing cults which in-
vite us to 'get in tune with the Infinite'; the various
devotional ways of escape from the fret of the ordinary,
successive, and imperfect these disclose their shallow-
ness and implicit egoism when measured against its dec-
larations and demands. For the Christian theist is
1 Divine Dialogue, cap. 22.
130 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
called upon to transfigure the ordinary, successive, and
imperfect; not to escape from it. He must follow the
lonely path of Jesus; press on, ahead of the racial level
and in constant conflict with the racial urge towards
self-seeking, and eternalize each moment of succession
by relating it to God. He is asked to love, and learn
from, the darkest incidents and hardest demands of
existence, not only its joyous and expansive stretches;
to set up the Cross in the very heart of personality. For
the real supernatural life requires a seizing, not a shirking
of the most homely: and a using of it as the material
of the most heroic.
Such is the 'following of Christ'; one of the strangest
of human phenomena, which has been going on steadily
for two thousand years in defiance of all those human
instincts of self-preservation, self-assertion and acquisitive-
ness which are supposed to be most beneficial to the
race. It always means the same thing, that which religion
calls the 'Way of the Cross': the bringing in of happi-
ness, security, fresh union of man with God, the doing
of redeeming work, at one's own cost and commonly
under stern conditions of self-renunciation. Wherever
this 'gospel' has been preached this 'good news' that
man can do saving work for man there, all the noblest
of souls have responded with zest and delight. The
overwhelming conviction which blossomed in the soul
of Jesus, that sacrifice, the gesture of complete self-giving,
is the deepest secret of life and the only gateway of the
supernatural world: this has ever since been the real
motive power of the saints. They have found here the
strange presence of a rescuing power, in conflict with the
downward trend of animal impulse and the evil deform-
ation of nature; a power using as its tools the dedicated
lives of men. Hence that close alliance of suffering and
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 131
sanctity, which the cheaper type of Christian optimist
finds so difficult to explain. Here that 'groaning and
travailing* of creation which St. Paul so vividly realized,
and which has worried his easy-going interpreters ever
since, is perceived as a fundamental truth. So even
were this the only gift of the Gospel, here Jesus of Naz-
areth transfigured our whole view of the meaning and
nature of man and his relation with Reality. For He
made Love the universal of personality, the absolute of
soul; and iri doing this, made that same principle of
Love the only category under which men could think
truly about God.
*Love ! thou art Absolute sole Lord
Of Life, and Death'
And the witness to this conception so trite, that we
forget its real meaning and wash it down into easy
sentimentality; yet so unthinkable an issue from the
universe of the determinist is not Eros but the Cross.
Christianity does not stand alone among the great
religions in declaring, and satisfying, the need for such
a 'Bridge'; though it states, and meets, the requirements
of man's situation with a special completeness. Those
requirements are also felt outside the Christian system,
wherever the attraction of God, the thirst for union
with Him, are deeply experienced. Thus in the Bhakti
Marga of Hinduism we have a 'way of love and personal
devotion* which is directed to that aspect of the Absolute
God personified in Vishnu or his human incarnations
Ram and Krishna. Here human personality again be-
comes in some sort a bridge between the transcendent
God and the desirous soul. For this cult, with all its
emotional excesses, yet gives an objective related to the
time-stream, through which the religious sense can find
132 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
and feel at its own level that which lies beyond Time;
and so balance the arid abstractions -of pure Brahma-
worship. And it is noticeable that the language in which
the hungry soul here tells its craving and its satisfaction,
comes nearer than anything else in religious literature to
the temper of Christocentric devotion.
'Dark, dark the far Unknown and closed the Way
To thought and speech; silent the Scriptures; yea,
No word the Vedas say.
Not thus the Manifest. How fair ! how near !
Gone is our thirst if only He appear
He, to the heart so dear!' 1
'This day is dear to me above all other days, for to-day the
Beloved Lord is a guest in my house ;
My chamber and my courtyard are beautiful with His presence.
My longings sing His Name, and they are become lost in His
great beauty :
I wash His feet, and I look upon His Face; and I lay before
Him as an offering my body, my mind, and all that I
have.
What a day of gladness is that day in which my Beloved,
who is my treasure, comes to my house!
AH evils fly from my heart when I see my Lord'.*
'My food I'll get in serving Thee,
- Thy thoughts shall be as eyes to me.
I'll live and breathe to sine: Thy praise,
From this time onward all my days;
Thy feet I choose, the world resign,
For Thou, from this day on, art mine
Brother beloved, and King divine I' 8
Buddhism too has been forced by the same intuition,
and same implicit need, to abandon its first negative
emphasis on mere liberation; and meet the deep-seated
longing of man's soul for personal love and leadership,
incentive to sacrifice, redeeming work. Thus it gives
to us the strange and noble spectacle of the Buddha
preaching happiness through escape from the 'wheel of
1 Psalms of Maratha Saints. Translated by J. Nichol, p. Si.
^Kabir's Poems: Song LXXXVIII.
3 Tilah. Translated from the Marathi by N. Macnichol.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 133
things'; yet, in his avatar as Buddha-saviour, refusing
Nirvana that he may return to the world and save the
souls of men- *zore necessitate sed caritate trahente. In
the figure of the Bodhisattva the great religious painters
of China have managed to convey just that mysterious
union of power, profound peace, and ineffable tender-
ness which the Christian contemplative well understands.
Surely we must give, in a limited sense, the value of
incarnation to such a conception as this; embodying as
it does man's deep intuition of redeeming love as a con-
stituent of Reality. 1 It is not the same thing, but it looks
the same way; acknowledges the same creaturely need
and divine desire.
So we shall not limit the redemptive action of the
supernatural within the human sphere to one supreme
historic figure; nor shall we attach it exclusively to
that experience of communion with a continuing Presence,
which the religious consciousness identifies with the
Exalted Christ. Not even will we limit it by that con-
secration of things and persons which radiates from this
focal centre; and is manifested to us in the power of
the sacraments, and in the redeeming energy of the saints.
But we shall mean that whole movement of Spirit Crea-
tive and Complete towarcj spirit created and incomplete,
that willing self-revelation of the Spaceless God in space
and time, of which so far as this planet is concerned
the perfect case is seen in Bethlehem and Calvary: 'the
condition, the work, and the mystery wherein God reigns,
and whereby He reigns, in His creatures'. 2
, * According to the doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva
is one who has reached and deliberately renounces 'arhatship' or libera-
tion from the wheel of life; and returns to earth in order to strive for
the redemption of all living things. He is dedicated to the saving of
souls, the destruction of passions, the knowledge and teaching of truth,
the leading of others in the Way: and exhibits the supernatural virtues
of charity, moral perfection, patience, devotedness, contemplation, wisdom.
Cf. W. M. McGovern: Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism, p. 101.
3 Berulle: CEwvres, p. 990.
134 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
IV
IT is perhaps because of this felt need of mediation,
of material given to us in history for the recognition
of God, that Christianity has never been satisfied with
an account of the Incarnation which limits it to a point
of historic time. For the deepest and truest Christian
feeling, that embodiment of the Infinite, that sublime
interweaving of the temporal and eternal, continues and
is continuously experienced; both at its centre and in its
sacramental and spiritual extensions. Mysterious, even
irrational as we may choose to think it, the spiritual
vigour of all great Christians seems ever to spring from
$his intimately felt here-and-now relationship with a
personal and redeeming Presence, that yet carries with
it something of the unsearchable splendours of the Ulti-
mate. From St. Paul onwards, the 'transition from God
the void to God the companion* 1 is made by them 'in
Christ': and in this discovery they are truly victorious
over succession, and experience under living symbols the
ever new impact of the supernatural world. Moreover,
it is along this same path of continuous incarnation that
we reach the conception of the Church as the visible gar-
ment of the Supernatural: the Body, in and by which
the Spirit of Christ indwells history, and by perpetual
self-disclosures within the temporal series draws souls
into the supernatural life. Other great faiths, in pro-
portion to their efficacy, have been compelled, as we have
seen, to provide a bridge of the same kind: for life and
renovating power seem always to go, not with a theism
of the impersonal and abstractive type, but with the
cultus by which a sense of incarnate revelation and of
close personal communion is expressed.
X A. N. Whitehead: Religion in the Making, p. 16.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 135
The Presence is noumenal and outside time; though
the human creature always apprehends it mixed with
phenomena, and within the temporal series. But a con-
stant return to this burning heart of spiritual experience,
now in one way and now in another however difficult
it may be to give it its right place in theology is one
of the most certain and most strange facts of Christian
history. So with the charismatic religion of the Apostolic
age, facing a hostile and incredulous world with a courage
born of the conviction which is expressed in the last words
of St. Matthew and St. Marbf and rising in St. Paul to
a height of assurance at which 'all things are possible*
since love and courage, poetry and faith, are one. So with
the beautiful mediaeval cult of the Holy Name, which
gathered up all that was most fervent and intimate in
the religion of its period, and finds classic expression i
the pages of the Imitatio 1 and in the ever freshly living
phrases of the Rosy Sequence: Jesu dulris memoria. It
is plainly from within the same circle of secret and intense
experience that the great English teachers of the spiritual
life are speaking, when they say:
*We should covet to feel aye the lively inspiration of grace
made by the ghostly presence of Jhesu in our soul, if that we
might; and for to have Him aye in our sight with reverence,
and aye feel the sweetness of His love by a wonderful homeli-
ness of His presence. This should be our life and our feeling
in grace, after the measure of His gift in whom all grace is,
to some more and to some less; for His presence is felt in
divers manner-wise as He vouchsafe. And in this we should
live, and work what longeth to us for to work on ; for without
this we should not be able to live. For right as the soul is
the life of the body, right so Jhesu is life of the soul by His
gracious presence. . . . How that presence is felt, it may better
be known by experience than by any writing; for it is the life
and the love, the might and the light, the joy and the rest of
a chosen soul. And therefore he that hath soothfastly once
felt^it, he may not forbear it without pain; he may not undesire
it, it is so good in itself and so comfortable. What is more
1 Cf. especially Book II, caps. 7 and 8. ^
136 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
comfortable to a soul here than for to be drawn out through
grace from the vile noye of worldly business and filth of desires,
and from vain affection of all creatures into rest and softness
of ghostly love; privily perceiving the gracious presence of
Jhesu, feelably fed with savour of His unseeable blessed face?
Soothly nothing, me thinketh. Nothing may make the soul of
a lover full merry, but the gracious presence of Jhesu as He can
show Him to a clean soul.' 1
And again:
'Christ alone did all the works that belong to our salvation
and none but He; and right so He alone doeth now the last
end: that is to say, He dwelleth here with us, and ruleth us and
governeth us in this living, and bringeth us to His bliss. . . .
For Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and
doeth all.' 2
1 Precisely the same type of feeling and conviction
marked the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. This is the source of its regenera-
tive and saving power, of the energy and confidence with
which such heroic spirits as Wesley, Brainerd, Martyn
and Livingstone carried through their astonishing works.
It brought back into Christian literature as in the hymns
of Charles Wesley the same intimately realistic note.
Moreover, the continuity of tradition was complete.
Wesley journeyed through England with the Imitatio in
his saddle-bag. Livingstone, alone in Africa, transcribes
the Jesu dulcis memoria in his diary 'because I love it so.'
It is not very easy to charge either of these great men
of action with the mawkish sentimentality which such
a devotion is often supposed to involve. We seem rather
to be faced with a concrete kind of religious experience,
appropriate to the creaturely status of man, and un-
equalled in its influence upon his behavior and character.
So in the present day, the two directions in which
./ religion shows signs of a restored vitality the redis-
covery of the historical Jesus, and the development of
1 Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, Bk. II, cap. 41.
s Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, cap. Ixxx.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 137
Eucharistic devotion are complementary expressions of
the same incarnational trend; and seem to lead, where
faithfully followed, to a spiritual experience of the same
type. And again it is not to the feverish imaginings of
the congenitally pious or the emotional derelicts, but to-
convictions wrought slowly in the souls of scholars and
men of action, that we must go for the most impressive
examples of this. I select three from among the most
personal and unconventional Christian writings which the
present century has produced. The first is the great pas-
sage with which that intrepid critic Dr. Schweitzer con-
cludes his revolutionary study of the historic Christ.
'The very strangeness and unconditionedness in which He
stands before us makes it easier for individuals to find their
own personal standpoint in regard to Him. . . . The names in
which men expressed their recognition of Him as such, Messiah,,
Son of Man, Son of God, have become for us historical para-
bles. We can find no designation which expresses what He is
for us.
'He comes to us as One unknown, without a name; as of
old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him
not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me I"
and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time.
He commands and to those who obey Him, whether they be
wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the con-
flicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fel-
lowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their
own experience Who He is.' 1
These words, as is well known, their author has worked
out in terms of complete self-renunciation and heroic
labour as a medical missionary in the African forest.
Put beside them those of a critic and scholar of another
type, whose independent study and meditation has brought
him to the same point.
'That our intellects cannot conceive the nature of an objective
presence which is not physical, and that a "spiritual body" re-
mains for our minds a contradiction in terms, is only evidence
that our minds are still inadequate to reality. The spiritual
1 Schweitzer: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, pp. 399, 401.
138 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
body of Jesus exists and is immortal. Some make their life-
giving contact with it through the Eucharist; for others that
contact is impossible. But they, through the effort of making
the earthly life of Jesus real to themselves, find their souls
possessed by love and veneration for the Prince of men. A
fount of living water is unsealed in them. And it may be
that this, and this alone, is the great Christian experience,
ultimate and eternal, though our ways to it must be our own.' *
Last, I take a passage in which Dr. Grenfell, the heroic
idoctor-missionary of Labrador, describes the sources of his
power :
'Christ means to me a living personality to-day who moves
about in this world, and who gives us strength and power as
we endure by seeing Him Who is invisible only to our fallible
a'nd finite human eyes; just as any other good comrade helps
one to be brave and do the right thing. Faith was essential for
that conviction fifty years ago. To-day with telephones and
radios and X-ray, and our knowledge of matter as only energy,
and now with television within our grasp, there is not the
slightest difficulty in seeing how reasonable that faith is. "The
body of His glorification" passed through closed doors, so the
Apostles said well, why should I be able to see it any more
than I can see an ultra-violet or an ultra-red ray or molecule,
an atom, an electron or a proton? All that those old fellows
claimed was that "now we see through a glass darkly, but then
face to face""
What do we find in all these testimonies taken almost
at random from the crowded literature of Christian real-
ism, and representing a wide variety of temperament and
even of belief? Surely we find a recognizable identity of
experience; an experience which again does not differ in
essentials from that which the Catholic Christian means
by the Real Presence or the Sacred Heart. These vari-
ous souls, approaching from different angles one point,
have discovered that adherence to the Holy, self-offered
at this point in union with man, does actually change
the world for man; raises him to a new and intimate re-
lationship with the beloved Reality, and 'gives eternal
*J. Middleton Hurry: Life of Jesus, p. 316.
a Wilfred Grenfell: What Christ Means to Me, p. 93.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 139
life'. 1 And if in these different ways men have been
able to lay hold on that same living Reality, healed in
the same way the breach between eternity and time, ex-
perienced the same communion in suffering and in service,
been flooded by the same tide of tender feeling, loyalty
and breathless awe then does it very much matter
whether we do or do not manage to determine the exact
proportion in which the human dramatic faculty (itself
God-given) and the direct self-giving of the Holy co-op-
erate to produce this result?
That result seems to be unlike anything else in the
whole range of man's spiritual and emotional life. On
the one hand it is distinct in kind from the metaphysical
passion for God. On the other it is wholly different
from our attachments to our fellow beings, even to those
fellow beings whom we most love and revere. Drawing
emotional and volitional material from both these great
sources of supply it makes of them, as the primitive
Christians saw clearly, a fresh creation 'if any man be
in Christ, he is a new creature'. Christian thought has
wavered in its identification and description of this ex-
perience. Already in the New Testament the line be-
tween 'Spirit' and 'Christ' grows very thin; and this
especially in St. Paul, whose religious range extends,
without any apparent dislocation, from a conversion which
he identifies as the direct work of the risen Jesus, to a
sense of indwelling Spirit which hardly depends on his-
toric incarnation at all, and is nearer the Johannine con-
cept of the Paraclete. But however explained and de-
scribed, the experience is there. It transfigures, enobles
and delights all who receive it with simplicity; and honest
study of the peculiar phase of religious feeling which it
represents, at least forces us to view with suspicion some
xvii, a-8.
MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
of the more dogmatic conclusions of 'religious* psychology,
and consider with respect the persistent and successful
use by devotional souls of this intuitive pathway to
Reality.
It is true that psychologists have found it easy, or
think they have found it easy, to analyse the Christian's
'sense of a presence' and attendant feeling of confidence
and power, and expose the disconcerting nature of its
constituents. Certainly in the religious complex as else-
where, phantasy is never wholly absent; and may easily
gain control of an uncritical mind. The clergyman in
The Veil of the Temple whose litany led up to the fervent
petition: 'Hands of Mary, which drip with myrrh,
fondle us!' 1 represents a type of piety that few would
desire to save from the clutches of the analyst. But it
is not primarily the 'sense of a presence' in its merely
consoling and compensatory aspects, with which we are
now concerned. It is rather the more substantial claim
to a genuine contact with supernatural sources of life,
given by means of this concession to our human limita-
tions ; a contract resulting in total re-direction of impulse,
vigorous and costly self-discipline, and consequent en-
hancement of power.
Once more, as in the historic incarnation, we seem to
be confronted with a special self-expression of the Infinite
God, in terms of a transcendent personality. We may
allow that the human tendency to dramatize, personify
its material, does play a part in an experience which must
always remain among the most sacred mysteries of the
spiritual life. We may admit the probable influence in
various degrees first of 'projection' the externalizing of
our secret longings, intuitions and beliefs next of 'regres-
sion', the tendency to retreat from the difficulties of life
1 W. H. Mallock: The Veil of the Temple, p. 137.
SELF-GIVEN IN PERSONALITY 141
and take refuge in a childlike attitude of dependence; 1
and last of the law of apperception, inevitably and cease-
lessly combining each fresh precept with the content of
the mind, and interpreting the present by the past. That
is to say, the form taken by this, as by all our other experi-
ences, will be governed by history, temperament, religious
environment and cultural level. But that is a crude imi-
tation of true criticism which cannot here discern a sub-
stance, in spite of the bewildering multiplicity of lowly
accidents with which it is given, and the sense-conditioned
mind by which it is received.
One instance among many will serve to illustrate
these propositions. I deliberately choose an example
which many persons will regard as extreme ; the religious
insights and symbolic constructions which are brought
together in the popular Catholic cultus of the Sacred
Heart. This is perhaps the most misunderstood of all
modern devotions, alike by those who love it and those
who are repelled by it. The unfortunate and high-
coloured imagery which is familiar to all of us, and too
much of the pious literature which it has inspired, now
obscure the noble aims and profound intuitions of those
by whom it was first proposed to the Christian mind. For
the great spiritual teachers of the seventeenth century,
the heart was not merely the seat of affection, but rather
the vivid focal point of personality. It was there that
they sought the true nature and meaning of man. Thus,
by the Sacred Heart, they meant the very character of
God and life-principle of the Incarnate: Christus totus,
the divine plenitude of life, love and intelligence, cease-
lessly self-given to men. This was a conception far ex-
ceeding the apparent content of that symbol of yearning
affection and compassion which pictures and statues
, * On the place of these factors in religious experience, see W. Brown:
Mind and Personality , cap. xx.
142 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
crudely and insistently suggest to the imagination.
'The Sacre4 Heart', said the Blessed John Eudes, one
of the founders of this devotion, f is the Holy Spirit':
that energetic divine love which links the Infinite Being
of God and His creative self-expression, and in Christ
becomes the supernatural principle of an action both
human and divine. 1 Surely in this we have a description
of the same substantial experience as that which the
Cambridge Platonist was struggling to express in his own
manner from the opposite edge of the theological fold :
'He is a quickening spirit, all spirit and life. His human
nature is now all spirit, and by having the Godhead, hath the
Fountain of Spirit and Life in itself.' 2
Here then, under symbols which the superior often
find distressing, a little homely door is opened to man
which yet leads out to the Eternal Spaces; and the con-
templative mind is led from the visible divine action,
to its origin in the invisible divine love, and from that
love to the 'sacred heart* which is the Uncreated Centre
of all love and all life. We here pass from 'special mys-
teries' which mediate the Supernatural, to the very Foun-
dation of all mysteries; from act, to principle of action.
Nevertheless we observe that, true to the principle of
incarnation, this sublime conception finds its expression
under the intimate human symbol of a heart burning
with love for man; and offers to the simplest human
feeling something that it can understand a devotion
which might even be called quasi-physical, yet is bound-
less in its metaphysical reach. Thus once more a bridge
is made from the transitory to the Eternal; and the
boundless self-giving of the Infinite is brought by the
path of humanity to men.
1 Cf. H. Bremond: Histoire Littermre dtt Sentiment Religieux en
France, vol. iii, pt. 3, caps, ii and iii.
"Peter Sterry: A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will, p. 131.
CHAPTER VI
THE SUPERNATURAL SELF-GIVEN IN
THINGS: SYMBOLS AND SACRAMENTS
Adoro te devote, la tens Deltas,
Quae sub his figuris vere latitas.
->-'' ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
That all our knowledge -begins with experience there can
be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition
should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means
of objects that affect our -senses? . . . But though all our
knowledge begins wxtk experience, it by no means follows that
all arises out of experience^
EMMANUEL KANT
The Majesty of God hath in some sort suffered itself to be
circumscribed to corporall limits. His supernatural! and cel-
estiall sacraments bear signs of our terrestriall condition.
MONTAIGNE
This sign works exopere operato, but only within the limita-
tion that the recipient be patient of the creative action.
A. N. WHITEHEAD
WITH that expansion of the spiritual horizon, and
that deepening of awe, which comes to the emerging
religious consciousness of man, there comes too a realistic
perception of our own true status over against the great
reality of God. We perceive our littleness and immatur-
ity; the uncertainty of our touch, the haziness and the
narrow limits of our human understanding even at its
best all that is meant by 'creatureliness'. That human
understanding may indeed seem remarkable when meas-
ured by planetary and evolutionary standards. Those
who only see in man a 'greater ground-ape* have every
143
144 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
right to regard him as a very successful and intelligent
specimen of his class. But this intelligence soon reveals
its inadequacy when we try to use it on the material
proposed by our nascent transcendental sense. It fails us
completely when we seek to apply it to ultimates, as
those who have looked deepest into divine things have
always been the first to realize. 'The divinest and the
highest of the things perceived by the eyes of the body
or the mind', says Dionysius the Areopagite, 'are but the
symbolic language of things subordinate to Him who
Himself transcendeth them all.* x Or, as his fourteenth-
century follower tersely puts it, 'Of God Himself can
no man think.' 2
This limitation is as true to-day as it was when the
antique and the mediaeval contemplatives wrote of their
ascents into the 'divine cloud'. Our brain has been de- *''
veloped in close association with sensory mechanisms,
and sharply reminds us of the fact directly we attempt
to transcend them. We cannot 'think Absolutes' save by
image and analogy. Hence the large part played by
symbol and image in all vigorous human religions; the
thinness and dryness which afflicts those systems which
insist on their rejection, forgetting the humbling truth
that the finite mind's apprehension of universals must ever
be symbolic and oblique. We cannot, in fact, in our c
present status directly conceive or experience 'pure' spirit.
The claim to do so is merely a piece of intellectual
arrogance, which honest self-analysis is enough to cure.
