[page99]
THE psychology of religious experience, as yet so little understood, has few more important problems proposed to it than
that which concerns the true place and right use of will, intellect, and feeling in prayer. This question, which to some may
appear merely academic, really involves the whole problem
of the method and proportion in which the various powers
and activities of our being may best be used, when they turn
from the natural world of concrete things to attend to the
so-called "supernatural" world of Spirit — in fact, to God,
Who is the source and sum of the reality of that world. That
problem must be of practical interest to every Christian —
more, to every one who believes in the spiritual possibilities
of man — for it concerns itself with all those responses which
are made by human personality to the impact of Infinite Life.
It deals, in Maeterlinck's words, with " the harshest and most
uninhabitable headlands of the Divine 'know thyself,'"
and includes in its span the whole region "where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God."
In the first place, what do we mean by prayer? Surely
just this: that part of our active and conscious life which
is deliberately orientated towards, and exclusively responds
to, spiritual reality. The Being of God, Who is that spiritual
reality, we believe to be immanent in all things: "He is
not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and move,
and have our being." In fact, as Christians we must believe
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this. Therefore in attending to those visible and concrete
things, we are in a way attending to that immanent God; and in this sense all honest work is indeed, as the old proverb
says, a sort of prayer. But when we speak of prayer as a
separate act or activity of the self, we mean more than this.
We mean, in fact, as a rule the other aspect of spiritual experience and communion; in the language of theology, attention
to transcendent rather than to immanent Reality. Prayer,
says Walter Hilton, in terms of which the origin goes back
to the Neoplatonists, "is nothing else but an ascending or
getting up of the desire of the heart into God, by withdrawing
it from all earthly thoughts" — an ascent, says Ruysbroeck,
of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law
defines it as "the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time
into the riches of eternity." It entails, then, a going up or
out from our ordinary circle of earthly interests; a cutting
off, so far as we may, of the "torrent of use and wont," that
we may attend to the changeless Reality which that flux
too often hides. Prayer stretches out the tentacles of our
consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life which
is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world
of things; but rather to that "Eternal truth, true Love, and
loved Eternity" wherein the world is felt to be enshrined;
and in this act it brings to full circle the activities of the human
soul — that
"Swinging-wicket set between
The Unseen and the Seen."
The whole of man's life really consists in a series of balanced
responses to this Transcendent-Immanent Reality; because
man lives under two orders, is at once a citizen of Eternity
and of Time. Like a pendulum, his consciousness moves
perpetually — or should move if it be healthy — between God
and his neighbour, between this world and that. The wholeness, sanity, and balance of his existence will entirely depend
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upon the perfection of his adjustment to this double situation;
on the steady alternating beat of his outward swing of adoration, his homeward-turning swing of charity. Now, it is
the outward swing which we are to consider: the powers
that may be used in it, the best way in which these powers
may be employed.
First, we observe that those three capacities or faculties
which we have under consideration — the thinking faculty,
the feeling faculty, the willing or acting faculty — practically
cover all the ways in which the self can react to other selves
and other things. From their combination come all the
possibilities of self-expression which are open to man. In
his natural life he needs and uses all of them. Shall he need
and use all of them in his spiritual life too? Christians, I
think, are bound to answer this question in the affirmative.
According to Christianity, it is the whole self which is called
to turn towards Divine Reality — to enter the Kingdom —
not some supposed "spiritual" part thereof. "Thou hast
made us for Thyself," said Augustine; not, as the Orphic
initiate would have said, "Thou hast made one crumb out
of our complex nature for Thyself, and the rest may go on to
the rubbish heap." It is the whole man of intellect, of feeling,
and of will, which finds its only true objective in the Christian
God.
Surely, the real difference which marks out Christianity
from all other religions lies just here; in this robust acceptance
of humanity in its wholeness, and of life in its completeness,
as something which is susceptible of the Divine. It demands,
and deals with, the whole man, his Titanic energies and warring
instincts; not, as did the antique mysteries, separating and
cultivating some supposed transcendental principle in him,
to the exclusion of all else. Christians believe in a God immanent and incarnate, Who transfuses the whole of the life which
He has created, and calls that life in its wholeness to union
with Him. If this be so, then Lex credendi, lex orandi; our
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belief should find its fullest expression in our prayer, and that
prayer should take up, and turn towards the spiritual order
all the powers of our mental, emotional, and volitional life.
Prayer should be the highest exercise of these powers; for
here they are directed to the only adequate object of thought,
of love, and of desire. It should, as it were, lift us to the top
of our condition, and represent the fullest flowering of our
consciousness; for here we breathe the air of the supernal
order, and attain according to our measure to that communion
with Reality for which we were made.
Prayer so thought of will include, of course, many different
kinds of spiritual work; and also — what is too often forgotten
— the priceless gift of spiritual rest. It will include many
kinds of intercourse with Reality — adoration, petition, meditation, contemplation — and all the shades and varieties of these
which religious writers have named and classified. As in
the natural order the living creature must feed and grow,
must suffer and enjoy, must get energy from the external
world and give it back again in creative acts, if he would live
a whole and healthy life, so, too, in the spiritual order. All
these things — the giving and the receiving, the work and the
rest — should fall within the circle of prayer.