We can only experience spirit when mixed with some
sense-element; and though in the highest reaches of reli-
gious experience this sense-element may become so tenuous
as to be almost imperceptible, a candid examination will
yet discover it. Even the Quaker's inner light, or the
1 De Myst. TheoL, cap. i. 3 Cloud of Unknowing, cap. vi.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 145
'divine dark' of negative mysticism, even the contempla-
tive's ineffable conviction of union with God, carry with
them a visual or tactile reference which involves at least
a faint sensual reaction. Those have not been among
the least of the saints who have recognized in the Beatific
Vision itself some equivalent for the sense-conditioned
experiences of men; and been humble enough to accept
the supernatural with and through these its natural veils.
'What do I love when I love Thee?' says St. Augustine.
'I love a certain kind of light, and voice, and fragrance, and
a kind of food and embrace, when I love my God: a light,
melody, fragrance, food, embrace of the inner man. Where
for my soul that shines which space does not contain, that
sounds which time does not sweep away, that is fragrant which
the breeze does not dispel, and that tastes sweet which when
fed upon is not diminished, and that clings close which no
satiety disparts.' 1
So too his English pupil:
'And we shall endlessly be all had in God, Him verily
seeing and fully feeling, Him spiritually hearing and Him
delectably smelling and sweetly swallowing.' 2
'For Thou/ says Nicolas of Cusa, 'dost abide where speech,
sight, hearing, taste, touch, reason, knowledge and comprehen-
sion merge in one.' 8
Such sayings as these seem to point to a vast sub-
limation of that here-and-now conviction of reality which
our senses give us upon levels accessible to all: to a pos-
sible stretching out and up of the soul, through sense,
to that which is beyond sense a transfiguration in which
the whole of man's composite nature shall, in its own
way, experience God. Hence these confessions of the
saints should be enough to save us from that implicit
vulgarity which despises the externals of religion and
*St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. X, cap. 6.
a Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, cap. xlii.
"Nicolas of Cusa: The Vision of God, cap. x.
146 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
our quasi-physical responses to grace; and tries; in the
true spirit of the parvenu, to advertise its advancement
by the unworthy expedient of leaving old acquaintances
behind. And as a matter of fact, I think most persons
who have received direct religious impressions would
probably be found to agree, that those which were con-
densed into some symbolic form whether woven into
words or pictures, or connected with dogmatic concep-
tions were recalled far more easily than those momen-
tarily more impressive but elusive 'pure experiences'
which seem entirely independent of our sensory mechan-
isms. These, it is true, have the 'noetic quality'; but
only those who have experienced it know how maddening
the 'noetic quality' can be. ( In so far as our half-devel-
oped and limited minds can be said to 'know' anything
of their mysterious environment, it is plain that they
know the world of the senses best; and that without
some sensory reference, they are incapable of conceptual
thought. This at least is equally true for realists and
idealists. Cut oil from all sense-stimulation, conceitedly
rejecting the outward as a mediation of the inward,
most of us are merely left sooner or later at the mercy
of the vagaries of the dream-consciousness. We cannot
in this easy way divide our bodies and our souls, and
renounce our racial inheritance.
It is true that for our spiritual consciousness or at
least, that which reaches the level of mystical experience
only the immediate is recognized as truly and fully
real. No symbol or particular can be identified with
God: and in those rare moments when intuition seems
to apprehend Him, all image appears to be banished
from the mind. Nevertheless God, Who is present with
all things, can be and is mediated to us by means of
particular things.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 147
^Because God is Spirit, and because man is spirit and is more
and more to constitute himself a personality, it does not follow
that man is to effect this solely by means of spirits and per-
sonalities, divine and human. . . . But, as in all mental appre-
hension and conviction there is always, somewhere, the element
of the stimulation of the senses, so also does the spirit awaken
to its own life and powers, on occasion of contact and conflict
with material things, v Hence Eternal Life will (here below at
least) not mean for man aloofness from matter and the bodily
senses, nor even a restriction of their use to means of spiritual
self-expression; but it will include also a rich and wise contact
with, and an awakening by means of, matter and things. 1 *
This, the truth on which sacramentalism rests, covers
indeed all religious practices. It witnesses to their
fruitfulness and necessity; to man's need -of a concrete
world in which his instinct for the Transcendent can,
assert itself, and, by attaching itself to symbols, achieve
expression. The 'immediate experience' is rare, \ and be-
cause of its apparent authority is much subject to illu-
sion. Moreover it cannot be procured at will; but is,
as theology says, a 'given grace'. Without impugning
its reality, we may agree that it cannot be the normal
means of human intercourse with God.
In Gerhard Hauptmann's play of Hannele a dying
child in the loveless squalor of a pauper refuge is visited
and consoled by angels which appear to her like the
brightly coloured figures of a German Christmas card
and is at last received by Christ; whose face is the
kindly face of the one human being who had ever shown
her some compassion and love. Yet, none the less, the
poet makes us feel that Hannele's experience mediated
though it be by images and symbols at the level of her
understanding and desire is in the deepest sense a true
experience; and that Christ and the angels are verily
with her in this quaint disguise. And theology can afford
to allow this : and on the same count to throw the mantle
*F. von Hugel: Eternal Life, p. 389.
I 4 8 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
of charity over many devotions repugnant to superior
minds. For, according to the profound teaching of
Nicolas of Cusa, within the Absolute Vision of God all
limited modes of vision are subsumed; and every limited
vision partakes of that Absolute by which it exists, and
without which it could not be. 1
Thus we need not be ashamed to admit, that there
is necessarily something of Hannele in all our apprehen-
sions of Reality. 'We are bound by our situation to inter-
pret our relations with it in human, approximate, and
historical ways, if we are indeed to feed our life on That
which transcends yet permeates all life.) 'Pure thought',
'pure conation', 'pure communion' all these abstract and
largely imaginary purities must find some expression, in
the end, in particulars; because it is for the apprehension
of particulars that our finite minds are framed. This
embodiment, it is true, will spoil their 'pureness'; but it
will give them actuality, link them with our life. Only
in some such humbling limitation of the soul's freedom,
such an impingement on things, can we hope to bring
Reality into concrete action. The spiritual mind, im-
patient of limitation, tends like a comet to rush off into
space. It craves 'the bare desert of the Godhead, where
no one is at home*. But even so, we notice that it is
still under earthly symbols that the most exalted of con-
templatives describes the haven of his desire: and if he
is not to be lost for ever in the Unconditioned, he is
drawn back in the end to the small and ordered system
of which, after all, he is a part.
Thus there is a sense in which the charge brought by
psychology against religious persons, of constructing and
externalizing their own objects of devotion, is often true
and capable of defence. > Examples of this abound. One
1 The Vision of God, cap. ii.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 149
known to us all is the ideal figure of the Madonna;
which has been and is the focus of so much intense
religious feeling, yet certainly is not a realistic or his-
torical presentation of our Lord's Mother, the Galilean
carpenter's wife. Christian feeling has built up this fig-
ure; but this does not mean that through it no objective
spiritual fact is reached. It only means that when the
mind is dealing with such difficult realities, it is driven
to use to the utmost its image-making power; and that
the Supernatural, which is not far from any one of us,
may thus become accessible alike to the most sophisticated
and most childish faith.
f The situation of man is this: his contact with the
world is brought about by a body. He lives and develops
mainly by intercourse with, and increased understanding
of, that level and aspect of the universe which we call
physical. He must deal with the hard and resistant stuff
of things, if he is to maintain his sense of reality. This
being so, how hopeless his position would be, if God,
to Whom of his own strength he can never attain, did
not come to him through the very things which at every
turn limit and educate him ! j We know now that a baby
brought up on 'rational' lines, without any expression of
the mother's love on the level of its own small sensory
cravings and emotional understanding, will grow up in
a dangerously self-centered loneliness; its potential rer
sponses perverted or undeveloped. 1 A lofty and hygienic
parental affection is no more use to the lonely baby than
the chilly respectabilities of Cosmic Emotion are to the
lonely spirit of man. Both must be met on their own
level, if they are to grow in a normal way and develop
all their capacities. The humble condescension of Infinite
Spirit to the infantile spirits of men that movement in
1 William Brown: Mind and Personality, p. 190.
150 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
which Julian saw 'all the fair working and all the sweet
natural office of dearworthy Motherhood' 1 = must reach
us and be recognized even on the level of sense, if it is
also to be recognized and assimilated by our babyish
souls.
This necessary concomitance the intimate relation in
the compound human creature of all physical and mental
events gives great importance to the external accompani-
ments of spiritual experience. For the one level reacts
upon the other; the sensory stimulus sets going the emo-
tional series, and mysteriously prepares the supersensual
path. 'Although we cannot reach God by the faculty
of sense', says St. Thomas, 'yet through signs that can
be perceived by the senses the mind is^stimulated in its
aim towards God.' 2 The ritual emphasis on posture and
action the bent knee, the folded hands, the shut eyes-ra
all this prepares and deepens paths of discharge for
transcendental feeling. It sets up associations between the
life of soul and body; and gets ready for that inflorescence
of the life of prayer, in which the whole man working
in unity becomes the tool of God. /''How much stimulus
the symbolic experience of the transcendent offered by
ceremonial religion will thus give to the soul, depends
chiefly on the quality of the reference of which that
soul is capable. And this quality of content and reference
hinges in its turn not only on the soul's degree of matur-
ity, purity and insight; but also on its spiritual culture*
the concepts it has received through history and tradition,
and through contact with more deeply spiritual selves^)
We have all experienced this truth, in the variation of
our own susceptibility to liturgic acts and words: and
in our knowledge that these same acts and words, which
1 Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, cap. lix.
*SumtM Theologica, Pars. II, Q. 84, I.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS
j
often turn a blank face to us, glow with celestial bright-
ness for the saints.
/Thus the external accompaniments of interior com-
munioneach verbal formula, each organic movement
and percept, inevitably carrying some mental and spiritual
reference cannot safely be disregarded or despised by
us. In fact, cultus, exterior devotion, may rightly be
considered in 'religious regard* as an actual evoker and
support of the interior state. It is not only dramatic
action, ritual or liturgy which does this: all concrete em-
bodiments of the religious (dea the lit shrine, the beloved-
image may do it too. /Human instinct in its vague
reaching-out towards the' supernatural, has always tended
to make special places, traps as it were for the celestial
sunshine. It has always set apart and held precious,
certain suggestive objects, actions, and ideas; which carry
a weight of meaning, a halo of significance stretching far
beyond appearance, and are able to release from succes-
sion the mind that surrenders to their appeal. Those who
too hastily and contemptuously cast away all this 'cere-
monial religion*, 'mechanical religion', 'emotional reli-
gion', and so forth, risk the disconcerting discovery that
the Inhabitant of the house has gone away with the last
van-load of furniture, and nothing remains but a few
empty tins and a sink.
It matters much that religious expression should weave
together our visible and invisible life; that we should
give the senses and the muscular system, something to do
which has a supernatural reference. Our experience of
God varying as it must and should between soul and
soul will not be a safe experience if it rejects all physical
paths; and creates a harsh opposition between the body
we cannot get rid of and the spirit by which it is informed.
152 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
For the call of the Transcendent is a call to the whole
man, and not to a particular distilled essence of him;
and the demand made upon him is, that he shall strive
to incarnate within the time series, and in closest contact
with the world of the senses, the supersensual gift of
Eternal Life.
It is surely the firm determination of Christianity
thus to anchor the transcendental to the natural, to re-
mind us that Mary and Martha are sisters and ought
to live under the same roof, which constitutes its solid
power. Christianity brings in plain fact at each stage;
insists at every turn that we are human beings conditioned
by the physical world, even while rising in thought and
prayer above it. The Incarnation, tKe Christian Com-
munity, the Sacraments, are particular historical, social
and sensible witnesses to that universal Reality which
lies beyond the world of sense. These hold the adven-
turous air-ship of human religion firmly and safely to
the planet to which, after all, it belongs: while allowing
it to ascend to the upper air, and vastly to enlarge the
scope of its outlook and experiences. Thence it returns
to find new significance and true intimations of the Super-
natural in the environment of common life. / Christianity
in fact recognizes the humbling truth that man's normal
contact with Absolutes can and must only be through
symbols: that is to say, particular images or objects of
sense, which carry for the perceiving mind a supersensual
reference.^
But it is the peculiar mark of Christianity that its
most significant symbols can and at best do retain
their own full life and actuality, their factualness, with-
out diminishment of their symbolic office. Thus the life
of Jesus, in its whole drift and incidents, is none the
less a real life, entirely human and historic, because it
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 153
is the supreme mode in which divine values are conveyed
to men. fThe symbol, completely existent as a particular
within the physical world, is here charged with the values
of the universal ; it is fully real on both planes, and hence
a bridge between 'the unseen and the seen'. /; )On this
count the conviction of all great Christians, that the
actual incidents in the life of Jesus have a meaning and
value which transcend history, and were the exact and
essential media for the conveyance of spiritual truth to
the souls of men, is philosophically reasonable. It justifies
that trend in mediaeval thought which closely associated
man's 'salvation* with a drama worked out on physical
levels by means of the brute things of the earth, and
found in the historic Passion the concentrated image
of a vast supernatural truth.
It is this thought of the emergence in history of that
which transcends time 'fore-ordained before the founda-
tion of the world', yet entering under living symbols the
successive life of one small planet and 'manifest in these
last times for you' 1 which gives the New Testament
writers their characteristic note of joyous awe. And
surely all but the most obtuse can still recognize a super-
natural message on the cell-wall at Florence, where Fra
Angelico has painted his strange vision of the various
'instruments of the Passion' the scourge, the mocking
face, the nails, the lance, the sponge emerging out of
the Invisible to awaken the soul's adoring grief; giving
these hard material things for evermore imperial status
among the means of man's actualization of the Love of
God. It is here, rather than in his flowery Paradise,
that Angelico proved himself a truly Christian artist.
\ For Christianity of all religions most steadily and sternly
rebukes all our attempts to get away from the concrete
J I Peter i. ao.
154 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
into a region of pious day-dream. ^She will not tolerate
any arrogant rejection of ordinary life. She finds in-
effable grace imparted through common food, a royal
humility taught by a bowl of water and a towel; and
at last, when the soul's self-giving must yield to the
soul's endurance, and charity be made perfect in suffer-
ing, she links her spituial victory to the pain-inflicting
power of common wood and iron.
'Dulce lignum, dulces clavoq,
Dulce pondus sustinent.'
This is the sufficient answer to those psychologists who
regard religion as an escape from reality; and it finds
its full expression in the Christian sacramental life, as
really lived by the real saints.
\Thus we see that we cannot properly separate incar-
nationalism from symbolism. They shade into one an-
other. They are both exhibitions of the prime truth that
human beings are not able to apprehend spirit unmingled
with sense; that they need an embodiment for their abso-
lute intuitions, and will seek and find the presence of the
Infinite not only in personality but also in things. Here
the history of religion, and an inspection of the con-
stituents of our human nature, lead us to an identical
conclusion namely, that it will be along sensory and
sacramental channels that the supersensual tide will first
flood our inland souls. For, if the fullest and most inti-
mate disclosure of the Infinite has indeed been made to
us through human personality if in the life of Jesus of
Nazareth the Godhead really accomplished its supremely
characteristic self-expression in relation to man then we
cannot regard such a self-manifestation of God as a soli-
tary occurrence. If it were so, we could not recognize its
real quality. It must rather be the crowning example
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 155
of that many graded Divine self-revelation, of which the
visible world is the medium : summing up and explaining
a multitude of lesser theophanies. Thus regarded, the
Incarnation creates for us an absolute standard; whereby
spiritual facts and values can be discerned within, yet
Distinct from, the world of time. It assures us of the
supernatural as everywhere present with, and yet other
than, the natural ; insisting that 'neither does God's spirit _
live all aloof from man's spirit, nor does man's spirit
live all aloof from man's body, or from this physical
body's physical environment. On the contrary, through-
out reality, the greater works in and with and through
the lesser, affecting and transforming this lesser in vari-
ous striking degrees and ways'. 1 Physical life, the world
process, the whole company of Things, are therefore
given a derived sanctity, as possible media of the fullest
and humblest self-impartings of God.
Moreover, the same law seems to be operative within
the field of secret religious experience; where pure intui-
tion cannot long maintain itself, or even become explicit,
without some resort to the machinery of sense. Hence
the vision seen, the voice heard, by mystics of a certain
type though in themselves capable of a wholly psycho-
logical explanation may be the media of supernatural
impressions of the most genuine kind ; and those who dis-
miss them as merely pathological are guilty of an unscien-
tific haste. In many of these reported experiences, we
can almost recognize the desperate effort of the fore-
conscious mind to provide an artistic framework able to
carry a whole new order of perceptions: for these per-
ceptions can only reach consciousness by way of the self's
sensory mechanisms. Thus a significant picture surges
; unforgettable words, curiously charged with meaning,
. von Hugel: Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion,
Series I, p. 5 g.
156 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
fall sharp upon the inward ear; a new glory suddenly
lights up the external world. The picture, the phrase, the
illumination, are manifestly symbolic; and many of the
greatest contemplatives have recognized that they are so.
They may not seem to other selves adequate to their
supposed content; but the choice of the experiencing soul
is inevitably restricted to its own store of images, and
these images carry a different quality of significance for
every mind. In any event the images, however impres-
sive, do not constitute the essence of the experience: the
essence consists in the something else, the Otherness, the
Absolute Present which is conveyed by means of these
auditory or visual mechanisms with their human, ter-
restrial, and historical attachments. Certainly self-sug-
gestion or disease may set these mechanisms going too
even the greatest saint, as theology prudently assures us,
may be 'deceived by the devil' but then the result will
not be the 'certitude, joy and peace* of Eternal Life.
In all such types of religious experience the sensory
contribution is found on investigation to be drawn from
the self's stock of memories and beliefs: though it may
be so realistically presented as to produce genuine hallu-
cination. Thus St. Teresa, though fully aware of the
representational character of visions, sometimes thought
it was Christ Himself who appeared physically to her: 1
whilst non-Christian mystics have received under forms
agreeable to their own cultus intimations of the super-
sensual world. At the other extreme the sensory material
may be so sublimated that it merely carries a sufficient
pictorial or verbal reference to redeem the intuition from
entire inefrability ; as when Angela of Foligno 'saw God
darkly' yet 'saw .nought that can be related of the tongue
nor imagined in the heart'. 2 In other words, the vision
cap. xxv.
2 Angela of Foligno: Book of Divine Consolations, p. x8i.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 157
or audition may be 'exterior' or 'intellectual' in type. The
distinction does not seem to be important. What does
matter is the aura of association carried by the image
or significant phrase; the extent in which it fulfils the
symbolic office of releasing from succession the mind that
makes use of it, and opens a window upon Eternity.
Such a dependence on the physical as a channel of
transcendental experience is not of course confined to
the religious field. Our apprehensions of the sublime,
whether in nature or art, are always of an indirect and
sacramental character. A very little reflection is enough
to convince us of this. When we are awed by the intol-
erable majesty of the Himalaya, when we look, with a
sense of strangeness, at the lonely hostile beauty of the
Eismeer only water at a low temperature after all or
taste the sense of infinity which is mediated by a strictly
finite desert landscape, we are merely receiving through
symbols adapted to our size, intimations of the Absolute
Beauty, the concrete universal, from which all our ex-
perience proceeds. With an increase in our own stature,
a change in our optic nerve, or a reduction of scale in
those corrugations of the planet which now evoke the
emotions of reverence and joy, these symbols would cease
to convey the sublime to us. Thus for most of us a
thunderstorm, that unfailing witness of the 'numinous'
to primitive man, has ceased to carry any supernatural
reference. Ants and bees, should they ever develop
the human instinct for absolutes, would find in another
series of symbols the intimations we discover at our own
level, and in our own way, of the Supernatural indwelling
and yet transcending life. For no symbol is capable in
itself of giving 'pure' beauty or holiness ; any more than
the easy blankness of the quietist is capable of giving
'pure' contemplation. Looking at an object which is
158 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
'beautiful' or 'sacred' for us, we are if we receive a
genuine aesthetic or religious impression passing through
and beyond this object, to the experience of an Absolute
revealed in things.
It is true that the Beautiful, thus presented, seems
to require of us an immediate veneration for its own
sake. Here is the most perfect apparent fusion of sense
and spirit: the Transcendental is given in the thing,
and in such a manner that we cannot separate substance
and accident. A Beethoven sonata, the Samothracian
Nike so too the shock of an imperial sunrise, or a sud-
denly discovered soldanella alone in a wilderness of
icy shale directly satisfy the feeling they evoke; which
the religious symbol often fails to do. But it is a peculi-
arity of the religious symbol that it need not be beautiful
~--ih order to be effective; a point which its critics often
fail to understand./ It is only required to set going the
necessary trains of association which arouse absolute feel-
ing, and this can be done without any appeal to the
aesthetic faculty: for the Holy, though manifested in the
Beautiful, can be found apart from it.
Thus the crude image, the simplest suggestion, may
do just as well for religion as the aesthetic masterpiece:
often indeed better, because it offers a freer passage, a
wider range of interpretation to the many grades of soul
using this great human highway towards God and this
character alone qualifies objects of sense to be considered
in supernatural regard. It is the failure of the symbol
to perform this, its true office, which creates the recurrent
demand for a rejection of 'outward form' in the supposed
interests of pure inwardness. \For there are two ways of
using symbols. They may and should be gateways
through which news comes to the sense-conditioned mind
from the supersensual world: -like the royal doors of the
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 159
iconostasis, which open to reveal something of the mys-
teries within. But they may also become substitutes for
reality; decorated screens set up between the soul and
the Eternal, and merely offering to it a series of images
or objects on which to spend surplus emotion in a pious
wav^i Religious history wavers between these extremes.
Where the exact form of the symbol becomes the subject
of anxious thought, and the graded and poetic character
of its message is ignored, we are entering the danger zone ;
and leaving the atmosphere of the New Testament, with
its wide and generous attitude towards the visible, its
bracing reminder that all religious externals and ordi-
nances were 'made for man'.
( As a stimulant of the supernatural sense, the symbol
which remains at the level of suggestion is often far
more effective than that which attempts the impossible
task of representation: for all efforts to conceive the
Absolute by intellectual means, and give it adequate
presentation, inevitably lead us to a diagrammatic view
of Reality the poorest and least adequate of all our
categories. /Mathematical symbols, without emotional
reference, notoriously produce this result: whilst a few
simple signs, carrying with them an aura of suitable asso-
ciations as for instance in Eucharistic worship can at
once bridge the gap between the successive and the Eternal
world. Thus when the deacon on Easter Eve cries
'Lumen Christi!' and holds up his flower-wreathed taper
in the lampless church, enough has been said and done.
The historic origin and exact theological justification
of the chosen image here matter little, so long as the
meaning it carries is accepted with simplicity : for symbols
are parts of the great picture-language in which man
once dealt with all his bewildering experience, and still
deals best with the deepest and most mysterious levels
160 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
of his life. Apprehension and sentiment alike are here
given him through an object to which his perceptive
powers are adjusted. Yet they are concerned with vast
uncharted tracts of experience lying beyond that object;
which has as its office the evocation of our interior re-
sponse to what is already there. (^Though the degree in
which each type of soul will receive its spiritual food
thus mixed with sense-elements will vary greatly, yet
there must plainly be some such physical reference in
every healthy spiritual life. ;The fact that such a life
seeks in its measure to incarnate, and give physical expres-
sion to the Eternal, makes this inevitable. Reflecting on
these facts, we are no longer amazed that Christian
initiation is accomplished by 'a little oil, a little water,
some fragments of bread and a chalice of wine'.
'Genuine divination, or apprehension of the transcendent
through symbols', as Otto most justly says, 'is not concerned at
all with the way in which a phenomenon be it event, person,
or thing came into existence, but with what it means; that
is, with its significance as a "sign" of the holy.' 1
Here our spiritual apprehensions seem to work upon
the same lines as do our other levels of reaction to ex-
istence; where again and again, under analysis, we find
a simple and significant image opening up a true exper-
ience of the unseen.
One day at the Zoo a desert antelope (probably con-
cerned for sugar) came to the bars as I was passing and
gazed into my face. And suddenly the bars, the concrete
floor, and all the stable-like surroundings vanished; and
I saw, through the creature so firmly fixed in those here-
and-now surroundings, the wild, free and anxioiis x iife
of the desert a whole non-human world. The antelope
had abruptly entered the symbolic sphere, and become
1 R. Otto: The Idea of the Holy, p. 149.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 161
capable of mediating universals. Thus to see through *
and beyond Things, and by their help to enter a world
which transcends those particular things, is one of the
queer prerogatives of man. A whole world and level of
being was gathered up and made accessible to me in that
tawny agile body, those soft and eager nostrils, those keen
yet melancholy eyes. Yet so little does the authentic
origin of the symbol matter that my antelope, as a matter
of fact, was born in the Zoo.
II
IF by means of the symbol, and the symbolic and
aesthetic use of objects, man has a certain access to
the supernatural, a limited contact with the Unlimited
One; in those half -physical religious deeds which we
call sacraments, a further stage in his spiritual education
seems to be reached. 'Something is here done by and
/'
to him, by means of natural objects used in supernatural
regard. A gift is made to him in ways that are specially
appropriate to his situation; placed as he is upon the
frontiers of the natural and spiritual worlds. /For if the
symbol is an evoking sign, a condensed, sensible presenta-
tion of Something Other; the sacrament is an efficacious
sign, whereby this Something Other is truly given/ It
is a genuine embodiment of the Eternal, a communica-
tion of the supernatural with and through natural acci-
dents. r Panem de caelo praestitistl eis: omne delectamen-
tum in se habentem. 3 x '/ Thus the symbol, the thing,
through which men reached out to and apprehended the
Infinite, now becomes the path by which the ever-present
Infinite itself, with its own fresh dower of life and
grace, comes into the little lives of rnen.^ As in great
L
I
1 Breviarium Romanian: In Festo Corporis Christi.
162 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
poetry linked words are suffused with an unearthly glow
and splendour, and carry a heightened significance far
beyond their literal meaning :? so in the sacraments, things
and deeds which emerge from the common stock of human
experience are suffused with a supernatural splendour
and become for the soul genuine Vehicles of grace'.) Per-
haps those who have most fully realized the latent power
of conveying the supra-sensible which is possessed by
certain sounds and certain things, and is evoked by their
artistic use, will come nearest to understanding what
the sacramental use of objects is, and tries to do yet
how truly 'given', how completely independent of the
little earthly sacramentalist or artist, is the beauty and
otherness thus conveyed.
The Christian theist does or should deserve the term
'sacramental' for this real self-giving of Spirit along the
channels of sense; and symbol for that object or image
which evokes in us an intuition of the Transcendent,
or creates for religious emotion a suitable path of dis-
charge.) We ought therefore to resist the diffuse applica-
tion of 'sacrament' to any and every natural act and
thing which seems to carry a religious reference. Much
of the vague modern talk of 'wayside sacraments' is only
pantheism in a surplice and stole, and blurs the distinction
between the vehicle and the gift. The genuine sacrament,
whether Christian or pagan, is a condensed and dynamic
exhibition and communication of the Transcendent, by
means of certain deliberately chosen physical acts and
- things, wherein the stuff of our sensory experience be-
comes the stuff of our spiritual experience too. Hence
, while it uses symbols, it is far more than a symbol; since
here the supernatural is not merely suggested but actually
conveyed.
Symbols, then, suggest and represent; but sacraments
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 163
work. They always have a dramatic and dynamic quality.
They are special deeds, in which the action proceeds at
two levels. Something genuinely done within the natural
sphere by and to the body a real washing, eating, touch-
ing or anointing involves something genuinely done
within the supernatural sphere by and to the soul. Thus
we have in sacraments 'a clear manifestation of the prin-
ciple which informs the whole universe, the utilization of
lower grades of being for the purpose of the higher, even
the highest'. 1 They give man a sensible experience of
supra-sensible realities; and by means of successive and
particular acts convey the unchanging Universal. For
this reason, they would appear to be of all religious deeds
those most perfectly adapted to our two-fold human
status. The true sacramentalist humbly accepts our bod-
ily limitations. Yet, by and through these very limitations
and under the bewildering conditions which they impose,
he does discover most vividly at work, the ceaseless and
generous divine action ; quickening, feeding, supernatural-
izing the small emergent soul which is so intimately
linked with this its bodily home.
'A thick black veil,' says Newman in a beautiful and cele-
brated passage, 'is spread between this world and the next.
We, mortal men, range up and down it, to and fro, and
see nothing. In the gospel this veil is not removed ; it remains,
but every now and then marvellous disclosures" are made to
us of -what is behind it
'At times we seem to catch a glimpse of a Form which we
shall hereafter see face to face. We approach, and in spite of
the darkness, our hands, or our head, or our brow, or our lips
become, as it were, sensible to the contact of something more
than earthly. We know not where we are, but we have been
bathing in water and a voice tells that it is blood. Or we
have a mark signed upon our foreheads and it spake of Calvary.
Or we^ recollect a hand laid upon our heads, and surely it had
the print of nails in it, and resembled His who with a touch
gave sight to the blind and raised the dead. Or we have been
eating and drinking; and it was not a dream surely that One
*W. Temple: Ckristus Veritas, p. 240.
v
164 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
fed us from His wounded side, and renewed our nature by
the heavenly meat He gave.' 1
Here, in special explication of the sacraments of Cathol-
icism, a theologian who is also a poet describes as only
a poet can hope to do the soul's veritable contact with
the Supernatural through veils and by symbolic deeds.
Is it wonderful that so delicate and mysterious an appre-
hension, wavering between the utterly intangible gift
and the evidently inadequate sign, should be exposed to
easy misunderstandings andf little able to bear the cold
glare of laboratory lights? ^Certainly it is in this sphere
of religion that the difficult tension between the temporal
and the eternal, the visible and the invisible, becomes
most acute; especially on the one hand for those concrete
and logical minds which are compelled to rationalize
every experience, on the other for those 'mystical 5 -souls
in whom the spiritual consciousness is awake. Yet being
what we are, it seems that only a religious practice into
which the sacramental element enters deeply can fully
protect the first type from the cramping and sterilizing
effects of a merely intellectual religion, or support the
second type in those recurrent periods of dereliction when
the inner light seems to vanish ; assuring them of a super-
natural contact wholly independent of our fluctuating
moods. And only this humble and willing reception of
the Holy by ways and means fitted to our common con-
dition, can save either class from ah isolation from their
fellows which might easily become arrogant. Only this,
by its full and willing utilization of our here-and-now
physical status, the interdependence of soul and body, can
sufficiently accentuate the creaturely quality of man.
When we look at the whole history of redemptive
religion, its gradual discovery of those profound wants
1 Parochial Sermons, vol. v, I.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 165
which Christian supernaturalism meets, we see how
homely and yet how transcendental is the ministry of its
sacraments. For man, wherever awakened to ultimates,
ever finds in himself two great needs, which cannot be
satisfied from within; the need of purification, the need
of support. He requires at the very least an initial cleans-
ing, to mark his transference from an earthly to a
heavenly citizenship ; from the self-regarding and instinct-
ridden life of the human- animal to the free, God-regard-
ing life of the human spirit. He needs too a constant
feeding, if he is to maintain this his new status, and
the germ of supernatural life within him is to expand.
His emerging spirit must be accompanied step by step by
the ceaseless support and self-giving of the Eternal, its
healing, restoring, energizing power, if it is to grow up
to its full stature. Thus signs of the hidden Other, even
appointed trysting-places, are not enough for him. He
needs to be assured of the utter and childlike dependence
of his tiny spirit on God's Being of the fact that its very
life hangs upon an actual infusion of the ,J.ife of the
Other of all that religion means by 'grace'. \ This infu-
sion, this gift if it is to meet the conditions of our
common nature- cannot be brought home to him by way
of some 'pure' but elusive experience; only apprehensible
in certain states of soul, or by certain 'spiritual' types of
men. It must come by the pathways of sense, through
that physical order to which every soul is attuned. By
ordinary water, as well as by Spirit; by ordinary bread
and wine, as well as by the supra-sensible Food.
The sacraments are a perpetual witness that man thus
needs something done to him, here and now. They de-
clare that an access of Supernature is needed, which he
cannot get alone: and that this access of Supernature
will reach him most easily along natural paths. Their
166 MAN AND JHE SUPERNATURAL
f -x
whole emphasis is on this ^iven-ness; They remind us
that our innate thirst for the Infinite is not the govern-
ing fact of our religious life, and cannot be satisfied by
any effort we are able to make. That Infinite must come
to us before we can go to it ; and it is within the sensory
and historical frame of human experience that such super-
natural gifts are best and most surely received by our
successive and sense-conditioned souls. Thus the sacra-
mental principle continues to press upon us that profound
truth which the Incarnation so vividly exhibits: that the
whole of man's spiritual history, both corporate and
solitary, involves and entirely rests in the free self-giving
of God is conditioned from first to last by the action
of His all-penetrating, prevenient and eternal love. 'He
it is that desireth in thee and He it is that is desired.
He is all, and He doth all, if thou might but see Him.' 1
Through the Christian sacraments that self-giving, of
which the Incarnation is the supreme example, finds an-
other and a continuous expression: sense here becoming
the vehicle through which the very Spirit of Life enters
into the little lives of men.
This profound truth, that the Universal is best given
to men through the hallowing of particular natural acts
and objects, and not by a precarious abstraction from
the conditions of normal existence, already seems dimly
apprehended in the Pagan sacraments of purification,
feeding, and communion. It is fully explicated in the
Christian scheme; where the only personal petitions of
the Lord's Prayer for food, forgiveness, deliverance
from evil receive their answer in the sacraments of the
Church. Jesus Himself by His baptism accepted a
sacramental dispensation: and if the brilliant suggestion
of Dr. Schweitzer be adopted, and the stories of the feed-
1 Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, Bk. II, cap. 24.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 167
ing of the Four and the Five Thousand relate to a Eu-
charistic meal which ministered to the citizens of the
Kingdom the bread of Eternal Life, His whole method
is then seen to be charged with sacramentalism. 1 That
this should be so is consistent with all that we know of
a revelation made to men in life rather than in statement^
and by One whose loving vision embraced and held to-
gether the perfection of the divine generosity and the
smallest homely details of human life: a revelation which
dealt little in doctrine, and much in significant deed.
For sacraments as such tell us little or nothing; and
modern religious talk about the 'teaching' of the sacra-
ments syrely blurs their real character. They do some-
thing. (They communicate 'otherness', the supernatural,
in the way in which the ordinary man can best receive
it : that is, through things concrete natural things lifted
up by man's hands, not by man's imagination, to meet
the ceaseless self-giving of God. What is given is 'grace',
the energy of God Himself; a genuine participation in
Eternal Life, not information about it. Moreover, here
the sense of history, of the Eternal present within suc-
cession, enters profoundly into the religious experience
of man.| By this humble resort in traditional bodily acts
to the very source of Holiness, he does indeed, as a Kempis
says, 'put his mouth to the hole of the heavenly pipe of
the fountain'; 2 and from within the time-stream, and
under accidents which reflect the moulding influence of
history, tastes of that which transcends history. The
last Christian neophyte meets the first disciples at the
same purifying font under symbolic veils; receives,
through the hand of the accredited agent of the Super-
natural Society laid upon his head, his share in the same
quickening and indwelling Spirit; is fed at the altar with
*Cf. A. Schweitzer: The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, cap. vii, ^
a De Imitatione Christi, Bk. IV, cap. 4.
168 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
the mysterious and unchanging food which has nourished
the souls of the saints.
The richness of meaning, the extended aura of sig-
nificance, which has been acquired by sacramental prac-
tice in its long progress through history, now makes it
possible for us to gather up and express by this method,
at once so 'material' and so 'mystical', and ever more
profound communion of the soul more, of the whole
man with the substance of Eternal Life. Man's super-
natural growth is therefore never to be assessed by the
extent in which he can dispense with such 'outward
means'; but rather by the use that he is able to make of
them. As his capacity for God expands, his sense of
mystery grows more delicate and deeper, so does he learn
more and more to find 'the soul's life, a hunger and a
satisfaction of that hunger, through the taste of feeling
rather than through the sight of reason ; God giving Him-
self through such apparently slight vehicles, in such short
moments, and under such bewilderingly humble veils;
and our poor a priori notions and a posteriori analysis,
thus proved inadequate to the living soul and the living
God.' 1
Thus sacramental religion does open a door, through
which the Infinite comes with its gifts right down into
the common life of our half-animal race; and we, again,
can go out towards it, so far as our love, purity and
courage permit us for this path between the soul and
God is utterly misconceived by us, if we allow ourselves
to think of it as a one-way street. So apparently hedged
in by our most humiliating and least spiritual limitations,
so full of distressing reminiscences of a racial past that
we should like to ignore, it does give in human ways,
1 F. von Hiigel: The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. i, p. 241.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 169
and under human conditions, a veritable access to Ulti-
mates.
Especially in the Eucharist, the aura of associations
seems to spread to the very fringes of the created world;
to include the most secret and close of all personal rela-
tionships, and plunge into those mysterious deeps of per-
sonality where the creature in its poverty and weakness
feeds on a generous and abiding life: For here a frame
is made within which each man, at whatever stage of
growth he may be, has access to the incarnate, and thus
to the transcendent, Reality. In the language of theology,
he can here accomplish 'in union with Christ' the sur-
render of his self-hood to God. Since Christ's Incarna-
tion stands for the Christian as the most perfect
self-expression of Reality in terms of space and time,
complete continuity is here established between the full-
ness of the supernatural generosity and the heart-breaking
wonder of human sacrificial love; between every level of
creation visible and invisible the vine and wheat, the
sunny terrace and ploughland the 'star-dust and the
planet', the Angels, Archangels and all the Company of
Heaven and the first holy feeding in the Upper Room.
More, continuity between this historic yet eternal act
and every little Christian altar, every adoring act of sprit-
ual communion with the Ever-loving, accomplished within
the hearts of the saints. Whilst the holy Presence is
not limited by its sacramental expression, that sacra-
mental expression is a sign which can convey to men
along the channels by which they receive news from
their physical environment, the assurance that this Pres-
ence is there. It is the taper in the window which tells
us that the Master of the house is at home.
These various metaphors may seem upon the surface
1 70 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
inconsistent. They must be understood as complementary
descriptions of a single yet infinitely rich experience; in
which gift and Giver are somehow recognized as one,
and man's deepest and most diverse needs are met in a
way that he can understand. He is both fed and com-
panioned; finds something at once sensible and supra-
sensible, historical and unchanging; recognizes and
receives the Eternal and Universal by way of personality
mediated through things.f Yielding up his own small life
in free oblation, he receives in so far as he can bear it, the
actual life of the Other ; and is woven into the mystical
body which incarnates the Infinite upon earth. / We sac-
rifice both richness and aliveness if we try to reduce all
this to system and logical plan.
Sacramental communion thus seems able to meet under
sensory and historical symbols the finite spirit's deepest
need. It is, as Ruysbroeck has it, a Way, which 'mani-
fests but cannot comprehend the Wayless'. 1 It communi-
cates an already achieved, an Absolute Perfection, which
that finite spirit craves but can never of itself attain.
And this it does in a manner at once so profound and so
simple that it can satisfy the mighty soul of Aquinas and
yet meet on its own level the vague emergent cravings
of primitive man. As irradiated food-stuffs conserve and
convey the actual values, the life-enhancing power of the
sunlight; so these visible gifts, consecrated, irradiated by
the invisible glory, truly convey the supernatural and
life-giving
'Cibavit eos ex adipe frumenti: et de petra melle saturavit
eos' a
Here the Fully Real with its over-plus of mystery
1 The Book of the Twelve Btgwnes, cap. v.
a Missale Romanum: In Festo Corporis Christi.
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 171
and fascination enters humbly and completely into the
tentative and many-levelled experience of the partly real.
The condensed, quasi-physical act and experience open
up paths along which the soul can enter into a spiritual
and perpetual act and experience. The Presence specially
perceived in connection with simple visible accidents, at
a special point of penetration of spirit into thing, is dis-
covered as a perpetually self-giving Food. 'Sense
quenches soul' and passes through the natural dispensa-
tion created by God to a certain metaphysical tasting of
God in Himself. Hence the awe and delight, the shamed
penitence and loving wonder, which sweep the soul of the
little creature thus met as it were on its own ground.
Therefore,' says Angela of Foligno, 'whoever meaneth to
come unto this most holy Sacrament must consider to whom he
cometh, how he cometh, and for what reason. For he cometh
unto a certain Good Thing, which is itself all good; yet it is
Itself the only good, without which there can be none other.
This Good Thing sufficeth and filleth everything, satisfying all
the saints and holy spirits, all those who are justified by grace,
and all the souls and bodies of the blessed who reign in ever-
lasting glory. . . . O Good Supreme, unconsidered, unknown,
unloved, but found by those who with their whole hearts
entirely do desire Thee!' 1
Moreover, if thus by things of sense we lay hold of
and receive the Supernal; so too from this contact with
the Supernal we come back to an entirely new and rev-
erent apprehension of things. We learn to recognize
the intimations of sense as themselves genuine if incom-
plete revelations of Reality: signs shown to our con-
ditioned minds out of the infinite richness and mystery
of that physical universe, of which we are ourselves a
tiny part and wherein is our bodily home. Thus each
smallest thing in our limited yet thickly peopled world of
things becomes to us of unbounded interest and worth,
1 Angela of Foligno: Book of Divine Consolations, p. 135.
172 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
and carries an eternal reference. Each single soft note
falling on the ear, each delicate gradation of light re-
ceived by the eye, is recognized and evaluated as a point
of insertion through which man receives a message from
the mysterious universe, which sometimes in its solemn
wholeness he can dimly apprehend. What wonder then
if this message is sometimes charged with a significance
exceeding that of the apparent world; if the blackbird's
song conveys melodies that lie beyond music, and the
unfolding beech-leaves are fringed with celestial light?
Yet the acknowledgement of symbols and sacraments
as true bridges to Reality, specially calculated to meet
and satisfy the needs of the whole man, weaving together
his double nature and double capacities this must never
mean for us the equation of sacraments and grace, a bind-
ing down of the soul to this one means of access to the
Transcendent, j Still less must it mean any arbitrary
limitation of the Transcendent to this one method of self-
giving to the human soul. The very gospel which shows
to us Christ as the Bread of Life, gives us that same
Reality under other compensating images as well. Here
we need specially that humble suppleness, that delicate
yet widely inclusive discrimination on which the balance,
health and beauty of the spiritual life so greatly depend.
We have to avoid the rough and ready solution; the
crude antithesis between inward and outward, the poison-
ous 'either ... or' of controversy, the doctrinaire notions
of those who are certain that the same diet must be given
to every child. It is only as seen within the richly vari-
ous, many-graded, and intensely living world of spirit, as
penetrated through and through by its generous life and
bringing that life to us along quasi-sensual paths never
as a device that works with mechanical certainty, and
still less as a ritual substitute for the freely willed and
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 173
4
ardently pursued communion of prayer that sacraments
must be regarded by us.
As the growing child requires for its development
food, warmth, shelter, loving intercourse, discipline, ex-
ercise and teaching, all ministering in proper measure
to the expansion of its compound nature; so too the
growing soul. The child, along these various channels,
receives all that it needs for a full sharing of the life
of the race. The conditions which govern and limit
human existence, the gifts of history and tradition, the
moulding influence of the corporate life these reach and
penetrate it gently and gradually along mental, physical
and social routes. The harmonious growth of the child's
nature depends, not on an intensive concentration on one
side of existence and the rejection of the rest; but on the
careful balance observed between them. It grows best
by sharing the mixed experiences of its fellows ; and mak-
ing at least some intellectual and physical, some social
and personal response to the external world. Indeed,
the parallel between natural and supernatural growth
goes further; for all these aspects of education point
beyond themselves, and fail in their office if regarded as
ends. Athletics or scholarship, hygiene or parental de-
votion all these can thwart the making of personality
if allowed to become excessive and usurp the central
place. The real fulfilment of each child's capacity, the
creation of a man or woman adequate to life, transcends
all means, however sacred. It may sometimes call for
the sacrifice of this or that element ; always for a careful
adjustment of them to individual needs.
All this is surely applicable as much to the supernatural
as to the natural life of man. This too is many-stranded,
fed and supported by many means of grace. We starve
and arrest a growing spirit we turn a possible saint into
174 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
a probable prig if we attempt to narrow the channels
along which it shall receive the gifts of the Infinite. It
too wants food, air, exercise, teaching and family affec-
tion, a social embodiment of its religious impulses, an
access to Spirit through things; and also giving life,
jdepth and meaning to these its external actions it needs
the unwatched and solitary meditation in which it draws
near in love to the transcendent Other, receives the in-
tangible gifts, and learns the unspoken lessons, of the
spiritual life.
The best, most balanced and life-giving experience
of the Supernatural possible to us is therefore more
likely to be compound and inclusive than abstract and
exclusive in type. It will be most easily and naturally
obtained from within a supporting religious tradition;
and will have intellectual, practical, historical, sacra-
mental and mystical elements. It will reflect upon
spiritual levels something of the contrast, tension, joy,
fellowship and loneliness of our bodily life on earth;
and will thus satisfy, and include in the work of trans-
figuration, every element of the richly various nature of
man. But the proportion in which these elements will
appear in the experience of each soul, the supernatural
reference which they carry for it, will differ enormously;
and we must expect and desire that this should be. The
symbol or sacrament, the psalm or the lesson, which for
one is charged with an almost unbearable wonder, may
turn a stony face to the excellent Christian in the next
pew. That loving, silent, and image-less recollection in
which the natural mystic breathes the bracing air of the
Eternal, will give to his unwary imitators nothing more
spiritual than the drowsy blankness which results from
deliberate repression of discursive thinking; a practice
condemned by all true contemplatives as 'nought else
SELF-GIVEN IN THINGS 175
but an idleness . . . wholly contrary to the supernatural
rest which is possessed in God'. 1
Thus an adequate religious system must help and allow
us to find Reality both incarnate and unincarnate; in
nature and in supernature too. It must leave room for
the full exercise of brave and faithful thought, for the
mysterious apprehensions that come by the touch and
taste of consecrated things, and for the soul's loving self-
mergence in that unconditioned stillness which lies both
within anid beyond all thoughts and things.
1 Ruysbroeck: The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, Bk. II,
cap. 66.
CHAPTER VII
THE SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE
(a) PRAYER
La priere est en elle-meme un acte tout spiritual adresse a
PEsprit par excellence, a 1'Esprit qui voit tout, qui est present
a tout, et qui, comme dit Saint Augustin, est plus intime a
notre ame, que ce qu'elle a de plus profond. Si nous joignons
a cette priere essentielle une certaine posture du corps, de9
paroles, des demonstrations exterieures, tout cela par soi meme
ne signifie rien, et n'est agreable a Dieu qu'autant qu'il est
1'expression des sentiments de 1'ame.
J. N. GROU
I am Ground of thy beseeching; first it is My will that thou
have it; and after I make thee to will it; and after I make thee
to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be
that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?
JULIAN OF NORWICH
TF God, the Supernatural Reality, is found to reveal
-* Himself 'at sundry times and in divers manners' in
History, Personality, and Things to those creatures who
are becoming capable of a certain participation in His
Life how and when shall we find this His Life at work
within our common human nature, and what are the
ways in which that average human nature feels and
responds to His attraction?
This attraction should surely be considered to be in
some degree at work, wherever absolute value claims
the devotion of man, and the 'brightness of His Glory'
whether seen in the worlds of science, thought or
176
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 177
beauty, in sacrifice or love over-rules self-interested de-
sire. But here its origin in the self-giving of Creative
Spirit is not always recognized by the little creature. In
two great regions of life it is so recognized: in the uni-
versal activity we call Prayer, and in that re-making of
character in supernatural regard which is the essence of
Sanctification. 1 In Prayer, the supernatural interest, the
creature's loving dependence on God, takes its place
though perhaps a major place among the other great
interests of life. Where it transcends these interests, and
initiates a more and more complete surrender of per-
sonality and redirection of existence in conformity with
the purposes of the Holy, we may well call this, in a
general sense, Sanctification: for it has as its assigned
end the production of the saint. These two great facts
of Prayer and Sanctity, pointing beyond the natural order
and requiring for their explanation another level of
reality, are the standing witnesses of the working of the
Supernatural within our human life.
From the point of view of Naturalism, the develop-
ment of Prayer is surely one of the strangest and most
intractable incidents in the whole strange history of man.
For here we have an almost universal human activity
which is solely called forth by, and directed to, the supra-
sensible; which has no survival-value, and no intelligible
meaning if cteterminism tells all the truth about the world,
yet which is not confined to spiritual specialists or ab-
normal minds but is a constant character of developed
manhood wherever found. We can trace the gradual
unfolding of this peculiar activity from primitive and
self-interested- forms controlled by need and fear, through
ever higher degrees of complexity carrying an ever wider
sphere of non-utilitarian reference, to a height at which
1 Vide supra, cap. ii, pp. 43-47.
178 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
the man or woman of prayer seems to experience a gen-
uine transcendence of succession; a conscious and first-
hand communion with God. Thus the development of
prayer can be observed though not explained, in a biolog-
ical sense ; complete historic continuity can be established
between the first glimmers of religious awe in primitive
man, and the blaze of 'absolute feeling' in the saint. All
along the path linking these two extremes we can see
the emergent human instinct for God, enticed and fed
by symbols, being released and expanded by the use of
ritual acts and words. It is mainly through the mechan-
isms of speech and gesture, by which he draws closer to
the souls of his fellow men, that man learns to draw
closer to the Food and Father of his soul.
Broadly speaking, prayer covers the whole of the little
human creature's search of and response to the Infinite,
in all its kinds and degrees; from the terrified chatterings
of the savage to the adoring rapture of the great con-
templative. Sometimes this response is evoked within
history by a personal or symbolic disclosure of the Holy,
and reaches its objective by the incarnational or sacra-
mental route. Sometimes the awakened spirit speaks to
the awakening Other in a way that seems to itself to be
purely spiritual or 'without means'. Sometimes in the
stillness it realizes that in spite of contrary appearance,
at every level of the devotional life, 'we endure His work-
ings beyond our workings, and so enduring Him we
apprehend Him and become apprehended by Him'. 1 In
the language of theology, prayer in its wholeness includes
all aspects and degrees of the soul's communion with
God; as immanent in, yet transcendent to, the world.
The very facts of our two-fold status, our double
relation with Reality, seem to require an intercourse with
1 Ruysbroeck: The Book of the Twelve Begwnes, cap. xvi.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 179
the Supernatural which shall be actualized both in visible
and invisible ways. Since man is at once a successive
yet spiritual creature, with a composite experience in
which sense and spirit co-operate closely, he must seek
and find the Eternal both as a child of the Eternal, and
as a creature of time. This means that his life is never
complete without prayer. Though this prayer must
always be inadequate to its subject-matter, it is only by
such small, constant, willed ascents, and such humble
childish intercourse of spirit with Spirit enabling him to
find and feel something of that same Spirit along the
pathways of sense that he can give to his religious and
historical constructions the genuine, though always ob-
lique, supernatural reference in which their true value
abides.
The little human soul emerges and expands, fulfils its
wonderful office of incarnating the Eternal here and now,
only in so far as it lives and breathes in its true Patria,
God. Such life and breath is prayer. Whether virtual or
actual, expressed in the 'simple act' which seems like
quietude, in words, in gestures, or in loving deeds, this
is the very substance of man's supernatural life. Its
continued practice deepens no less than expands the area
of our conscious personality: for the deeps of the self,
the unconscious ground, where the creature subject to
time has a certain contact with the Abiding, is by this
brought more and more within the conscious field. The
soul thus grows by appropriation of something which is
already present to and with it; and growing, is able to
feed more. 1 The communion thus set up seems some-
times to the self to be clearly personal, sometimes to be
impersonal.. By turns it speaks with its Master and rests
in its Home; and through and in these completing oppo-
*This is not 'immanentism'. Cf. St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk.
VII, cap. 10. 'Cresce, et manducabis me', etc.
i8o MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
sites gradually develops that side of its two-fold nature
which is turned towards the richness of the Eternal
world. In stating this, surely we state too the capital
truth which must control all our fumbling efforts to ex-
plicate the little we know about prayer: namely, the fact
that it is wholly evoked by God and not produced by us.
He is there first, the 'ground of our beseeching'. The
given-ness which is a character of all the creature's gen-
uine experiences of the Transcendent also obtains here.
'In our own efforts we always fail, an,d therein we cannot
apprehend Him. But where He works and we endure, there,
by that enduring, we apprehend Him beyond all our efforts.' 1
When we grasp this, our view of prayer is transformed.
Then we see its whole span, from the first na'ive beginning
in childish wants and dependence to those Alpine peaks
where the great contemplatives dwell alone with God,
as one tiny part of the vast supernatural action of God
Himself, in and with His creation. The significant
thing is no longer the little human soul trying by its own
effort to get into touch with a supernatural landscape and
power external to it. Although we are often driven thus
to describe our apparent experience, that which matters
and that which happens is far better conceived as the
opening up of that soul to the spiritual reality and power
by which it is already sustained and transfused. Aall
through the innocent deeds and events of our human
life, so here supremely, the created soul ever acts though
often unwittingly under the secret impulsions of the
spaceless Spirit of God; who is at once the immanent
cause and transcendent end of every real prayer. His
presence and action are there first. He enters and affects
it by ways and means both visible and invisible: ways
which we, from our limited viewpoint, like to distinguish
1 Ruysbroeck, loc. cit.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 181
as we elistinguish the west wind from the east ; but which
are in essence one.
'In the beginning,' says St. Teresa, 'it happened to me that
I was ignorant of one thing I did not know that God was
in all things: and when He seemed to me to be so near, I
thought it impossible. Not to believe that He was present,
was not in my power; for it seemed to me, as it were, evident
that I felt there His very presence. Some unlearned men used
to say to me, that He was present only by His grace. I could
not believe that, because, as I am saying, He seemed to me to
be present Himself: so I was distressed. A most learned man,
of the Order of the glorious St. Dominic, delivered me from
this doubt; for he told me that He was present, and how He
communed with us: this was a great comfort to me.' 1
Prayer, then, is man's nearest approach to absolute
action; it means the closest association of which any soul
is at any time capable with the living and everywhere
present God who is the true initiator of all that we really
do. Progress in it is really a progressive surrender of
the conditioned creature to that unconditioned yet richly
personal Reality, who is the only source, teacher and
object of prayer. Its whole wonder and mystery abide
in this: that here, our tiny souls are being invited and
incited to communion with God, the Eternal Spirit of the
Universe.
Hence the self that fully gives its mind and will to
prayer at once moves out actually if not consciously to
the border between the natural and supernatural worlds,
and changes its relation to both. So whether a prayer
seems to him who prays to be introversive or out-flying,
contemplative or intercessory in type, does not perhaps
matter very much; since it is, in essence, a non-spatial
activity, expressed in such particular forms or ways as
lie within the limited grasp and understanding of each
soul. It may find its embodiment in gesture, action,
1 Life, cap. xviii, par.
182 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
liturgic or spontaneous words. The Catholic procession,
the Quaker silence, the Methodist prayer-meeting, the
Salvationist's tambourine, can all justify themselves in the
presence of the one God. Prayer may equally find its
fulfilment in a special use of rhythm and cadence, in
phrases which direct and support attention and desire, or
in a state of soul apparently unrelated to the centres of
speech; the profoundly absorbed and satisfying prayer of
quiet or of union, as described by the mystics. 1 What-
ever its kind or degree, it means for the praying soul an
interweaving in experience not necessarily in intellectual
realization of two already present orders; and the mys-
tics are surely right when they insist that its essence is a
resort of the creature to that mataphysical 'ground of
the soul', where every spirit inheres in God and already
in a measure partakes of eternal life, since 'God, the
ground of the soul, and grace go together.' z
Superior persons smile at the pious extravagance which
sees in the mumbled prayers of the beggar in the porch
as valuable a spiritual engine as the more cultivated de-
votions of a Doctor of the Church. But quite small-
angels are probably able to laugh heartily at the quaint
planetary conceit which distinguishes these minute dif-
ferences in a number of little animals equally bathed in,
and utterly dependent on, the mighty torrents of the Love
of God. Indeed the humble, simplified, wide-open and
uncritical soul may conceivably offer a clearer pathway
to that mysterious energy than the canalized channels of
the 'developed mind': for prayer is simply 'that most
noble and divine instrument of perfection ... by which
and in which alone we attain to the reward of all our
endeavours, the end of our creation and redemption to
1 Here St. Teresa is of course the classic authority. Cf . especially
The Interior Castle, 4th and sth Mansions; and Life, caps, xv to xx.
a Meister Eckhart: Sayings, p. 418.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 183
wit union with God, in which alone consists our happi-
ness and perfection'. 1
Here that noble and touching thirst for ultimates
which constitutes the true dignity of human nature finds
its most general and widely various expression: and a
Scala Santa is set up on which every soul, at whatever
degree of development, can find a place. Each disclosure
to the soul of the Supernatural, whether made in mystical,
personal, symbolical or sacramental ways in company or
solitude, through beauty or worship, love, penitence or
grief is an incitement and nourisher of prayer; and only
in so far as that soul meets these disclosures by such de-
liberate ascents towards, and surrenders to, the Tran-
scendent as it is able to achieve, will these revelations of
Reality have value for its life. Man's spiritual growth
seems ever to require such a collaboration of two forces.
It is not due to the action of God alone, nor to the desire
and effect of man alone ; but to lioth. And the opening
up in prayer of the small human personality to the quick-
ening power of God incited, it is true, by His prevenient
grace is yet left to the action of the will. Such willed
effort is indeed essential, if spiritual realism is to be
achieved. For here as elsewhere 'our belief in things of
all kinds, in continuously existing self-identical realities,
is founded in our experience of effort of putting forth
power and energy in pursuit of our goals'. 2
In studying prayer, it is surely above all important to
look at the flower and not at the seed. A very rough
little seed, buried deep in the primitive stuff of human
nature, and finding its first nourishment in our primitive
terrors and needs; a flower, of which we cannot yet an-
alyse the mysterious fragrance or estimate the healing
power. Even though its first beginnings and first entice-
1 Ven. Augustine Baker: Holy Wisdom, p. 341.
a W. McDougall : Outline of Psychology, p. 426.
184 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
ments are na'ive and humble -wholly utiltarian in their
objectives, and largely dictated by the ignoble passions of
' fear and desire this embryonic movement towards com-
munion with an invisible Other must surely be judged,
as we judge the beginnings of architecture, painting and
music, in relation with its triumphant developments. The
mud hut does not discredit the cathedral; nor does the
devotee of Durga discredit the adoring prayer of the
saints. 'In Him life lay, and this life was the Light
for men. Amid the darkness the Light shone, but the
darkness did not master it.' x
Thus spontaneously arising within each religious com-
plex from the most crude to the most sublimated, prayer
appears in human history as the expression of man's gen-
eralized instinct for and dependence on God; the raw
stuff of his spiritual experience. But if we consent for
a time to abandon the evolutionary standpoint, to stand
back and look in a positive and concrete way at this gen-
eral spectacle this strange upward surge of the half-
made and half-real human creature towards that Wholly
Real and Changeless One, half-glimpsed but never fully
seen then surely we begin to grasp the pathos, the daring,
the convincingness of that various and world-wide demon-
stration of man's confident instinct for God. It expresses
his decisive refusal to be a clever animal and nothing more;
it means the implicit discovery of his own duality, his
amphibious state, his response to the attraction of the
unseen.
Of course in speaking thus, we are taking refuge in
suggestive metaphor. We do not yet know what prayer
-x really is; any more than we yet know that which poetry
and music really are, or the whatness of that which they
give us. In all, we have a certain empirical knowledge
^John i. 4, 5 (Moffatt's translation).
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 185
of process, hardly any of underlying fact: for here, as
ever when we touch the mysterious region where human
nature fringes on the supernatural, the aura of intuitive
yet genuine knowledge extends far beyond the nucleus of
science, and we are obliged to deal with forces which we
are unable to describe. Doctrines of prayer which em-
phasize its 'simplicity' do not really penetrate the symbolic
veil which clothes and conceals the dread realities of re-
ligion. But in our actual prayer we enter with closecl
eyes within this veil; and are concerned with those un-
known but most actual forces of spiritual world. Whilst
and in so far as we truly pray, we do live according to*
our measure the supernatural life : and this is not 'simple**,
but rich and vivid beyond all our conceiving. 'Lord,,
I come unto Thee to the end that wealth may come unto
me!' 1
Hence the attitude toward these profound mysteries
of those who know most remains humble, receptive, and
agnostic. But at least their discoveries tend to assure us
that w^ only begin to have a chance of understanding
prayer, if we recognize from the first its genuinely super-
natural character; and see in it the tentative and childish
beginnings of an intercourse of which we do not know the
laws or discern the end. Though it represents as do
music, poetry, metaphysics a special and still unex-
plained expansion of the mysterious thing we call human
consciousness, yet it is not a faculty of our organic nature :
the most convinced evolutionist has not detected its be-
ginning in 'the greater ground-apes' and their kin. It
is a result of an incitement that comes to us from beyond
the world in religious language, of grace; and though
its action upon the natural is often direct and deeply
impressive, its truest concern is with the supernatural.
Imitatione Christi, Bk. IV, cap. 3.
i86 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Yet since in prayer, both virtual and actual, the created
spirit has dealings with God, and He is the one God of
Nature and of Supernature, we cannot fence off its sphere
of interest and influence. That interest and influence
cover the whole span of life. Prayer enters deeply into
history, and is explicated in traditional and historic ways ;
and yet it transcends history. It affects our physical and
mental status, transforms to its purpose and fills with new
ardour the homely symbols of our emotional life, takes
colour from the senses and gives a deepened signifi-
cance to their reports; yet alone moves freely in the
regions beyond sense. It is with God, and therefore omni-
present. The praying soul, the man who is really 'in
the Spirit/ is experiencing human freedom in its most
intense form, and realizing its latent capacity for spiritual
action.
JLiving as we mostly do within the narrow bounds of
a sense-conditioned consciousness, it is always good to
remind ourselves first that this human capacity for spiri-
tual action does exist; and next that its real nature and
extent are still largely unknown to us. As the physical
forces on which life depends are hidden, and known to
us not in their essence but in their effects; so the life of
the Spirit far exceeds in its factualness that which it
seems to us to be. Its dark and powerful rays, its en-
lightening, quickening and attractive forces, permeate
the little fragile creature; healing and supporting, incit-
ing and preventing, at every point and in every way. This
truth should surely keep up in humility as regards our tiny
and limited religious apprehensions; and in delighted
confidence, as regards the unmeasured possibilities opened
up to us in prayer. It is at once bracing and humbling,
thus to remember our relation to the unsearchable Source
of that mysterious sunshine of which we sometimes feel
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 187
a little, that boundless generous air which we take as it
were for granted and almost unconsciously breathe.
There, surrounding, bathing and transfusing us, but in
its reality infinitely transcending us, is that unmeasured
and living world with its powers, its beneficent influences ;
and here are we, capable of a certain communion with it,
of action through and within it. The whole rationale
of prayer is bound up in the belief that such action is pos-
sible, and transcends in power and obligation its mere
outward or physical expression. Prayer in its fullness ~
commits us to the belief that the eternal world of Spirit
is the world of power; and that man is not fully active
until he is contemplative too.
Therefore a primary duty among the great humarr
duties perhaps the greatest of all is willed and faithful
correspondence with that Eternal World, and action with-
in it : a correspondence and an action which gradually
spread from their focus in deliberate devotional acts, till
they include and transfuse the whole of life. The capital
possibility offered to man in prayer taking this word now
in its most general sense is that he can genuinely achieve
this: and that his small and derivative spirit, by such
humble willed communion with the very Source of its
being and power, can grow and expand into a tool of the
creative love and power. Within the atmosphere of
prayer, virtual and actual but only within that atmos-
phere his being can expand from a narrow individuality
into a personality capable of being fully used on super-
natural levels for supernatural work. This is of course
the state of holiness; and holiness, the achievement of a
creative supernatural personality capable of furthering
the Divine action within life, is the true assigned end
of the faithfully pursued and completely developed indi-
vidual life of prayer.
188 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
II
THE saintly M. Olier said that prayer consists irt"
its completeness in three things Adoration, Com-
munion, and Co-operation ; 1 and in these words gave one
of the best of all definitions of the spiritual life. For
that life means the ever more perfect and willing asso-
ciation of the invisible human spirit with the invisible
Divine Spirit for all purposes; for the glory of God, for
the growth and culture of the praying soul, and concur-
rently for the performance of that redemptive and crea-
tive work which is done by the ever-present God through
and with the spirit that really prays. It has therefore
three great aspects or moments; in which perhaps it is
not wholly fanciful to trace a certain kinship with the
three aspects under which the Christian theist seeks
to apprehend God. There is first the humble, admiring
adoration of the transcendent Object; next the loving
personal communion with that Object found here and
now in the soul's secret life; last, active self-giving to
the purposes of the Object. These three together, in their
fullness and variety of expression, cover all that we know
of the spiritual life in man: directed as it is towards
those only three realities of which we know anything
God, the Soul, and the World.
Thus prayer in its widest sense embraces first all our
personal access to, and contemplation of, the Supernatural
Reality of God. Next, because of this possible access,,
all our chances of ourselves becoming supernatural per-
sonalities, useful to God. Last, and because of this, all
our capacity for exerting supernatural action on other
souls. For the state of adoration opens the soul's gates
to the Supernal; and that Supernal, invading and con-
1 Br6mond: Histoire Littra*re dii Sentiment Religiettx en France,
vol. iv, p. 1 1 6.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 189
trolling more and more of its will and love, enters into
a loving communion with it which issues in an ever closer
co-operation, limitless in its energizing power. Hence
prayer, in a soul which is completely patient of the super-
natural, is literally without ceasing, because the whole
of its action is supernaturalized. When we thus state
the position, it becomes obvious that all these types of
prayer, all the ways in which man can hope to deepen
and enlarge his supernatural life, must hang utterly upon
his primary relationship with God.
'Thou^halt love the Lord thy God with all thy Heart
and with all thy Soul, and with all thy Mind, and with
all thy Strength. This is the first, and great command-
ment because it defines the relation of man to the Abid-
ing. As a rule we take its obligations rather lightly.
For not only does it require in religion the absolute
priority of the objective over the subjective point of view;
but, if we translate its terms from the language of reli-
gion into that of philosophy, we see that it further en-
tails a complete revolution on our usual attitude to life.
We can hardly begin to obey it unless we give the Super-
natural primacy in our thought and feeling, and work
for its interests with all our power. This means, for
the individual, making a place in his flowing life for a
deliberate self-orientation to the unchanging and eternal:
acknowledging that man is indeed a 'swinging-wicket,
set between the Unseen and Seen*, and being sure that our
hinges are so adjusted that we move smoothly in both
directions. For the organized community it means pro-
viding an environment, an institution in which that hum-
ble, complete and delighted attention to God in and for
Himself whicli is the first point of prayer can be taught
and practised. For clearly, if our deepest meaning and
our fullest life do lie beyond the natural struggle; then,
190 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
total concentration on the natural struggle maims us.
True, it is the theatre within which every soul is placed,
and gives us the raw material of experience: but in some
form or degree, dim or vivid, the sense of an achieved
Perfection lying ever beyond us is essential to our real
growth. How can we hope to actualize this, unless we
make of it an independent objective; stretching out to-
wards it with our thought and our love, -with a deliberate
attention and interest at once awestruck and passionate?
Being, after all, at best half animal creatures, with
a psychic machinery mainly adapted to maintaining our
physical status, we cannot conceive a supernatural status
and activity much less achieve it by ourselves. Until
that secret holy energy we call 'grace' has touched and
stirred us, we do not know what 'grace' is: it is a pious
word, not the name of an actual power, a free gift from
the sources of Eternal Life. And unless grace continues
to play upon and support us, we cannot go on knowing
what it is. Therefore attention to God, adoration of
God, spreading gradually from its focus in deliberate de-
votional acts till it colours all the activities of existence,
and from His discovery and worship under particular at-
tributes to a certain tasting of Him as He is in Himself;
this must be the first and governing term of the super-
natural life, the unique source of all its possibilities. The
reason the saints are so winning and persuasive, and so
easily bring us into the presence of God, is that their
lives are steeped in this loving and selfish adoration. And
in the deepening and development of such non-utilitarian
prayer towards God in and for Himself, the balance
which is maintained in it of docility and of effort, lies
our best hope of achieving a genuine and lasting religious
realism.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 191
'Prayer,' says Angela of Foligno, 'is nothing else save the
manifestation of God and oneself, and this manifestation is
perfect and true humiliation. For humility consists in the
soul beholding God and itself as it should.' 1
If this great activity is to be given its place in our two-
fold human outlook, this can only be done by the same
process as that by which we establish any other fresh
or neglected field of interest within the circle of con-
sciousness namely, by deliberate and repeated acts of at-
tention. The crude instinct must be educated, must reach
the level of habit and of skill, if it is to be of much use
to us. Here' then we find support for the drill of the
religious life : too lightly condemned by some as mechani-
cal and unreal. The daily rule, kept without regard
to fluctuations in devotional feeling, the office faithfully
recited, that practice of constant brief aspirations towards
God a redirection, as it were, of man's vagrant will to-
wards eternal values which the old masters of prayer
so constantly recommend; all this had and has much to
do with the formation of a solid type of spiritual char-
acter. Such formal practices, such harnessing of the
speech-centres to the purposes of grace, are not to be dis-
missed as 'mere auto-suggestions'. They are deeds tend-
ing to increase the energy of the idea, the adoring orien-
tation of the soul towards its assigned end. They work
from without inwards; slowly educating and transform-
ing those unconscious deeps in which the springs of con-
duct are hidden.
These habits, -though we may not always appreciate
the colour which piety has given them, are therefore justi-
fied by our psychic peculiarities, limitations and needs.
By their indiscriminate rejection we should gravely im-
poverish ourselves; for without some such discipline it is
1 Angela of Foligno: Book of Divine Consolations, p. 106.
192 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
impossible that our religious impulse will be raised to the
level of real effectiveness. Though the distance which
separates the best that we can say from the least that God
is, becomes more and more apparent with the soul's
growth; yet even the greatest mystic abandons at his
own peril all use of the human resources of gesture and
speech, all 'binding rules of prayer'. Psychology assures
us of the need for periodic concentration on our prime
interest, whatever it may be, if this is to have a radiat-
ing effect on the whole of our existence ; and of the essen-
tial part played by repeated acts in the production of
skill. Nowhere does this law apply more certainly than
in the religious sphere. It is indeed a central function
of organized religion to stimulate and give precision to
such purposive acts such self-openings in the direction of
the Infinite to foster and educate the emergent human
capacity for God.
The rightf ulness of such a deliberate concentration of the
soul on the Abiding is in some sense guaranteed, not only
by the ever-deepening joy and peace, but also and chiefly
by the power it brings to those who patiently undertake
this slow education of their neglected spiritual sense; and
thus gradually learn to see the whole sweep of existence
in supernatural regard. Where that sense is allowed to-
atrophy, human life is reduced to mere succession and be-
comes flat, shallow, uncertain of its own goal: for unless
we consent, by adoring resort to the Universal, to de-
velop the spiritual side of our consciousness, and so become
aware of our deepest attachments, we have no key to the
problems presented by the multiplicity of experience. Life
will seem to us, as it does to many people, either a rich
or a baffling confusion: and although we may be im-
mensely busy with it, the busyness will be that of the
inexperienced housemaid, who cleans a room by raising
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 193
clouds of dust. Much devoted social service is unfortu-
nately of this kind : doomed to end in discouragement and
exhaustion, because those who undertook it had failed
to develop their power of resort to the abiding sources of
man's life, and maintain an adoring relation with Reality.
It is true that this relation can be virtually present
where it is not actualized under religious forms; as the
moulding influence of the living and unchanging God
can be and often is intuitively realized, in a greater or
less degree, by the human soul. But since we are men
and women, born of the sense-world and mostly condi-
tioned by it, such intuitive perception is never constantly
or fully enjoyed by use, and will hardly develop its power
if we leave it to chance. It will be more and more felt,
as we more and more turn to and attend to it: for, like
every other faculty, it needs and is susceptible of., educa-
tion. Anyone who has practised landscape painting,
knows the immense and unguessed transfiguration of the
natural world which comes to the artist through patient,
attentive and unselfish regard; how the significance and
emphasis of simple objects change, how a range of beauty
and reality to which the common eye is blind, is dis-
covered in familiar things through that deliberate con-
templation of his subject, that absorbed, unhurried, and
largely unreflecting gaze, in which effort and docility
combine. This disciplined attentiveness, which is the
way to enter into communion with nature, is also one
great way of entering into communion with Supernature.
It is the way in which we raise our level of sensibility,
make ourselves more able to receive that light and life
which God is ceaselessly giving to His creation, a path
along which those who submit to its disciplines may rea-
sonably hope to discover the intense reality, the mystery
and the beauty, of the world to which we turn in prayer ;
194 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
yet in which we live and move and have our being all
the while.
'If we would taste God,' says Ruysbroeck, 'and feel in our-
selves Eternal Life above all things, we must go forth into
God with a faith that is far above our reason, and there dwell
. . . and in this emptiness of spirit we receive the Incompre-
hensible Light, which enfolds and penetrates us as air is pene-
trated by the light of the sun. And that light is nothing else
but a fathomless gazing and seeing.' 1
We feel as we read these words that they represent
Ruysbroeck's effort to tell us about something actual,
which he has done; and which most of us have certainly
not done. They give us a sense of the distance that sepa-
rates the religion which dwells contentedly among sym-
bols and ideas from the religion which has passed through
and beyond image in its impassioned quest of ultimates.
They oblige us to believe that in the highest regions of
contemplative experience genuine results are achieved,
which are beyond the normal span of our thought. Great
areas of new truth may then be unveiled; and though
the imaginative faculty inevitably lays hold of them, and
the self's beliefs and longings enter into and modify the
form in which they reach consciousness, this does not dis-
credit the fact that fresh levels of spiritual reality are ap-
prehended in this deep adoring attention of the Unseen.
Realizing this, we realize too the profound distinction
here between vague aspirant and skilled craftsman: a dis-
tinction which is worth emphasizing, for the character-
istic vice of the amateur artist or musician, of supposing
himself able to appreciate all the truth and beauty that
there is to see and hear, is common enough in amateurs
of the spiritual life and surely here reaches its utmost
pitch of absurdity. As a matter of fact, the saints andy
men and women of prayer to whom we owe our deepest
1 Ruysbroeck: The Sparkling Stone, cap. ix.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 195
revelations of the Supernatural those who give us real
news about God are never untrained amateurs or prodi-
gies. Such men and women as Paul, Augustine, Cath-
erine, Julian, Ruysbroeck, are genuine artists of eternal
life. They have accepted and not scorned the teachings
of tradition: and humbly trained and disciplined their
God-given genius for ultimates. I do not suggest that
all the news which they give us is of equal worth, or
that it is exempt from criticism; far from it. But the
best, simplest, and most restrained of them do show us, as
great artists ^do, fresh loveliness, intense reality, and in-
finite possibility, in a spiritual scene on which every
Christian is privileged to look. Each could say with
Dante
*. . . La mia vista, venendo sincera,
c pitt e piu entrava per lo raggio
dell' alta luce, che da se e vera.' 1
The first possibility inherent in adoring prayer that
simple, quiet yet ardent looking at and waiting upon God
for His own sake is therefore a certain real if limited
knowledge of Him and of Eternal Life. This sort of
prayer, persevered in, does bring a progressive discovery
of the concrete reality and richness of those supernatural
facts, which the doctrines and practices of formal religion
are designed to express. Usually arising at the symbolic
level, and first focused upon particulars, theocentric
prayer can lift those doctrines, symbols and practices from
the level of dreary unreality at which we too often leave
them; and can make of them that which they ought to
be, the transcendent art-work of the religious soul. It
can inform the simplest crudest hymn or the most solemn
service with vitality, and cause each to convey spiritual
truth ; because the persons using these forms of expression
1 Paradiso, xxxiii, 53.
196 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
are accustomed to look through them towards the ever-
present God, in love and joy. For this sort of prayer,
developing as it does our spiritual sensitiveness, and re-
leasing us from the petty falsities of a geocentric point
of view, gradually discloses to us a whole new realm of
reality and our own status within it: and with this a
progressive sense, that the best we can ever know or ex-
perience is nothing in respect of that plenitude of being
which God holds within His secret life.
'For all the torrents of the grace of God are poured forth,'
flays Ruysbroeck again, 'and the more we taste of them, the
more we long to taste ; and the more we long to taste, the more
deeply we press into contact with Him; and the more deeply
we press into contact with God, the more the flood of His
sweetness flows through us and over us; and the more we are
thus drenched and flooded, the better we feel and know that the
sweetness of God is incomprehensible and unfathomable.' 1
Hence this simple and adoring contemplation, which
some have condemned as fostering illusion or spiritual
pride, is as a matter of fact the best and gentlest of all
teachers of humility. Far from leading the soul to despise
'ordinary ways', it brings it to a deeper, meeker, more
gently intimate discovery of God revealed through sacra-
mental and incarnational means. It sets the scene of the
supernatural life, and helps the little human self to get its
values right, to recognize its own lowliness; teaching it
the utter distinction in kind between nature even at its
highest, and supernature in its simplest manifestations.
'This prayer,' says a great teacher of the spiritual life,
'so stripped of images and apperceptions, idle in appearance
and yet so active, is in so far as the condition of this life
allows, the pure "adoration in spirit and in truth"; the adora-
tion truly worthy of God, and in which the soul is united to
Him in its ground, the created intelligence to the Intelligence
tJncreate, without the intervention of imagination or reason,
l Thf Sparkling Stone, cap. x.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 197
or of anything else but a very simple attention of the mind
and an equally simple application of the will.' 1
Most often arising from within the humble and patient
pse of image and formula, such a practice as this brings
a gradually increased simplification of consciousness; a
slowing-down of the discursive reason, a melting of each
separate act and aspiration into one single movement of
the soul. That movement is in essence a disinterested
act of adoring self-donation; an act at once austere and
ardent, which offers everything and asks for nothing, con-
tent to say with St. Francis, Deus metis et ominia.
Whether practised in apparent solitude, or within a cor-
porate act of worship, it forms part of the one great Sane-
tus of the universe. Because of the deep awe, the meek
creaturely sense which it fosters, it is the antiseptic of
the devotional life, checking those corrupting tendencies
to sentimental individualism and sugary effervescence
which are always ready to infect it. Christian prayer at
its best always preserves this astringent quality, this para-
doxical combination of intimacy and otherness; so won-
@erfully expressed in the opening phrase of the Lord's
Prayer, where the exquisite tenderness, the confident
claim of Pater Noster is instantly qualified by the intro-
duction of ineffable mystery qul es in coelis opening
up before the little praying soul the unmeasured spaces
of the Eternal World.
Ill
TF the instinctive awe and worship the delighted
* wonder which form the raw material of adoring
prayer, represent the human sense of the Transcendent
over against the created soul; this does not exhaust the
*J. N. Grou: L'Ecole de Jss t vol. ii, p. 8.
198 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
rich variousness of that relation with God in which the
life of prayer consists. For that Reality which is the
object of religion is as truly immanent as transcendent,
'present no less than absent near, no less than far', said
St. Augustine. 1 He is intimate as well as adorable; and
hence the soul's response to His attraction will include all
those homely yet sacred experiences, within the normal
range of our religious sensitiveness and desire, which are
dependent on and express our feeling of His closeness,
inseparableness, and dearness. 'The state of the inner
man is to walk with God.' 2 The Transcendent Other
is felt now in the most personal of relationships, as actu-
ally entering, accompanying and affecting the soul's life.
'Thou hast holden me by my right hand:
Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel. . . .
My flesh and my heart faileth:
But God is the strength of my heart, and my
portion for ever.' 8
Yet this inward communion, if it is to maintain, its
vigorous life-giving quality and resist the tendency to
slide down into pious sentimentalism, needs itself to be
placed within the atmosphere of adoration. For it rep-
resents one side of that complete experience which drew
from Thomas a Kempis the wonderful exclamation:
'The Heaven of Heavens cannot contain Thee, and yet
Thou sayest Come ye all unto Me !' 4 If then ador-
ing prayer emphasized the 'otherness' of God, His un-
touched Perfection; here instead is emphasized His mys-
terious loving nearness to the soul, a certain likeness, a
latent affinity between Spirit and spirit, a close here-and-
now dependence. A give-and-take is set up between In-
1 St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. I, cap. 4.
z De Imitatione Christi, Bk. II, cap. 6.
B Psalm Ixxiii. 23, 24, 26.
& De Imitatione Christi, Bk. II, cap. i.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 199
finite and finite; there is a response on the self's part to
something given to it from the treasures of the super-
natural world.
This response inevitably made under symbols, and
involving certain well-marked feeling-states seems to
the soul, above all else, the response of a person to a
Person. We find in it a touching utilization of all the
simplest aspects of man's emotional life. Here the child-
like come by their own, and achieve a closeness of com-
munion with Reality unreached by the loftiest thought.
The little creature is met on its own level; the spirit
that was first filled with awestruck worship is sought
and won on its own ground. A strange and penetrating
intercourse . is established. Maintained by the periods of
concentrated and loving attention in which the self 'medi-
tates' or 'waits upon God ' according to the measure of its
powers, this gradually spreads to permeate the deeds of
active life ; bringing all external action, of whatever kind,
into direct relationship with His Reality. Life is more
and more felt in every detail to be overruled by the inti-
mate moulding and cherishing action of God; opening
paths, suggesting sacrifices, bringing about those unfore-
seen events and relationships which condition the soul's
advance.
It is here, in this humble yet intimate, ardent yet little
understood communion of the small human self with a
present and infinite Companion an 'immanent Ultimate*
within the compass of man's heart, but beyond the span of
his conceiving mind that the transforming power exer-
cised by prayer on human personality is most clearly seen*
Here some measure of the supernatural, with its generous
grace and beauty, its demand for self-donation, truly en-
ters the life of every awakened soul. In all its kinds and.
200 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
degrees, from the colloquy or free conversation 'as one
friend with another* 1 which results from meditation
faithfully performed, through that gradual expansion and
simplification of consciousness which leads to the silent
yet deeply active absorption of the Prayer of Simplicity
or of Quiet, this secret intercourse has marked educative
and purifying effects. When we consider what such
prayer involves, this can hardly surprise us: for here
our small and childish spirits are being invited and in-
cited by God's prevenient Spirit to enter into communion
with Him. If this mysterious intercourse of the half-
real with the Wholly Real this give-and-take between
the emergent creature and its supernatural environment
be done sincerely, humbly, simply and steadily ; surely the
result must at least be a fresh and ever clearer vision of
the self's true status, the vast difference between that
which it is and that which it is invited to be.
'In a room into which the sunlight enters strongly',
'says St. Teresa, 'not a cobweb can be hid/ 2 The dust
and rubbish, all the grimy corners, the hoarded unworthy
possessions are ruthlessly exhibited and condemned. The
essential conflict between animal impulse and spiritual .de-
mand declares itself; and with the setting up of fresh
standards comes access to fresh sources of power. The
soul feeds on the Invisible, and gains thus the incentive
and energy for self-conquest. If the adoring vision of
the Holy emphasized the difference between the sinful
creature and the Perfect, this experience of a here-and-
now Companion makes possible the work of transforma-
tion. Thus at the very least, such prayer can hardly fail
to do that which St. Teresa demanded as the test of its
efficacy: It will teach the little self to love, suffer
and work on ever higher levels of reality and self-devo-
1 St. Ignatius Loyola: Spiritual Exercises, ist -week.
* Life, cap. xix.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 201
tion. Something in fact is here effected for the soul's
true being which nothing else could achieve : here, directly
occasioned by the humble self-imparting of the Infinite,
begins for it that growth and movement from the in-
dividual to the universal standpoint, which is the essence
of the supernatural life in man.
Expressed in psychological language, the characters
of this growth and movement of the human spirit come
perhaps to this. Such intimate and docile communion
first deepens religious sensitiveness, effecting a real culti-
vation of ouf latent capacity for God; and next involves
a complete redirection of desire, a dedication of those
powers of initiative and endurance which every living
creature possesses in a greater or less degree, to the single
purposes of God. This redirection of desire may be, and
generally is, effected through the simplest devotions and
in the most homely ways. But if we examine the different
traditional types and degrees of prayer in which the com-
munion of the soul with the Transcendent is embodied,
we see that these too gather up and express the dedica-
tion to Reality, the Supernatural, of each aspect of man's
being. Thus 'mental prayer' means the giving of thought
to that ruling influence ; 'affective prayer' the giving of
love, 'acts of will' the steady training of volition, desire,,
in the one direction. In the mature and rounded spiritual
life, its tranquillity and power, we see the result of that
consecration of 'all the forces of the soul, gathered into
the unity of the Spirit' * which is summed up in the great
Ignatian formula: 'Take Lord and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding; all I have and I possess!' 2
Much of the prayer of petition and surrender, which
takes so large a place in the routine of the devotional life,
is really an education of the human will towards this end :
1 Ruysbroeck: Book of the Twelve Beguines, cap. vii.
8 Spiritual Exercises: Contemplation to obtain Love.
202 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
strengthening the sense of dependence, and persuading 'de-
sire to take the channel that leads towards God. Thus
the sublime 'Thy Will be done !' if regarded as a request
addressed by man to the Eternal, would be an absurdity:
since we are sure that the steady sweep of that Infinite
Will overrules all our individual preferences and desires.
But as a means of harmonizing the childish human will to
His purposes, it is one of the most powerful and search-
ing of all prayers ; a complete purgation of the mind that
really means it. For it then becomes a dynamic sugges-
tion which, if effective, does actually extend the area over
which that Will has an unimpeded sway and is actively
furthered by our intention.
It is only within the atmosphere of such surrendered
communion as this, such willed identity of purpose and
desire, that those amazing dramas of the spiritual life
which shine out in the history of religion, are carried
through. Did we know more of the power of the Spirit
and the mysterious energies of the invisible world, we
should neither necessarily regard these histories with sus-
picion, nor set them apart as miraculous; but might see
in them the working of consequence and law. Psycholo-
gists studying conversion sometimes fail to recognize this,
and to allow for the full and gradual working out of the
factors which conversion installs at the centre of life.
They forget that it is not the initial crisis, but the steady
continuous feeding of the soul on God, which alone makes
those conversions bear their wondrous fruits. The life
of communion which the conversion sets going, the humble
and arduous year by year acceptance and using of every
experience in supernatural regard: this it is which gradu-
ally converts the penitent into the saint, as a real garden
is made, not by sticking in plants, but by long and un-
remitting cultivation of the soil.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 203
We see this factor of a steadfast and docile communion
at work in the movement of St. Paul's soul from the type
of zeal which 'breathed forth fire and slaughter', to that
which speaks in Philippians or the gentle little letter to
Philemon; and again in the story of that immense but
really gradual metamorphosis which turned Augustine
from a sensual and conceited young don into one of the
Fathers of the Church. It was such loving, continuous
and surrendered communion with an infinite Light and
Love found here and now, self-given to human life, which
transformed St. Catherine of Genoa from a melancholy
and disillusioned woman into a great mother of souls.
The hours she spent in prayer, and the other hours that
she spent in doing the things to which she was impelled
in her prayer, were those that really mattered in her life.
During her formative years, it is said that St. Catherine
prayed for five or six hours a day. That is to say, one-
third of her waking life was given to exclusive attention
to God. Such a distribution of time, expected in a scholar
or an artist, is surely not excessive in the scholar of eternal
life. Thus was produced that habitual state of union
with a living and beloved Reality, that rich consciousness
of the supernatural world, which supported and governed
her career. 1 Of such union, persisting in sickness and
overwhelming griefs, a modern contemplative has said:
'As soon as my soul remembers God, it finds that He is
already present there, more present to my heart than is
the heart itself; in so much that recollection and union
need not be achieved, but subsist at a certain level and
continuously, below all the multiplicities, the labour and
suffering, the very agitations of life.' 2 To the same in-
fluence and discipline we owe the maturing and main-
tenance at levels of self-oblivious serenity of such great
1 Cf . F. von Hiigel: The Mystical Element of Religion, voL i, cap. 4.
8 Journal Sptrituel de Lttcie Christine, p. 384.
204 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
souls as Elizabeth Fry, Henry Martyn, Charles de
Foucauld, Elisabeth Leseur, and many other modern
saints.
Nor does this inner transformation, this achievement
of a stable love, joy and peace in strongest contrast with
the jangled consciousness of "natural man" exhaust the
possibilities of the prayer of communion as seen in great
spiritual lives. These possibilities seem also to include
a strange power of transcending circumstance, a certain
control over health and sickness, an abnormal enhance-
ment sometimes of physical powers of endurance, some-
times of intuitive powers of foresight and discernment of
spirits. It seems as though the little creature obtained
access, by way of its loving and confident surrender, to
some genuine sources of power. Here we move in regions
largely unexplored by us. We do not know the limits
if there are limits within which that ordinary sequence
of events which we call natural can be overruled by a
higher term. We have no such grasp upon the non-succes-
sive and the spaceless as would help us to make sense of
the clairvoyant powers and knowledge of the future
clearly displayed in some great spiritual lives. We must
move carefully, and beware as much of overpressing as of
hurriedly discrediting such evidence as we possess.
Nevertheless religious history does abound in examples
of this enhancement of life; suggesting, even when its
reports have been critically sifted, the presence of some
unknown factor modifying the action of so-called natural
law. The careers of St. Catherine of Siena and St. Joan
of Arc are classic examples of such transcendence, but
it is to be found at work in other and less startling lives.
Thus we see George Fox passing untouched through a
hostile crowd; the ship Woodhouse brought safely through
her dangerous voyage by the piloting of a little com-
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 205
pany deliberately subdued to the suggestions of the Spirit. 1
We see Elizabeth Fry facing, dominating, and finally
winning the criminal mob in Newgate Gaol; the Cure
d'Ars, by a holy clairvoyance, reading in the souls of his
penitents the secrets they dared not speak ; David Living-
stone alone in Africa, convinced of an invisible protection
and therefore choosing unharmed the most perilous routes.
We see Foucauld and Mary Slessor, because they held
themselves to be 'in royal service', living for years in
tropical countries under conditions of physical hardship
which few Europeans could survive. These, chosen at
random from a multitude of instances, seem to bear out
the wonderful stories of the triumphs of Christianity in
its charismatic stage; and hint the nature of those vast
resources which await our discovery in the world of
prayer. And we surely trace along another route the
same power of the life of loving communion to subdue
even the most dread aspects of the natural existence to
the overruling purposes of Spirit, in that beautiful subli-
mation of suffering which as in the life of Elisabeth
Leseur turns it from a sterile into a fertile thing. 2
But this transfiguring and enhancing power, this
achievement of creative life, is not experienced by these
souls merely because they believe that it is possible for
them to experience it: still less because they make such
1 ' . . . we were brought to ask counsel of the Lord and the word
was from Him: "Cut through and steer your straightest course and
mind nothing but Me"; unto which thing He much provoked us and
caused to meet together every day, and He Himself met with us, and
manifested Himself largely unto us, so that by storms we were not
prevented (from meeting) above three times in all our voyage.
'Thus it was all the voyage with the faithful, who were carried far
above storms and tempests, that when the ship went either to the right
hand or to the left, their hands joined" all as one and did direct her way;
so that we have seen and said, we see the Lord leading our vessel even
as it were a man leading a horse by the head, we regarding neithefl
latitude nor longitude, but kept to our Line, which was and is our
Leader, Guide and Rule'. Bowden: History of the Society of Friends
in America, 1850, vol. i, pp. 64 seq. Quoted in Christian Life, Faith
and Thought, p. 29.
3 Elisabeth Leseur: Journal et Pensees.
206 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
increase of power the object of their prayer. All this can
and does only happen to them, in so far as they are
deliberately orientated towards the Supernatural, not for
their own sakes but for God alone; and in so far, too, as
their attitude to Him is controlled by utter confidence
and self-oblation, and not by anxious demand. Here the
paradoxical character of the spiritual life, in which self-
abandonment and self-fulfilment go hand in hand, and
personal striving always frustrates itself, is most plainly
asserted; and all theories of prayer which stress its 'use-
fulness ' are most plainly condemned. Hence the pathetic
failure and stultifying effects of much deliberately this-
world spirituality; attempts to 'make prayer work*
whether in the spheres of healing, influence, philanthropic
action or moral reform ; personal efforts, however well in-
tentioned, to harness the majestic powers of Supernature
to the little purposes of man. In that true prayer of
communion which is the only preparation for effective
intercession, *I love' obliterates 'I want'. Hence such /a.
complete transference of the self's centre of interest is
effected, such a realization of the Pauline 'I live, yet not
IP that it shares as a child of the family, and not as a
beggar, in the riches and privileges, the powers and the
iduties, the 'more abundant life' of the supernatural world.
'When God,' says Brother Lawrence, 'finds a soul permeated
with a living faith, He pours into it His graces and His favours
plenteously; into the soul they flow like a torrent, which, after
being forcibly stopped in its ordinary course, when it has found
a passage, spreads with impetuosity its pent-up flood.' 1
All sanctification, all supernatural growth and effec-
tiveness, depend on the initial movements of self-oblivious
and non-utilitarian worship, of disinterested faith and
love, which opens up the soul of man to this supernatural
1 Brother Lawrence: Practice of the Presence of God, Letter II.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 207
torrent; and so convince him once for all, that all the
possibilities of power, light, certitude and joy which he
can realize in his prayer, are given and not self-chosen
or self -induced. Moreover, this deep and gentle inter-,
course seems to effect a gradual sensitization of the spirit ;
bringing the real man or woman of prayer into a state in
which the spiritual currents active below the surface of
life those contractions and expansions of the soul which
are a sure guide to our spiritual state and the secret
impulsions of God, are actually felt. Such loving and
disinterested prayer exerts a power over human character
which is unique both in kind and degree. It may emerge
from a type of devotion that is humble and even mechani-
cal ; and may at first be exercised in blind faith, with but
little sense of reality. But as it develops, will and desire
are gradually and inevitably transferred from lower to
higher centres of interest; and the true life of the soul is
anchored ever more firmly in the Eternal world to which
it belongs.
'Do not ask such a soul,' says Grou, 'what it has been
praying about. It does not know ... all it knows is, that
it began to pray, and continued to pray, as it pleased God;
sometimes arid a_nd sometimes consoled, sometimes consciously
recollected, sometimes involuntarily distracted, but always peace-
ful and united to God in its ground.' x
The prayer of adoration alone, in its intense objec-
tivity, could never have brought the soul to this close and
intimate correspondence with God: for such correspon-
dence involves the interweaving of each of the changing
creature's successive deeds and states with the immanent
Holy and Abiding, the quiet acceptance and use of each
serial event of existence, as somehow mediating the pres-
ence of a deeper Reality. We cannot in any real sense
1 J. N. Grou: Manuel des Ames Interieures, p. 328.
208 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
have unmediated communion with Universals; but only
with the particulars which embody and represent them.
This truth, already seen to be the basis of incarnational
and sacramental religion, is still operative in the secret
life of prayer. It gives us an explanation, agreeable alike
to faith and to psychology, of the fact that abstract con-
templation and worship of the Godhead will not alone
suffice to feed the hungry soul. It guarantees the validity
of that personal and intimate type of devotion which has
been so richly developed in Christianity: and endorses
the profound Christian feeling that here, in the world
of prayer no less than in the world of doctrine or of
sacrament, God comes all the way to the soul under
conditions of fullest self-giving, and offers it close com-
munion with His Being in ways that human nature is
able to understand.
St. Teresa tells us in a well-known passage, that it was
only when she gave concrete devotion to Christ priority
in her spiritual life, and curbed the mystical inclination
to 'reject all images' in favour of the formless contempla-
tion of God, that 'her prayer began to be solid like a
house'. 1 Diffuse awareness gave place to the actualized
and loving communion of a person with a Person: an
experience resting on the bed-rock of human nature,
and using for supernatural ends Teresa's natural powers.
This witness of a great and sane spiritual genius to the
dangers of an unbalanced transcendentalism to the need,
for human creatures, of a religious Object fully given
within the human sphere really only endorses the fun-
damental principles of the Christian life of prayer. For
the peculiar character of Christian prayer, as it emerges
already within the New Testament, in the Fourth Gospel
and St. Paul, is surely this profound, intimate and per-
*Life, cap. xxiv, par. 2.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 209
sonal communion; this self -giving of the Infinite in ways
at once ineffable yet human, carrying with them the utter
satisfaction here and now of man's supernatural desire.
Whatever the Fourth Evangelist may or may not tell us
about history, he tells us much of that which the Primi-
tive Church felt and knew about supernatural prayer.
We see how deeply tranquil, how completely unecstatic
yet full of peace and joy, is the religious experience which
he describes. It moves securely within the finite scene,
is expressed in symbols which the simplest can understand ;
yet mediates the Eternal in its entrancing loveliness and
life-giving power. Here once for all, under homeliest
images, we are shown all that the life of communion-
means for the awakened spirit; in food, nurture, guid-
ance, and more abundant life.
1 am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never
hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. ... I
am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known
of mine. . . . Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot
bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can
ye, except ye abide in me. ... I am the vine, ye are the
branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same
bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.
... As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: con-
tinue ye in my love.' 1
It is within this frame that the greatest saints have
developed and satisfied their aptitude for God: discover-
ing here a present Objective, at once mystical, personal
and historical, which meets at every point the intimate
needs and self-offerings of the finite soul. Not only so,
but they insist that the reanimation of the past, the dis-
covery of Christ as an intensely living fact in and through
meditation on the Gospel story, which has always formed
part of the Christian education in prayer, does quicken
and enrich their supernatural life. Nor does this claim
Ti, 35; x. 14; xv. 4, 5, 9.
210 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
really require the elaborate psychological explanation
which its modern apologists so anxiously provide. Still
less need it be discredited as a pious illusion, or placed
on a par with the emotional stimulus which we receive
from painting or poetry. For in all such cases we have
to remember that Spirit, God, is there first was always
there first, embracing past and present in His Eternal
Now and that He enters into communion with the human
spirit truly and realistically along many routes, but al-
ways within the world of space and time. We, deliber-
ately reascending the time stream and utilizing in such
meditations our historic inheritance, are simply finding an
approved path along which our conditional minds can
enter into that already waiting Presence. 'In the wall
that encircles Paradise*, says Nicolas of Cusa, 'Now and
Then are one.' *
The need of such a personal focus for the intimate life
of prayer has been felt by all the great theistic religions;
and has driven them to seek some way of actualizing that
communion with and dependence on the Unseen which
is so fully and beautifully given in Christian spirituality. .
Nor is it any part of Christian apologetic to discredit
paths which so clearly lie in the direction of truth. After
all, the communion of the Transcendent with the spirit
of man is given, in all its kinds and degrees : and is surely
far more likely to be given under forms that fall within
the circle of human perception and love even though
the desired Object be imperfectly conceived than to be
discovered as the result of a precarious ascent into the
Unknown.
'Oculi omnium in te sperant Domine: et tu das illis escam
in tempore opportune.
'Aperis tu manum tuam, et imples omne animal bene-
dictione.' 9
1 The Vision of God, cap. 9.
*Missale Romanwn: In Festo Corporis Christ!.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 211
Thus 'we love Him because He first loved us* should be
regarded as declaring a philosophic truth that extends far
beyond the Christian field; covering the personal devo-
tion of Bhakti Marga, the redemptive aspects of developed
Buddhism, and the ardour of the Sufi Saints.
'How could the love between Thee and me sever?
As the leaf of the lotus abides on the water: so Thou art
my Lord, and I am Thy servant.
As the night-bird Chakor gazes all night at the moon: so Thou
art my Lord, and I am Thy servant.
From the beginning until the ending of time, there is love
between Thee and me; and how shall such love be
extinguished ?
Kabir says: "As the river enters into the ocean, so my heart
touches Thee."' 1
*O thou who are my soul's comfort in the season of sorrow,
O thou who are my spirit's treasure in the bitterness of dearth!
That which the imagination has not conceived, that which the
understanding has not seen.
Visiteth my soul from thee; hence in worship I turn toward
thee.' a
Surely these witness, though at different levels of reality
and life-enhancing power, to the same human intuition
of the nearness of the Supernatural to the soul; and to
an asking, seeking and knocking both incited and answered
by God.
Poems: Song XXXIV.
3 Selected Poems from the DTvani Skamsi Tabria: edited and trans-
lated by R. A. Nicholson, VI.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE
SANCTIFICATION-
La premiere legon que nous donne la solitude c'est de nous
apprendre que nous ne sommes pas seuls, mais, tout au con-
traire, emportes dans I'inamense remous de 1'ceuvre divine.
PIERRE CHARLES
Spirit and spirit, God and the creature, are not two material
bodies, of which one can only be where the other is not: but
on the contrary, as regards our own spirit, God's Spirit ever
works in closest penetration and stimulation of our own; just
as, in return, we cannot find God's Spirit simply separate from
our own spirit within ourselves. Our spirit clothes and ex-
presses His; His Spirit first creates and then sustains and
stimulates our own.
F. VON HUGEL
Nee gratia Dei sola, nee ipse solus, sed gratia Dei cum illo.
ST. AUGUSTINE
study of Prayer, its very existence over against
* the rich wonder of the universe still more, per-
haps, the concrete facts disclosed by our own tiny prac-
tice these things force upon the mind in most vivid
form the full paradox of the spiritual life. Why do the
mighty supernatural forces, why does the personal yet in-
effable Reality, thus seize here and there upon certain
crumbs of creation, certain human spirits, and compel
them while still immersed in succession to recognize and
adore the Eternal? Why does this news, idelight, and
312
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 213
demand reaching them through things and through
thoughts, revealed to them in various degrees of fullness
by historical or dream-like figures, in personal or imper-
sonal ways require of these its tiny initiates a more or
less complete surrender of will, a more or less drastic
purification of mind and heart?
Perhaps the answer is to be found in the last of those
three characters which M. Olier declared to be essential
to the life of prayer, and to which he gave the strange
name of Co-operation. For that word means that man's
full relation to the Supernatural is a relation not only of
patient, but also of agent. He is awakened, called, and
trained, that he may work on spiritual levels with and
for the purposes of God. We see the visible world filled
with an endless variety of living growing creatures at
every stage upon the ladder of being. Distinct yet inter-
dependent, they act and react on one another in countless
ways ; and thus contribute to the glory and richness of the
physical universe. Even so, we may think of the invisible
world as filled with living intelligences, endless too in
their variety of type and degree, their place on the ladder
of life; but all acting and reacting on one another, and
contributing to the richness of the glory of God. Within
that world, so fully present with Nature yet distinct from
it, every soul which has heard the supernatural call has
a place to fill and work to do. Each is privileged and re-
quired to take a share in those labours and transformations
which shall bring out the spiritual implicits of humanity.
Each is to be transformed, not into a model devotee, but
into a tool, a redeeming engine of the Holy; and only
in so far as he accepts this exacting vocation, will the
supernatural possibilities of his own emergent spirit be
realized. That spirit is to grow by the faithful practice
and interweaving of two movements. By deepening, and
214 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
by expanding; by costly interior transformation, and by
uncalculating consecration to the redemptive purposes of
Eternal Life. Through this parallel series of disciplines
and efforts, present in one form or another in the life of
every healthy soul, God's Spirit evokes in man's spirit
that degree of likeness to the Holy of which it is capable.
Here is the assigned end of human prayer; and by his
^o-operation in this work man performs his little part in
the mighty process of incarnating the Eternal within the
world of time.
This conception of human existence has haunted the
minds of the saints, and achieves classic expression in the
Pauline vision of the 'mystical Body of Christ*. A jdeep
intuition prompts these saints to labo.urs, renunciations ami
sufferings which seem meaningless to the 'natural* man;
but by which they are sure that genuine work is done.
Though social Christianity is far from telling all the
truth about the supernatural life, and must never be al-
lowed to discredit the high calling to an exclusive adora-
tion and contemplation of God, nevertheless no saint
even the loneliest is merely a self-cultivator. He is
always self-given to some objective beyond the boundary
-of his own soul, and lives because of this concentration
upon spirit a wider, richer and more creative not a more
aloof and constricted life than other men. Sanctifica-
tion means the universalizing of the creature's will and
love ; their dedication to the interests of Reality. Thus, if
the prayer of adoration and communion brings man to an
ever deeper consciousness of his own faulty nature
obliges him to work with God in the supernaturalizing of
his own selfhood by the secret labours of self-conquest
this call to purgation of character is only the first point
in the real sanctifying of personality. Sooner or later
he will realize that this reformation is being effected
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 215
for a purpose; in order that he may co-operate in the
workings of the Supernatural on and in other souls.
The whole history of religious experience, as seen in
the noblest spiritual personalities, makes it plain that
the state of communion between the soul and the Tran-
scendent Other is not in this life an end in itself; nor
maintained for the sake of the rapturous joys which may
accompany it. It is maintained in order that the little
creature, through this faithful intercourse, may be woven
into the organism by which the Eternal Spirit acts within
the historic scene. Each soul completely given over to
the interests of God is, in little, such an organism, more
or less powerful, according to the purity and intensity of
its invisible attachments. The society of all such souls
deeply interconnected, and devoted to the interests of
one indwelling Life is a great organism of many cells;.
a true 'mystical body* of the incarnate Reality.
Here we surely touch the deepest truth known to u&
concerning the mystery of man's supernatural life: his
redemptive and creative power. We see that the very
existence of this power requires of the awakened soul, if
it is to grow to its full stature, not only penitence but alsa
intercessory action: and not only an individual, but also
a social relation with the supernatural world. That
soul .has a double obligation ; to a total and solitary re-
sponse to God, however felt, and to a share in the com-
mon life and mutual service of the Body which His Spirit
indwells within the temporal world. Hence not only
'Prayer* but also 'Church* not only secret adoration,
but also corporate worship is necessary to the full ex-
pression of its life. The invisible, but most actual, in-
corporation of all such awakened souls in one Super-
natural Society embracing life and death, past and pres-
ent, in its span: this is what Christianity means by the:
216 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Communion of Saints. Of that vast Supernatural So-
ciety, with its countless types of soul and of vocation
active, intellectual, mystical, speculative, intercessory, sac-
rificial co-operating for one great end, the visible Church
is or should be a sacramental expression. That Church
xlraws vitality and spiritual wisdom from many sources.
It is subject to succession, and partakes of the frailty
and stupidity of men. Yet so deeply is it tinctured with
Eternity and here, among all the hoarded and uncriticized
accumulations of symbols, rite and story, men of good
~will can hardly miss the savour of the Ultimate. The
Church, then, is an effectual sign of the embodiment of
the Supernatural in a social organism; and this although
the greatest single achievements of that Supernatural,
man's purest acts of heroic love, may often be found out-
side its walls.
Thus the co-operation with the Eternal to which the
awakened spirit of man is called can be thought of under
. three heads: Personal Transformation, Intercession, In-
corporation. Through the constant interaction of these
three factors, the differing contributions made by each
different soul to each, the Communion of Saints is created,
maintained, and does its work. One character runs
through all three, everywhere latent, but for the Chris-
tian theist patent ; namely, the principle of costly redemp-
tion. The first point has as its assigned end the sanctify-
ing of character, the production of a full-grown, fully su-
pernaturalized, creative personality capable of redeeming
work. Here the human will co-operates with the energy
of God in the work of transmuting human nature; re-
moulding the plastic psyche nearer to the heart's desire.
On the degree in which this transmutation is effected in-
each individual depends the worth of his or her spiritual
"work; the contribution made by it to the corporate life.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 217
Yet we observe that this secret co-operation of will and
grace is seldom if ever effected in isolation. The support-
ing love and will of his fellows intercession: the dis-
cipline and shelter of an institution and the tradition
which it conserves- Church : these, in some form or de-
gree, seem essential factors in the fullest transfiguration
of man. Where they are apparently absent e. g. the
first in the emergence of a lonely spiritual genius such
as Jacob Boehme or William Blake, the second in such
unchurched sanctity as that of George Fox careful in-
spection will commonly reveal their remote influence.
The most independent, even the most illiterate, saint can-
not elude all contact with those truths which the Church
exists to proclaim. Thus Boehme, Blake, the early
Quakers, were all fed not only by the Scriptures, Jbut by
mystical writers depending on Catholic tradition: whilst
no believer in the effectiveness of spiritual action, the
reality of that wide-spreading love which is poured out
in intercessory prayer, can limit its possible sphere of
influence to souls who wittingly receive its gifts.
We must hold, then, that God, the Supernatural, acts"
through personality and through history, from without
and from within, by external influence and by personal
striving, in the production of His Saints. What is a
Saint? A particular individual completely redeemed
from self-occupation; who, because of this, is able to
embody and radiate a measure of Eternal Life. His
whole life, personal, social, intellectual, mystical, is lived
in supernatural regard. What is he for? To help, save,
and enlighten by his loving actions and contemplations;
to oppose in one way or another, by suffering, prayer and
work upon heroic levels of love and self -oblation, the
mysterious downward drag within the world which we
call sin. He is a tool of the Supernatural, a 'chosen.
218 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
vessel, of the redeeming, transforming, creative love of
God.
All this is part of the widely various work of inter- -
cession: which is quite misunderstood by us if we limit
it to acts of prayer for the needs of other men. We may
expect to find this work being done by many different
types of soul, from the most naive to the most subtle,
both consciously and unconsciously, and in many different
ways and degrees. It will often be done in ways which
our clumsy analyses fail to recognize as 'religious'; and
by souls not yet continuously self-devoted, but driven by
a sudden generous impulse above their average level of
life. Thus even one heroic self-obvious act, one tiny work
of love, one cup of cold water given with eagerness, one
passionate longing to comfort or save, does to that extent
incarnate the supernatural; and contributes to the slow
triumph of Spirit over animal self-interest. That triumph
is prepared in the laboratory as well as in the cloister;
by the artist and the adventurer as well as the 'religious, 1
man. Every heroic devotion to beauty, truth, goodness,
every ungrudging sacrifice, is a crucifixion of self-interest,
and thus lies in the direction of sanctity; and wherever
we find sanctity we find the transforming act of God,
of supernature, upon the creature, irrespective of that
creature's dogmatic belief. All Saints, that 'glorious
touching Company', will doubtless include many whom
the world classed among its irreligious men. Because of
*sin', because of that strange element within the world
which opposes God, and perverts His gifts, all such
working of the Supernatural in human life must involve
suffering and tension. Real temptation, struggle, dark-
ness, is involved in every genuine transcendence of the
'natural man'. Yet since this transcendence is the very
condition of the fulfilment of personality, it brings even
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 219
through effort a real and vivid joy, an ever-deepening
peace and harmony, to the soul that undertakes it.
These points, in so far as they are true of the indi-
vidual, are also true of that Supernatural Society of
which the regenerated spirit is a unit, a cell. It too is
there to embody the Eternal ever more perfectly and vari-
ously in its widely various members; and thus to become
an agent of the saving and redeeming power of God. It
too remains completely a part of history and of humanity:
subject to frailty, fed by tradition, called to a difficult in-
terweaving of the present and the past. It too works by
the transformation of sensible material to spiritual pur-
pose. Yet in all its visible expressions and historical de-
velopments it looks beyond the sensual and historical
world. It too must be holy in essence, universe in spirit ;
not for its own sake, but in order that the Supernatural
may have an unimpeded channel through those many and
various members of which it is made.
Individual and group, then, are called, hot to a re-
jection of the sense-world, but to its transmutation; to
permeate the greatest number of successive acts, the wid-
est area of relationships, with the living Spirit of the
Infinite. Both church and soul retreat from the world
only that they may in some way return to it. They must
balance recollection by action, asceticism by love. The
raw material to be supernaturalized is mostly found in
the common ways of life. But the power of dealing with
that raw material, the deep certitude in which such deal-
ing becomes possible these are only fully achieved in
those periods of exclusive attention to God in which the
growing spirit, whether alone or with its fellows, turns
from succession and breathes the bracing atmosphere of
the Eternal World.
220 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
II
transforming of character, sanctification : this
* is for the individual the first point of that process
which enthrones the Supernatural at the heart of exist-
ence. No religion has passed from idea to actuality which
does not incite to this reforming and reharmonizing of
the plastic human psyche in accordance with the implicits
of the spiritual life. The need of such remaking has been
clear to all great moral teachers. Looking at man as he
is, and not merely at the inconsistent diagrams of him
offered by biology, psychology, and dogmatic theology,
these have mostly seen, as St. Paul saw, two distinct
strivings in him. The physical~!ife-force is ever striving
to fulfil itself. The spiritual impulse, still rudimentary
save in exceptional natures, is seeking contacts with the
supernatural world. With his emergent affinity for God,
man is an animal still. Where the first striving triumphs
completely, its assigned end is the full development of
the natural man; the perfection of his this-world adjust-
ments. Where the second triumphs completely, its as-
signed end is the self's real santification ; though not
necessarily the production of anything which the official
mind would recognize as a saint. The first type is bent
towards an ever more adequate response to the world
of particulars. Its interests, however legitimate and
wholesome, are those of planetary life. The second is
more and more dominated by the strange human thirst for
universals, and sense of their commanding claim. Its
true focus of interest lies beyond, although within, the
experienced world. Wittingly or unwittingly, it aims
at God.
That view of human psychology which is gradually
gaining acceptance, helps us to place what we know of
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 221
man's spiritual craving and growth in relation with the
rest of his being. This view regards the essence of our
psychic life as an energy, a life-force, informed by pur-
pose. It allows us to look upon every soul as an unde-
veloped entity; not yet wholly emancipated from the
animal instincts which have conditioned its past, but capa-
ble of progress, of growth in real being those develop-
ments which we call character and personality. It allows
us ta suppose that the purposive action which prevails
right through the animal world and explains its behaviour,
in some degree conditions and spiritual life too; and that
here as there, this means a total direction of the organism
towards the required end, and can call all the faculties of
the self to its service. In fact, the most recent psychology
enthrones the Will once more in the position which
St. Augustine gave to it: that of primacy in the mental
and spiritual life. Will is character in action; and sanc-
tity, which is simply character transformed upon super-
natural levels, means above all else the complete and
unreserved collaborations of this energetic will with the
active grace of God.
The human and divine elements, as Aquinas insisted,
rise and fall together. Neither a mere limp surrender
to the supernatural power, nor a self-dependent striving
neither Quietism nor Activism will alone suffice for
the transforming of man. A delicate harmony must be
established between the moulding action of the Divine
creativity and the costly deliberate effort of the soul.
The little human creature is required, as a condition of
growth, to work in its tiny way with the supernatural
determinant; deliberately setting its active will in that
direction. This it will tend to do, not merely by a desire,
a general intention; but by a series of purposive acts and
willingly accepted disciplines, seldom well understood in
222 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
their origin by those who undertake them, but having
/ as their term a complete and stable redirection of interest
and re-education of the unconscious mind. That redi-
rection and re-education is the essence of the Pauline
change from the 'carnally minded' to the 'spiritually
minded' man. 1 Here, in his transcendence of nature, man
utilizes a method deeply implanted in nature: for
'the modes of purposive striving form a continuously
graded series, from the pursuit of its prey by the Amoeba
to the moral struggles of Man'. The series begins in
'the vague almost undifferentiated striving of the animal-
cule in pursuit of his prey' and passes through the stage
of 'strivings prompted by desire for instinctive goals' to
the 'striving regulated in the choice of goals and means
by the desire to realize an ideal of character and con-
duct 5 . 2
Such an ideal means for tjie consciously religious
nature, a recognition of the claim and the attraction of
a realized Perfection drawing the soul 'from the .unreal
to the real'; a recognition which is the very essence of
the life of prayer. Now we find at every level, that
the success of the creature's deliberate striving is propor-
tionate: first, to the calm clearness with which the goal
is realized and gazed on. Next, to the eager steady
trust in its possible attainment. Last and chiefly, to the
generous and self-giving ardour with which it is pursued.
These conditions apply equally, whether the chosen aim
be an earthly or heavenly love; a natural, intellectual or
' spiritual achievement. Faith, Hope and Charity to give
these states of soul their traditional names remain the
essential conditions under which man can transcend him-
self; the dispositions in which alone he can bear the
stresses and make the sacrifices, which are involved in
1 Romans viii. 2-9.
8 McDougall: An Outline of Psychology, p. 248.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 223
every increase in his knowledge of Reality. Not anxious
conflicts, but a self-forgetting and all-enduring enthusiasm
best draw him on; whether his assigned end be that of
the discoverer, the artist, or the saint.
Formal religion has always declared that the two
'instf uments of perfection* which are in themselves enough
to supernaturalize human personality, are Prayer and
Mortification. By this it means on the one hand an ever
greater self-opening and tendence towards the Eternal,
that asking, seeking and knocking which cannot fail in
their effect ; and on the other hand an ever greater control
of our instinctive reactions to the temporal. It is another
way of stating the essential co-operation of will and grace
in the spiritualizing of man.
'In those two duties, therefore, of mortification and prayer,
all good is comprehended ; for by the exercise of mortification
those two general most deadly enemies of our souls, self-love
and pride, are combated and subdued, to wit, by the means of
those two fundamental Christian virtues of divine charity and
humility. And prayer, exercised in virtue of these two, will,
both by way of impetration obtain, and also with a direct
efficiency ingraft, a new divine principle and nature in us,
which is the Divine Spirit; which will become a new life
unto us, and the very soul of our souls.' 1
The great masters of asceticism insist that this morti-
fying action is to be directed only to the affections and
desires as psychology would say, to the conative life
for that which must be changed is the powerful set of
the self's interest and striving. St. Augustine described
the whole process with precision when he defined virtue
as 'an ordering of love' ; and thus by implication declared
sin to be the disordered, ill-directed action of that same
desire. Love must be set in order, so that the strongest
power of our nature, the true cause of all we do, may be
rescued from self-squandering on unreal and fleeting ob-
1 Augustine Baker: Holy Wisdom, p. 197.
224 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
jects, self-regarding ends, and may be concentrated on
'one only object which is God.' *
The control of unruly and self-regarding instincts in
other words, moralized behaviour though not in itself
supernatural, is therefore an essential preliminary of
supernatural life. It marks the first movement towards a ^
universalized existence, by opposing at its source the
downward drag of 'sin'.
'And what sin is, we have said already; namely to desire
or will anything otherwise than the One Perfect Good and
the One Eternal Will, and apart from and contrary to them,
or to wish to have a will of one's own. And what is done
of sin, such as lies, fraud, injustice, treachery, and all iniquity,
in short all that we call sin, cometh hence, that man hath
another will than God and the True Good; for were there no
will but the One Will, no sin could ever be committed.' 8
This view of sin shows us why real contrition is a
supernatural state. It is evoked by measuring ourselves
not against natural and human, but against more-than-
human standards; by seeing the extent in which spirit,
our essential reality, is degraded, smirched, amd deflected
from its true business, cut off from its true life by all
loveless and self-interested thoughts and deeds. We may
perhaps think of the human spirit as possessing, alone
among the various inhabitants of this planet, a certain
latent capacity for continuing the line of creation beyond
nature, to more than nature. 'Thou hast made us for
Thyself and our hearts shall have no rest save in Thee.'
This line of growth proceeds from a narrow and self-
regarding individualism controlled by the animal impulses
to self-preservation, self-assertion and self-satisfaction, to-
wards the production of a full, rich, warm, self-forgetful
personality capable of receiving God and hence able to
share His creative work. Incarnational religion points to
1 Augustine Baker: Holy Wisdom, p. 240.
Theologia Germanica, cap. 43.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 225
this, as the true function of the human spirit in the econ-
omy of the spiritual universe ; and the saint is the human
spirit who has fully grown up to that standard, by the
perfection of his adoring and courageous responses to
his environment, God.
~ *TIie soul,' says Grou, 'has reached the highest degree of
sanctity when, having become perfectly simple, she sees God
only in all things, loves God only in all things, and has no
interests but His interests.' 1
This statement does not imply an ever-narrowing con-
centration on the materials of piety ; bu"t an everwidening,
more disinterested, more joyous communion with every
aspect of the natural and supernatural world. Thus
when Walter Hilton and mystics of his school speak of
man's inner growth as the abolition of the 'image of
sin* and the re-forming of the 'image of God', 2 they seem
to be describing a costly organic process which does truly
happen to those in whom the supernatural sense is active :
the transformation of the individual outlook into the
universal outlook, the complete surrender of man's per-
sonal striving to the overruling Will of God, and thus
the linking up of all the successive acts of daily life with
the Abiding. For the natural man moralized behaviour
is often hard; because it involves perpetual will-decisions
in opposition to the instinctive drive. For the saint it
has ceased to be hard, because that instinctive drive has
been re-directed at the source.
'La guerra & terminata
de le virtu battaglia
de la mente travaglia
cosa nulla contended *
1 Manuel des Ames IntMeures, p. 330.
*Cf. Hilton: The Scale of Perfection. Bk. II.
*Jacopone da Todi, Lauda XCi.
MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
The yoke is now easy and the burden light; for the
self's striving is no longer merely individual. It gathers
power from its mergence in the total and tranquil oper-
ation of the Divine creativity. 'The Spirit helpeth our
infirmities.' 'Create and make in us new and contrite
hearts 5 , is equivalent to a prayer for this profound super-
naturalizing of personality.
Psychology can thus tell part of the story of sanctifi-
cation: in terms first of the control and redirection of
our animal strivings and desires, and next of the enhance-
ment of our spiritual correspondence. In other words,
it can tell us something of what happens to the human
psyche through mortification and prayer. It may rea-
sonably regard the whole process from its own angle; as
a further stage, sometimes and unequally achieved, in that
psyche's development. But doing this, it only tells half
the story. It describes an ethical and spiritual evolution ;
not a supernatural transmutation. For that which sets
the production of sanctity aside from all other expansions
of man's plastic nature, all other achievements of personal
status, is the fact that it cannot be described in terms of
development alone. Behind the whole region analysed by
psychology, and quite unreachable by psychology, is God ;
indwelling the soul that He transcends. That is what
the mystics, in their confusing spatial language, mean
by its 'ground'. It is in the soul's ground that sanctity
is prepared: and from this ground, where the creature
inheres in the Changeless, that the invitations and im-
pulsions, the anguish and blessedness come, which pre-
pare and mature man's spiritual life.
'This truly,' says Tauler, 'is much more God's Dwelling-place
than heaven or man. A man, who verily desires to enter in,
will surely find God here, and himself simply in God, for
God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be
present with him, and he will find and enjoy eternity here.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 227
There is. no past nor present here; and no created light can
reach unto or shine into thi divine ground; for here only is
the Dwelling-place of God and His sanctuary.' 1
This profound imbeddedness of the little human spirit
in the Divine and Infinite Spirit is known to us only
in naive intuition; or in that mystical experience which
is the developed form of such naive intuition. Yet all
the symbols or hints by which we try to express it,
here point beyond themselves to the primal reality of
our life; 'more inward than our most inward and higher
than our highest*. 2 The interpenetration of spirit with
spirit which is the basis of all that is perdurable in human
friendship and love, is but a faint image of this inter-
penetration of the Spirit of God and the created spirit;
the cause and support of all growth towards the super-
natural life. Where that union of Spirit and spirit is
perfected, we have sanctity; and the degree of such union
achieved by any one soul, is the degree of this soul's
sanctification. God wills that union all the time; the
generous response^ of the creature conditions its achieve-
ment.
We see then that M. Olier was right when he declared
co-operation between the soul and the Eternal to be
the perfection of prayer; and that we shall make no
sense of the story of human sanctification, unless we
acknowledge the priority for it of the distinct and per-
sonal action of God, the Changeless, upon the changeful,
fluid personality of man. For it means the turning over
of the finite self, every scrap of it, in utter trust and
unlimited self-giving, to the total invasion of that Holy
Spirit who is Lord and Giver of its life. No unpacking
and re-ordering of the soul's innate possessions, no develop-
ment of its latent possibilities, will here meet the case.
l The Inner Way, p. 98.
St. Augustine: Confessions, Bfc. Ill, cap. 6,
228 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
The mighty factor which theology calls grace, the incite-
ment and aid of a wholly other order than the human,
is required if the specific and unearthly loveliness of the
supernatural personality is to be brought forth within
the world of time. The play of supernatural forces on
and in the soul is rich and complex. In their reality they
escape us ; but the little we are able to apprehend must be
actualized by us as a fresh invasion from the Transcendent
Holiness beyond our radius, not only as an upspringing of
Spirit from within, if we are to retain and .feed our
filial and creaturely sense. Those who see in the reli-
gious facts of incarnational and sacramental religion a
witness to the dealings of Supreme Reality with its little
creatures, can hardly refuse to bring this further instance
of the creative action of the Supernatural into the scheme.
So the demand of the Ultimate on the tiny human
self immersed in history seems to be on one hand a de-
mand for full, generous and heroic action, deliberate
striving, completeness of life; and on the other, for the
humble acknowledgement that the incitement to this ac-
tion and food of this life come from beyond the radius
of the soul. A delicate balance must be found and
maintained between the creature's surrender to those
mighty energies which would transform and use it, and
its own initiative, its active, willed response. The
Teresian collaboration between Martha and Mary is
everywhere needed. 1 As it advances, the soul becomes
ever more flexible, more able to combine the uncalculat-
ing, genial life of service with a secret and austere re-
nunciation; and the line between God's impulse and its
own willed and generous action grows ever thinner, until
at last a stable union between spirit and Spirit is achieved.
All this will be done by different spirits in an infinity
*Cf. The Interior Castle, Seventh Habitation, cap. Iv.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 229
of different ways; for sanctity, human self-giving to the
purposes of the Holy, means the gradual and at last
perfect supernaturalizing of the special material offered
to any one soul, not rigid conformity to a pious con-
vention, or the slavish imitation of a type. Included
in this material are the simple daily deeds of every man
and woman of good will, the whole gamut of human
sufferings and renunciations, lonely study and social rela-
tionships. Thus Christ more perfectly discloses His
divine character by sitting at meals with sinners being
so wide, genial, strong and pure, that He can take all
human acts within His span than by pursuing the
traditional methods of ascetic saintliness.
The Christian saints have all partaken of this lovely
freedom; their peculiar charm, their variousness and
effectiveness, depend largely on the degree in which they
avoid all strain and rigorousness, all self-conscious cor-
rectness, and give with a generous simplicity just that
which they have and are. For all descriptions of sanctity
are accounts. of the loving reaction of a human factor
which is never twice the same to a Divine factor which
is always the same; but always, in its richness, exceeds
the capacity of any one soul. Each soul is personal and
distinct ; that which it has to offer, and is able to do, will
be its own. There is no such thing as one 'saintly type'.
Therefore we do not discredit one by pointing out that he
is not like another: and even the most apparently bizarre
or 'morbid' vocation-^St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar,
Santa Fina on her wooden board need not be too
hurriedly condemned. Aquinas can be skilled philosopher
and enraptured mystic ; Francis of Assisi can be poet and
penitent, troubadour and servant of the lepers; Lawrence
can serve God in the kitchen and the wine-barge, and
come from these homely duties to the skilled direction of
230 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
souls. Santa Zita is a general servant; Margaret of
Scotland is a queen. Julian of Norwich does her endur-
ing work in the cell of an anchoress ; Marie de Tlncarna-
tion goes as a pioneer to the New World. And, in the
records of modern sanctity, the Abbe Huvelin can radiate
the Supernatural from a Paris confessional; his convert,
Foucauld, from a lonely hut in the Sahara. Cardinal
Mercier can equally manifest its power on homely and
on heroic levels, in the spheres of pastoral, intellectual
and political action; whilst Elisabeth Leseur gives us a
perfect example of the sanctification, the universalizing
of the particular life so apparently narrow, yet so
richly fertile to which she was called.
'I resolve,' she says in her Journal, 'to sanctify my intellectual
work by giving to it a supernatural intention, performing it
humbly, without personal preoccupation, for the sake of other
souls.' And again, 'I only desire one thing the accomplishment
of Thy Will in me and through me; and I pursue, and desire
more and more to pursue, one end alone: the gaining of Thy
greater glory through the realization of Thy design for me.' 1
Hence those desires, strivings and adjustments, those
inward battles and surrenders, through which the pres-
sure of the Holy is felt and actualized by men the dis-
covery that every gift of new light requires an answering
movement of self-spending love all this will not be con-
fined to some special territory marked out as the domain
of 'religion' or of 'inner life'. It will be experienced, as
all the great realities of our existence are experienced,
on our own humble level and in our own humble way.
That is, within history, and on the plane of sense; no less
than beyond history, and on the plane of spirit. God
will then be felt by His awakened creature, inciting and
helping the perfect performance of all mental or manual
work ; and not only as present in the times of solitary
1 Journal et Penshs, pp. 161, 197.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 231
communion which support and explain that work. Noth-
ing less than this integration in man of the natural and
the transcendental, this supernaturalizing of the chain-
like events of daily life, 'each single act, each single
moment, joined directly to God Himself not a chain,
but one Great Simultaneity', 1 can, it seems to me, make
Reality homely to us; whilst fully safeguarding its over-
whelming mystery, distinctness and perfection, the pro-
found reaches of Eternal Life ever hidden from the
creature's furthest gaze. This means the lovely balance
of detachment and attachment; detachment from all this-
world demands and entanglements, but attachment to all
this-world duties and self-spending loves. It means re-
treats and returns, prayer and work; that easy swinging
of the soul between the Unseen and the Seen, which
maintains within history its relation with That which
transcends history and is in one form or another the very
secret of Christianity, the crown of a fully harmonized
life. It means finding in the particular the presence and
the appeal of theNQniversal ; and thus moving ever more
and more towards that universalizing of all love and of
all life, which is called union with God.
All the great presentations of achieved saintliness wit-
ness in various ways to this richly inclusive ideal. Artists
have again and again captured and shown its living
peacef ulness ; its combined character of devotion and
devotedness, quietude and zest. Thus in Sebastiano del
Piombo's lovely painting of 'St. Jerome in his Study,' 2
what we see is just a patient scholar, utterly lost in his
work and therefore happy in it; yet with an outlook on
a wide and lovely landscape. On the edge of his desk
stands a crucifix; so placed, that when he raises his eyes
to the landscape he must look at the Crucified too, and
1 F. yon Hugel: Selected Letters, p. 287.
National Gallery, London.
232 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
the most touchingly human of all self-givings of the Super-
natural, the most inexorable of its demands on the love
and trust of men, is brought into closest union with the
natural scene. Concentrated as he is on the study of
God's supreme revelation within history; yet the saint's
protective, loving influence seems to radiate without effort
to all his smaller or untamed relations the quail-walking
about the floor in perfect security and confidence, almost
within snapping distance of the peacefully snoozing lion.
Nothing of him seems to be rusting ; nothing is in conflict ;
nothing is turned inwards, to be used for his own sake.
He has objectives for adoration, for homely compassion,
and for thought. We feel that St. Jerome is in full
and willing contact with all the levels and contingencies
of life; all the bracing disciplines and frictions of ordi-
nary existence, from the care of his monks and his animals
to the exacting demands of textual research. He has
varied and ample material for the exercise of the sacrificial
will. Yet all is permeated by such an atmosphere, such
a quietude of the spirit, as transmute these contingencies
into sacraments of the Real.
Then balance that picture as we must, if we are to
understand it with those other pictures. of 'St. Jerome
in the Desert', which show us the inevitable times of
stress and solitude, when the saint must turn from the
contingent and face the bare actualities of God and his
own soul. There he is, in penitence that is to say,
deeply conscious of his inherent unworthiness, his crea-
turely imperfection and measuring that creaturely im-
perfection, that nothingness, against his vision and his
love. As unguessed and ever deeper reaches of the Super-
natural are disclosed to that loving, awestruck vision; so
must this abasement of the creature over against the
Holy increase. His creative work, his spiritual authority,
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 233
his kindly civilizing influence, his peaceful acceptance of
life, all have their origin here. Without that meek re-
course to the Unchanging Perfect, that perpetual redis-
covery of his own small status, he might have been a
doctor, but never a saint.
Ill
' I ^HIS saint, this more or less completely love con-
*- trolled and irradiated creature, cannot be thought of
as existing merely for his own sake. He only has meaning
in so far as he is in some way creative; and thus. becomes
a channel through which God, the Abiding Perfect, acts
.within the successive world. This supernatural action,
this ceaseless divine creativity, is still mainly uncompre-
hended by us. The 'tranquil operations of perpetual
Providence' may be dimly recognized in particular ex-
pressions and effects. We fail to realize these expressions
and effects as glimpses of a vast and hidden order; tiny
ripples that witness to the subtle forces and interacting
currents of the Sea Pacific in which we are immersed.
Those glimpses warn us that our world will lack richness
and meaning if we forget the unmeasured powers which
lie beyond the fragmentary universe disclosed by science,
and exclude supernatural causation from our theory of
human life. And it is in the sphere of supernatural
causation that we must look for the significance of the
saints.
Reports of experiences and adventures which remind
us of our mysterious situation, and cannot be squared
with 'common sense', appear again and again in the his-
tory of religion, and in accounts of spiritual action outside
the organized field. They all point to unrealized possi-
bilities in human nature; and suggest the vast extent to
which personality can stretch beyond the apparent con-
234 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
fines of the animal, the interdependence of all spirits, the
personal yet co-operative character of all spiritual life.
These reports oblige us to believe that human souls are,
in certain circumstances, open to each other's moulding
influence and loving regard ; and that the spiritual devel-
opment of man is largely effected by God through such
mutual influence an influence which transcends- spatial
limitations, and perhaps can even cross the chasm which
seems to separate the 'living' from the 'dead*. In some
this sympathetic contact reaches the conscious level; and,
by its energy of love and pity, enters into, knows and
shares, the secret griefs, needs, temptations and destinies
of those to whom its help is sent. Thus contemporary
witnesses describe St. Catherine of Siena as vividly aware
of the sins, troubles and necessities of her absent sons,
and drawing back with invisible cords those wanderers
who had once come within her sphere of influence. 1 Tele-
pathic and clairvoyant ability of the same kind is claimed
on good evidence for George Fox: 2 and such modern
saints as the Cure d'Ars and Abbe Huvelin seem to
have possessed a supernormal power of entering and
reading souls. 3 Here however we move on the fringe-
regions of psychology, where little that is precise is yet
known. Such scattered facts as are available should
only induce in us a humble suspension of judgment as
to the limits of human faculty and possible interaction
between souls.
If then we allow that God, the Supernatural, is ever
at work upon human personality through the distinct
yet deeply connected spirits of those men and women
whom He creates and indwells: we may perhaps think
of the saints as individuals who are so perfectly self-
J E. Gardner: St. Catherine of Siena, caps, v and x.
8 Cf. R. Knight: The Founder of Quakerism, Pt. a.
*A. Germain: Le Bienheureitx 7. B. Vianney t p. 127, and H. Bre-
mond: Histoire Litteraire, vol. iii, p. 591.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 235
given to His purpose, that here in their 'intercessory
action* immanent Spirit works most freely and with
power. And in intercession as a whole we have the
simplest example provided by the general religious life,
of a vast principle which is yet largely unexplored by
us. It is the principle, that man's emergent will and
energy can join itself to, and work with, the supernatural
forces for the accomplishment of the work of God : some-
times for this purpose even entering into successful con-
flict with the energies of the 'natural world'. Here
the little human creature, in virtue of its mysterious
power of sublimation, can use every act and intuition,
every sacrifice, disability and pain for the purposes of the
Eternal. Yet, so doing, it can and will come to feel
more and more that all this is but a drop of water as
against the ocean of supernatural power in which we live
and move; and that the mercy and generosity of the
redeeming saint who gladly takes the burden of another's
sin, is only a hint, a\microscopic expression of those saving
and supernaturalizing forces which are begotten of the
very essence of Reality.
Hence intercession in its widest and deepest sense is
the true business of sanctity; and emerges in some way
or degree in all those lives and separate acts which lie
in the direction of the Holy. It completes, with Adora-
tion and Communion, the triune life of prayer; and as
that life of prayer develops, so do these its three great
constituents fuse into one loving act of communion which
redeems while it adores and adores while it redeems. But
such adoring intercessory action cannot be limited to
overtly religious desires and deeds. Since every act and
thought of its members affects the whole spiritual society,
there is hardly any mental or bodily action which cannot
by intention gain or lose intercessory worth.
236 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
'All that you do,' says Cardinal Mercier, 'for good or for
evil, either benefits or damages the whole society of souls . . .
the humblest of you all, by your degree of virtue, and by the
work that you are called to do even in the most obscure situa-
tion, makes his contribution to the general sanctification of the
Church.' *
The great surge of cleansing and compelling life we call
'grace* takes and uses these men and women. -Lifting
them from concentration on the life of nature, it teaches
them each in their own way and degree and often in
terms unconnected with theology the supreme super-
natural secret of heroic and redeeming love. As the
longing for personal purification and harmony points
to a deep need in the human creature, an implicit knowl-
edge of its half-achieved status and spiritual call; so the
longing to do in some way this redemptive work dis-
tinctive of all the greatest souls surely points to a funda-
mental character of the supernatural life in man. It is
given a place in every great religion. Thus for Islam,
the right of intercession vests in the Prophet alone, but is
claimed by the Sufi saints as part of their spiritual in-
heritance from him : 2 whilst the Buddhist Path of Holi-
ness, which has as its first stage personal salvation, leads
through enlightenment to the achievement of redemptive
power. Doubtless this redeeming impulse is, and will
be, worked out in many ways and at many different
levels. The great intercessory action of the whole Super-
natural Society, whether it be still within the physical
world or beyond (so touchingly acknowledged in the in-
vocation of the Saints) includes all the diverse responses
to God, to Supernature, all the aspirations, all the sacri-
fices made by every type of soul. Both adoration and
supplication, both love and renunciation, accepted suf-
1 Lettre sur L'Unitf CathoKqne, mai 1922. Quoted in Irnikoit> Col-
lection No. 3, 1927.
8 R. A. Nicholson: The Idea of Personality in Siifism, p. 65.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 237
fering as well as devoted action, enter into this; and, in
religious language, 'prevail with God*.
Physical and mental labour, no less than spiritual
labour, can therefore become the vehicles of spiritual
effectiveness: for the worth of intercession abides, not
in the specific things which it can and does do for man,
but in the unimpeded channel offered by its loving inten-
tion to the transforming Divine love and will. There is
included in its work that strange power of one spirit to
penetrate, illuminate, support and rescue other spirits,
through which so much of the spiritual work of the world
seems to be done ; the more awful privilege of redemptive
suffering, as it appears again and again in the lives of the
saints ; the total dedication of the contemplative, redress-
ing in adoration the downward trend of our largely
self-interested world; the strong out-streaming prayer of
the cloistered nun, given for the general need. Not only
these, but the scientists' costly battle with disease; the
heroic reformer's struggle for social purity; the joyful
endurance of physical pain and weakness which makes
many a sick-bed into a radiant centre of spiritual power.
By each such act and life the tiny human creature, if
only for a moment, contributes to that spiritualizing of
the natural order which 'takes away the sin of the
world'.
*I believe,' says Elisabeth Leseur, 'that there circulates an ong
all souls, those here below, those who are being purified, and
those who have achieved the true Life, a vast and ceaseless
stream made of the ^sufferings, the merits, and the love of
all those souls: and that even our smallest pains, our least
efforts can, through the divine action, reach other souls both
near and distant, and bring to them light, peace and holiness.' z
All this must inevitably take place at a certain cost to
the creature; for here the physical and mental vehicle is
''Journal et Pens&es, p. 317.
238 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
wrested from its normal purpose, endures fresh strains,
and serves the purposes of another level of life. Much
that goes to make full natural life may be sacrificed ; ease
and liberty, family happiness, health. Nor are the spirit-
ual consolations of the sort which admiring outsiders
often suppose. Creative and redemptive prayer, in which
the human creature seems to advance to the very .fringe of
personality and act in dimly understood co-operation with
another power, has never been regarded by those called
to it as a succession of interior delights. By their uni-
versal testimony it is often full of pain, bitterness and
tension; though always proceeding from a spirit which
is utterly at peace. For it carries a heavy burden, but
carries it with joy.
There is a drawing by Eric Gill of the Agony in
Gethsemane, 1 which presents in one poignant scene the
very essence of such an intercessory life. In the fore-
ground three drowsy, earthy figures sit huddled in their
cloaks in the thick darkness ; comfortably somnolent,
wholly insensitive to that which is being endured on
their behalf. Beyond them, the prostrate figure of the
agonized Reedeemer lies bathed in a white celestial light
which He does not see. By His costly act of immola-
tion, He has completely entered the supernatural world.
Beside Him in that changeless light, an angel holds the
dark but radiant chalice of redemptive suffering; the
'cup of salvation* willingly accepted from God for
other men. In their lesser degrees and ways, the inter-
cessory saints have all sought to take their part in this
supernatural action. The steadfast pressure of God, felt
at different levels right through creation, finds through
them a special path of discharge. Because of their burn-
ing love and limitless compassion, they have become tools
1 In The Passion, published at the Golden Cockerel Press, 1926.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 239
of the Divine Creativity; and this in the most real and
concrete sense.
Thus the prayers, tears, and secret sufferings of St.
Monica avail more for St. Augustine than all his anxious
studies and fervent search. His sanctification is the work
of her redemptive love. 1 Thus St. Francis of Assisi, as
he enters more deeply into his supernatural vocation,
knows that behind the joy and expansion, the apparent
simplicity of his message and life, lies the mysterious
relationship with Reality which at last impressed upon
his body the signature of the Cross. Thus St. Catherine
of Siena, a young and untaught woman, declares that
she is sent into the world 'to taste and devour souls'. 2
She awakens the sense of the supernatural, sets up the
standard of Reality, wherever she appears; effects thou-
sands of conversions in her thirty years of life, and soothes
and rescues sinners by taking on herself the burden of
their sins. At last, worn out by the intensity of her
saving labours, which ^try to the utmost both her body
and her soul, 3 she dies 'merry and joyous' regretting
only that she has not reverenced yet more deeply the
sweet and glorious privileges of creative pain. 4 Thus
the Cure d'Ars, always ailing and tortured by insomnia,
offers his sufferings for the good of his parishioners and
penitents, and in defiance of physical weakness accom-
plishes his astonishing work. 5 Thus David Brainerd, the
saintly Evangelical leader, when first filled with the
light and love of the mystic vision 'felt at the same time
an exceeding tenderness most fervent towards all man-
kind'. 'God enabled me so to agonize in prayer that
1 St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. Ill, caps, n and 12.
. a E. Gardner: St. Catherine of Siena, p. 214.
3 'Her prayers were of such intensity', says an eye-witness, 'that one
hour of prayer more consumed that poor little body than two days upon
the rack would have done another.' Quoted by Gardner, op. cit, p. 333.
*Op. cit., pp. 85, 214, 349> etc.
5 Germain: Le Bienheureux J. B. Viannay, p. 133.
240 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
. . . my soul was drawn out very much for the world:
I grasped for multitudes of souls.' 1
In their fullness such dispositions as these, and such
results, are doubtless the privilege of the saints. Yet
they show how close and real is the interlocking of all
human spirits; how far reaching the soul's force and
responsibility. They suggest that we stand as it were
on the verge of a world of supernatural action, and are
in touch with powers of which the full span cannot be
conceived by us: powers most truly given by God to
the spirit of man, a world in which creation on spiritual
levels can go forward; a world of which the limitations
have not been seen by any human soul.
When we reflect on these things, their steady exhibi-
tion throughout history, their perpetual emergence
wherever man's love and man's religion transcend the
self-regarding stage and anchor themselves upon God,
we are driven towards the view that in such total self-
giving to the purposes of the Eternal at whatever
level it may be actualized, and in whatever way the
human spirit lives according to its measure the super-
natural life. Whether by naive petition, by costly action,
by single heroic deeds, long secret suffering and renuncia-
tion, or the disinterested and often agonizing travail of
the mind in all these we find man painfully yet will-
ingly transcending that level of nature within which he
emerges, and giving himself to a mighty purpose which
he loves but does not comprehend. The sacrificial in-
stinct, so deeply planted in his soul and finding such vari-
ous and such strange expressions as it accompanies his
upward path, holds within itself the secret of his corres-
pondence with Reality. Whether that Reality, self-
revealed within the life of succession, is best found by
1 Jonathan Edwards: An Account of the Life of David Brainerd,
quoted by C. E. Padwick: Henry Marty*, p. 86.
SUPERNATURAL IN HUMAN LIFE 241
him in lonely intuition or in corporate action, along
sensible or speculative paths whether his experience of
God be mainly mystical, social, sacramental or intel-
lectual in type the response which it asks for is always
the same. This response we find made with classic com-
pleteness by the saints. In them we see the soul's deep
thirst for the Perfect, satisfied in and through its own
loving and creative action on the imperfect. In its
service of the successive, its here and now sufferings and
tensions entinctured as they are by the ever-present sense
of the Abiding the Transcendent Other is fully known
and enjoyed.
In the Christian sacraments we have compact ex-
hibitions, suited to our comprehension, of the self-giving
of that Eternal Life which is nevertheless virtually pres-
ent in and with all things; and in the historic Incarna-
tion, the summing up and explication of many lesser theo-
phanies. So perhaps in the redemptive saints we have a
succinct and vivid demonstration of the general vocation
of the Race; and in the existence of sanctity a clue to
the deepesj: mysteries of our strange human experience.
For where else shall we find so fully expressed, and made
so vigorously operative, that instinct of heroism and self-
sacrifice, that alliance of beauty and pain which emerges
in all man's freest acts and volitions, and points beyond
itself to an unearthly goal? The protective pity of the
intercessor, his willing suffering in and with the souls
with which he is charged, the intensity of his detailed
care how close this brings the human spirit to the divine
nature ; how well this runs in series with the life and
mind of Christ.
The physical world, with its iron laws, its apparent
cruelties, its strains and conflicts; this is the theatre
Vvithin which the intercessory spirit emerges. The seeth-
242 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
ing pot of organic life, coloured and darkened by count-
less fugitive joys and agonies, creative novelty and beauty,
the horrors of decay, the ceaseless cycle of birth, growth
and death ; this is the material with which he has to ideal.
The power by which alone he can deal with it or with
such scraps as are proposed to the action of his redeeming
love is the power inherent in that costly and uncon-
ditioned self-giving of the creature to the will of the
Holy, which finds its supreme symbol in the Cross. And
in this loving, suffering surrender to the Supernatural, the
tiny human spirit achieves its glory and its rest. In so
far as it is a creature of time, it suffers. In so far as it
partakes of Eternity though it may not comprehend its
own experience rthat suffering is transfused by a deep
exultancy, a still and living peace; for beyond and within
the stress and conflict, it knows the enfolding presence of
an infinite and unbreakable joy. And here it is per-
haps that the changeful soul of man draws nearest to the
Unchanging, and tastes the peace, the splendour and the
pity that dwell together in the heart of God.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACTA SANCTORUM BOLLANDIANA. Paris and Brussels,
1734, 1910 (in progress).
ALEXANDER, S. Space, Time and Diety. 2 vols. Lon-
don, 1920.
ANGELA OF FOLIGNO, BLESSED. The Book of Divine
Consolations (New Mediaeval Library). London,
1908.
AUGUSTINE, ST. Confessions. Text and Translation
(Loeb Classical Library). 2 vols. London, 1919.
BAKER, VEN. AUGUSTINE. Holy Wisdom or Direc-
tions for the Prayer of Contemplation. London,
1908.
^BALFOUR, ARTHUR. Theism and Thought. London,
1923.
BERULLE, PIERRE DE. QEuvres. Paris, 1856.
BHAGAVAD-GITA. (Sacred Books of the East.) London,
1882.
BREMOND, H. Histoire Litteraire du Sentiment Reli-
gieux en France. 6 vols. (in progress). Paris,
1923, etc.
BROWN, WILLIAM. Mind and Personality. London,
1926.
BURCH, VACHER. Jesus Christ and His Revelation.
London, 1927.
CATHERINE OF SIENA, ST. The Divine Dialogue, trans-
lated by Algar Thorold. 2nd edition. London,
1926.
243
244 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
^CHRISTIAN FAITH, THOUGHT AND LIFE. Being the 1st
Part of the Friends' Book of Discipline. London,
1922.
CLOUD OF UNKNOWING, THE. Edited by Evelyn Un-
derhill. London, 1912.
DANTE. Divina Comedia. II testo Wittiano-riveduto
da P. Toynbee. London, 1900.
DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE. The Divine Names and
Mystical Theology. Translated by C. E. Rolt.
London, 1920.
ECKHART, MEISTER. Translated by C. de B. Evans.
London, 1924.
GARDNER, EDMUND. St. Catherine of Siena. London,
1907.
GARDNER, PERCY. Modernism in the English Church.
London, 1926.
GERMAIN, ALPHONSE. Le Bienheureux J. B. Vianney.
Paris, 1905.
GRENFELL, DR. WILFRED. What Christ Means to Me.
London, 1926.
GROU, J. N. Manuel des Ames Interieures. Paris, 1925.
L'ficole de Jesus. Lille, 1923.
HAUPTMANN, GERHARD. Hannele. Berlin, 1894.
HILTON, WALTER. The Scale of Perfection. Edited by
Evelyn Underbill. London, 1923.
HOPKINS, GERARD. Poems, edited by Robert Bridges.
London, 1918.
^HUGEL, BARON F. VON. Essays and Addresses on the
Philosophy of Religion. Series I and II. 2 vols.
London, 1921, 1926.
Eternal Life. London, 1912.
The Mystical Element of Religion. 2nd edition. 2
vols. London, 1923.
Selected Letters. London, 1927.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 345
/IGNATIUS LOYOLA, ST. The Spiritual Exercises. Span-
ish and English. Edited by J. Rickaby, S. J. Lon-
don, 1915.
JACOPONE DA TODI. Le Laude: a cura di G. Ferri.
Bari, 1915.
JULIAN OF NORWICH. Revelations of Divine Love.
Edited by Grace Warrack. London, 1901.
KABIR. One Hundred Poems. Edited by Rabindranath
Tagore and Evelyn Underbill. London, 1915.
KNIGHT, RACHEL. The Founder of Quakerism. Lon-
don, 1922.
LAWRENCE, BROTHER. The Practice of the Presence of
God. London, 1906.
LESEUR, ELISABETH. Journal et Pensees de Chaque
Jour. Paris, 1924.
LITTLE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS. Translated by T. W.
Arnold (Temple Classics). London, 1903.
LUCIE-CHRISTINE. Journal Spirituel. Paris, 1912.
MACHEN, ARTHUR. Hieroglyphics. London, 1902.
MALLOCK, W. H. The Veil of the Temple. London,
1904.
MALORY, SIR THOMAS. The Morte d' Arthur (Temple
Classics,). 4 vols. London, 1897.
McDouGALL, W. An Outline of Psychology. London,
1923-
McGovERN, W. M. Introduction to Mahayana
Buddhism. London, 1922.
MOFFATT, JAMES. The New Testament : a New Trans-
lation. London, N.D.
The Old Testament: a New Translation. London,
1925.
MURRY, J. MIDDLETON. The Life of Jesus. London,
1926.
NEWMAN, J. H. Parochial Sermons. London, 1836-7.
246 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
NICHOL, J. Psalms of Maratha Saints. Calcutta, 1919.
NICOLAS OF CUSA. Opera. Basle, 1565.
TRANS. La Vision de Dieu. Louvain, 1925.
NICHOLSON, R. A. Selected Poems from the Divan!
Shamsi Tabriz. Cambridge, 1898.
The Idea of Personality in Sufism. Cambridge, 1923.
;<X)TTO, RUDOLF. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by
J. Harvey. Oxford, 1923.
PADWICK, C. E. Henry Martyn, Confessor of the Faith.
London, 1922.
PETERSEN, GERLAC. The Fiery Soliloquy with God.
London, 1921.
PLATO. The Dialogues. Translated by B. Jowett. 5
vols. 3rd edition. Oxford, 1924.
PLOTINUS. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen
MacKenna. 5 vols. (in progress). London, 1917,
etc.
RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR. Opera omnia (Migne,
Patrologia Latina, t, 196).
RUYSBROECK. The Adornment of the Spiritual Mar-
riage, The Book of Truth, and The Sparkling Stone.
Translated by P. Wynschenk Dom. London, 1916.
The Book of the Twelve Beguines. Translated by
John Francis. London, 1913.
SCHWEITZER, ALBERT. The Mystery of the Kingdom of
God. London, 1925.
The Quest of the Historical Jesus. London, 1910.
(TAULER, JOHN. The Inner Way: 36 Sermons for Festi-
tivals. London, 1909.
^TEMPLE, WILLIAM. Christus Veritas. London, 1925.
TERESA, ST. Life. Written by Herself. Translated by
D. Lewis. 5th edition. London, 1916.
The Interior Castle. Translated by the Benedictines
of Stanbrook. London, 1921.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 247
THEOLOGIA GERMANICA. Translated by S. Winkworth.
London, 1907.
THOMAS A KEMPIS. The Imitation of Christ. The
earliest English translation (Everyman's Library).
London, N.D.
THOMAS AQUINAS, ST. Summa Theologica. Translated
by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 12
vols. London, 1912-17.
THOMAS OF CELANO. The Lives of St. Francis of Assisi.
Translated by A. G. Ferrers Howell. London,
1908.
N/TROELTSCH, ERNST. Christian Thought, its History and
Application. London, 1923.
WHITEHEAD, A. N. Religion in the Making. Cam-
bridge, 1926.
WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG. Tractatus Logico-Philosophi-
cus. London, 1922.
INDEX
A eta Sanctorum, 96
Adoration, 59, 118, 234, 236
Alexander, S., 79
Angela of Foligno, Blessed, 29,
31, 32, 156, 171, 191
Apocalyptic, 89, 105, 112, 120
Art, 97, 125, 157 seq.
Augustine, St., 43, 203
quoted, 4, 15, 16, 17, 23, 43,
52, 59, 66, 73, 87, 145, 179,
198, 227, 239
Baker, Augustine, 54, 183, 223,
224
Balfour, Lord, 67, 71, 72
Beauty, 158
Becoming, Philosophy of, 60
seq.
Berulle, P. de, 69, 114, 115,
133
Bhaffavad-Gita, 87
Bhakti-Marga, 131, 21 1
Blake, William, 217
Bodhisattva, 133
Boehme, Jacob, 217
Brainerd, David, 240
Bremond, H., 142, 188
Breviary, Roman
quoted, 114, l6l
Brown, William, 6, 141, 149
Buddhism, 132, 211, 236
Catherine of Genoa, St., 203
quoted, 15
Catherine of Siena, St., 203,
234, 239
quoted, 23, 26, 102, 129, 239
Character, see Personality
Christ, see Jesus Christ
Christianity, 89 seq., 106, 1 12
seq., 127 seq., 129, 134
seq., 152 seq., 162 seq., 231
Christmas, 113 seq.
Christology, 116 seq., 125 seq.,
141 seq.
Church, 134, 216 seq.
Cloud of Unknowing
quoted, 32, 58, 144
Communion of Saints, 216 seq.
Contemplation, 193, 196
Contrition, 224, 231 seq.
Conversion, 219
Creatureliness, 143, 197, 232
Cross, 118, 129, 154, 231, 242
Way of, 130
Cultus, 151 seq.
Cure d'Ars, 205, 234, 239
Dante, 97, 195
Dionysus the Areopagite, 32,
144
Divani Shamsi Tabriz, 211
Dualism, 56, 62 seq., 7 1 seq.,
96 seq.
Duration, 81
Eckhart, 182
Edwards, Jonathan, 240
Eternal Life, 37, 55 seq., 71, 75,
87, 91 seq., 138, 242
and sacraments, 165 seq.
von Hugel on, 99, 147
Eternity, 13, 66, 87, 90, no
Eucharist, 122, 137, 159, 167,
169 seq.
Eudes, Blessed John, 142
Foiicauld, C. de, 67, 230
Fox, George, 204, 217, 234
Fra Angelico, 153
Francis of Assisi, St., 7, 43, 82,
96, 239
248
INDEX
249
Gardner, Edmund, 234, 239 seq.
Gardner, Percy, 88
Gethsemane, 238
Giles of Assisi, 83
Gill, Eric, 238
God (see also Supernatural)
and history, 94 seq.
and mystics, 22 seq., 28 seq.
and personality, 234 seq.
and sanctity, 225, 227
and symbols, 146
approach to, 78 seq., 84 seq.
attention to, 190, 192 seq.
communion with, 199 seq.
given-ness of, 10, 12, 24, 34
seq., 46, 73
idea of, 3, 16 seq.> 34 seq.,
52, 65 seq.
immanent, 72 seq., 226, 234
incarnation, ill, 118 seq.
ineffable, 145
Kingdom of, 120
knowledge of, 83 seq.
prayer and, 188
prevenient, 23 seq., 52, 73,
_
richness of, 58, 83
transcendent, 109 seq.
Trinity, 1 12
union with, 203, 228
Gospels,
Fourth, see John
Synoptics, quoted, 82, 120,
123
Grace, 164 seq., 185, 190, 223,
236
and will, 183, 221
Grenfell, Wilfred, 138
Grou, J. N., 197, 207, 225
Ground of Soul, 226
Hauptmann, G., 147
Hebrews, Epistle to, 128
Heroism, 91, 97, 218, 228
Hilton, Walter, 136, 166, 225
History, 85 seq., 230
and sacraments, 167 seq.
and supernatural, 94 seq.,
126 seq.
Christian, 118 seq., 125 seq.
Holiness, 12, 45, 69, 125, 187,
214, 227, 234
Holy Name, Cult of, 136
Holy Spirit, 141, 142, 181
and sanctity, 226 seq.
Hopkins, Gerard, 1 12
Hugel, F. von, 15, 26, 33, 37,
53, 7<>, 87, 99, 100, 147,
155, 168, 203, 231
Huvelin, Abbe, 230, 234
Ignatius Loyola, St., 8, 200, 2OI
Incarnation, 85, 99, no seq.,
152, 241
and Eucharist, 169
and symbolism, 153 seq.
continuous, 135 seq.
in Hinduism, 131
Intercession, 214, 234 seq.
Isaiah, 42, 96
quoted, 25
Jacopone da Todi, 225
Jerome, St., 231 seq.
Jesu dulcis Memoria, 135
Jesus Christ, 96, 105, 116 seq.,
229
and sacraments, 166 seq.
character, 122 seq.
communion with, 133 seq.
imitation of, 129
life, 114 seq., 152
names of, 121
nativity, 114
nature, 121
passion, 118, 120, 153, 238
person, 119 seq.
presence of, 135 seq., 148
teaching, 123 seq.
John, St., 112
quoted, no, 122, 128, 139,
184, 209
John of the Cross, St., 94
Julian of Norwich, 36, 64, 136,
145, ISO
Kabir
quoted 25, 132, 21 1
Knight, Rachel, 234
250 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Lawrence, Brother, 206, 229
Leseur, Elisabeth, 205, 230, 237
Livingstone, D., 205
Love, 131, 223
divine, 141, 236
redemptive, 235 seq.
Lucie-Christine, 43, 55, 203
Machen, Arthur, 83
Mallock, W. H., 140
Malory, Sir T.
quoted, 8l
McDougall, W., 183, 222
McGovern, W. M., 133
Meditation, 200 seq., 209 seq.
Mercier, Cardinal, 230, 236
Missal, Roman
quoted, 114, 170, 210
Moffatt, Dr. J., 128, 184
Mortification, 223
Monism, 52 seq.
Moses, 42
Murry, J. Middleton, 138
Mystics
defined, 21 seq.
experience, 28 seq., 37 seq.,
155 seq.
Naturalism, 58, 65, 178
Newman, J. H., 108, 164
Nichol, J., 132
Nicholson, R. A., 21 1, 236
Nicholas of Cusa, 28, 29, 145,
148, 210, 211
Numen, 64, 157
Gates, Captain, 92
Olier, M., 188, 213, 227
Otto, R., 64, 109, 160
Pantheism, 60
Paraclete, 139
Parousia, 121
Paul, St., 36, 64, 135, 139, 203,
222
conversion, 42
Personality, 91, ill, 129, 131,
154
creative, 187, 216, 224 seq.
Personality (Cont.)
divine, 141
heroic, 90 seq., 103, 217
of, Christ, 114 seq.
transformation of, 207, 212,
221
Peter, St, 128
Petersen, Gerlac, 58
Plato, 87, 113
Plotinus, 51, 52
Prayer, 44, 85, 174 seq.
and history, 185
and supernatural, 184, 205
seq.
Christocentric, 208 seq.
corporate, 214
creative, 205
defined, 175, 178, 189 seq.
effects of, 200 seq., 202 seq.
end of, 213, 222
life of, 202, 212, 235
non-Christian, 210
of adoration, 188, 195 seq.,
234
of aspiration, 121
of communion, 118, 198
of co-operation, 118, 212
of simplicity, 200
origins of, 183
psychology of, 176, 191 seq.,
2OO seq.
redemptive, 238 seq.
rule of, 191 seq.
training in, 195
types of, 176, 179, 189 seq.,
200 seq.
Presence, sense of, 134, 139 seq.
sacramental, 170
Psalms
VIII, 12, 106
XVI, 25
LXII, 65
LXIII, 65
LXXIII, 198
CXLII, 65
Psychology, 140, 149, 192, 222
Reality
and Christ, 116 seq.
and history, 89 seq., 104, 113
INDEX
251
Reality (Cotit.)
and sacraments, 171
and symbolism, 148 seq.
changeless, 17, 29, 79, 87
experience of, 79, 83 seq., 171
incarnate, 215
twofold, 50 seq., 62 seq., 88
seq., 99, 105, 178, 181, 231
Redemption, 130, 166, 214 seq.,
235
in Buddhism, 132 seq.
Religion
and history, 89, 95 seq.
and mystics, 21 seq., 101
and psychology, 140, 150
and sacraments, 171
and theology, 16 seq., 80
beginnings of, 10, 20
ceremonial, 151
Christocentric, 135 seq.
defined, 2 seq., 12, 18
incarnational, 116 seq., 22$
natural, 78
revealed, 113 seq., 126 seq.
supernatural, 67 seq.
theocentric, 55
two levels of, 19 seq., 77
utilitarian, 55
von Huge! on, 33, 54
Richard of St. Victor, 29
Romance, 80 seq., 125
Ruysbroeck, 27, 40 seq., 54, 60,
170, 175, 178, 180, 194, 196,
201
Sacraments (see also Euchar-
ist), 85, loo, 133, 147, 161
seq., 172 seq.j 232, 240
Sacred Heart, 139, 141
Sacrifice, 130, 233
Saints, 24, 214, 217, 229, 235,
240
(see also Sanctity)
Sanctity, 12, 20, 23 seq., 69 seq.,
130 seq., 175, 213, 217,240
defined, 228
growth in, 225
witness of, 27, 44
(see also Saints and Holi-
ness)
Schweitzer, Dr., 67, 137, 167
quoted, 137
Sebastiano del Piombo, 231
Senses and spirit, 144 seq.
Sin, 223 seq., 237 seq.
Socrates, 92, 124
Spirits, interpenetration of, 234,
237 seq.
Spiritual life, 6 seq., 12 seq.,
28, 38 seq., 44 seq., 171
seq., 205 seq., 214 seq., 226
crown of, 232, 240
growth in, 195 seq.
Sterry, Peter, 142
Succession, 86 seq., 99 seq, 171,
218
Suffering, redemptive, 237 seq.
Sufism, 211, 236
Supernatural, 22, 27, 34, 45
se( l' 5 1 seq., 62 seq., 76
seq., 234
and history, 90 seq., 214, 230
and personality, 212 seq.,
222, 235
and prayer 115 seq., 212 seq.
and sacraments, 1 66
and sanctity, 214 seq., 227,
230, 240 seq.
and symbols, 147 seq.
experience of, 83, 87 seq.,
172 seq., 179 seq., 229
incarnation of, Hi seq., 129
seq., 211 seq.
life, 240
society, 215 seq., 238
Symbols, 16, 32, 85, 145
aesthetic, 157 seq.
Tauler, 226
Telepathy, 234
Temple, W., 163
Teresa, St., 156, 181, 182, 200,
208, 228
Tersteegan, G., 6l
Theologia Germanica, 224
Theosophy, 97
Thomas a Kempis, 25, 35, 54,
135, 185, 198
Thomas Aquinas, St., 14, 15,
28, 96, 98, 150
252 MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Tilak, 132 Visions and Voices, 155
Time, 86 seq. Vocation, 40 seq., 215
Troeltsch, E., 72, 76
TT i - ,< Wesley, J., 136
Umversals, 9 3, 146 Whitehead, A. N., S3, 94, 134
and particulars, 98, 123, 147, wm 20 - '^
152 seq, 208, 231 Wittgenstein, L., 33, 54
Vianney, J. B., tee Cure d'Ara Woodhouse> Voyage of the, 204
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
19 197 849
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
I
19 197 849