Now, when we do anything consciously and with purpose,
the transition from inaction to action unfolds itself in a certain
order. First we form a concept of that which we shall do;
the idea of it looms up, dimly or distinctly, in the mind. Then,
we feel that we want to do it, or must do it. Then we determine that we will do it. These phases may follow one another
so swiftly that they seem to us to be fused into one; but
when we analyze the process which lies behind each conscious
act, we find that this is the normal sequence of development.
First we think, then we feel, then we will. This little generalization must not be pressed too hard; but it is broadly true,
and gives us a starting-point from which to trace out the way
in which the three main powers of the self act in prayer. It
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is practically important, as well as psychologically interesting,
to know how they act or should act; as it is practically important to know, at least in outline, the normal operation of
our bodily powers. Self-knowledge, said Richard of St.
Victor, is the beginning of the spiritual life; and knowledge
of one's self — too often identified with knowledge of one's
sins — ought to include some slight acquaintance with the
machinery we all have at our disposal. This machinery,
as we see, falls into three divisions; and the perfection of
the work which it does will depend upon the observing of
an order in their operation, a due balance between them,
without excessive development of one power at the expense
of the others.
On the side of spiritual experience and activity, such an
excessive and one-sided development often takes place. Where
this exaggeration is in the direction of intellect, the theological
or philosophical mood dominates all other aspects of religion.
Where the purely emotional and instinctive side of the relation
of the soul to God is released from the critical action of the
intelligence, it often degenerates into an objectionable sentimentality, and may lead to forms of self-indulgence which
are only superficially religious. Where the volitional element
takes command, unchecked by humble love, an arrogant
reliance upon our own powers, a restless determination to do
certain hard things, to attain certain results — a sort of supersensual ambition — mars the harmony of the inner life. Any
of these exaggerations must mean loss of balance, loss of wholeness; and their presence in the active life reflects back to their
presence in the prayerful life, of which outward religion is but
the visible sign. I think, therefore, that we ought to regard
it as a part of our religious education to study the order in
which our faculties should be employed when we turn towards
our spiritual inheritance.
Prayer, as a rule — save with those natural or highly trained
contemplatives who live always in the prayerful state, tuned
[page 104]
up to a perpetual consciousness of spiritual reality — begins,
or should begin, with something which we can only call an
intellectual act; with thinking of what we arc going to do.
In saying this, I am not expressing a merely personal opinion.
All those great specialists of the spiritual life who have written
on this subject are here in agreement. "When thou goest
about to pray," says Walter Hilton, "first make and frame
betwixt thee and God a full purpose and intention; then
begin, and do as well as thou canst." "Prayer," says the
writer of the Cloud of Unknowing, "may not goodly be gotten
in beginners or proficients, without thinking coming before."
All mediaeval writers on prayer take it as a matter of course
that "meditation" comes before " orison"; and meditation
is simply the art of thinking steadily and methodically about
spiritual things. So, too, the most modern psychologists
assure us that instinctive emotion does its best work when it
acts in harmony with our reasoning powers.
St. Teresa, again, insists passionately on the primal need
of thinking what we are doing when we begin to pray; on "recollecting the mind," calling in the scattered thoughts,
and concentrating the intellect upon the business in hand.
It is, in fact, obvious — once we consider the matter in a practical
light — that we must form some conception of the supernal
intercourse which we are going to attempt, and of the parties
to it; though if our prayer be real, that conception will soon
be transcended. The sword of the spirit is about to turn
in a new direction; away from concrete actualities, towards
eternal realities. This change — the greatest of which our
consciousness is capable — must be realized as fully as possible
by the self whose powers of will and love it will call into play.
It seems necessary to insist on this point, because so much is
said now, and no doubt rightly said, about the non-intellectual
and supremely intuitional nature of the spiritual life; with
the result that some people begin to think it their duty to
cultivate a kind of pious imbecility. There is a notion in the
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air that when man turns to God he ought to leave his brains
behind him. True, they will soon be left behind of necessity
if man goes far on the road towards that Reality which is
above all reason and all knowledge; for spirit in the swiftness
of its flight to God quickly overpasses these imperfect instruments. But those whose feet are still firmly planted upon
earth gain nothing by anticipating this moment; they will
not attain to spiritual intuition by the mere annihilation of
their intelligence. We cannot hope to imitate the crystalline
simplicity of the saints; a simplicity which is the result,
not of any deliberate neglect of reason, but of clearest vision,
of intensest trust, of most ardent love — that is, of Faith, Hope,
and Charity in their most perfect expression, fused together
to form a single state of enormous activity. But this is no
reason why we should put imbecility, deliberate vagueness,
or a silly want of logic in the place of their exquisite simpleness;
any more than we should dare to put an unctuous familiarity
in the place of their wonderful intimacy, or a cringing
demeanour in the place of their matchless humility.
In saying this — in insisting that the reason has a well-marked
and necessary place in the mechanism of the soul's approach
to God — I am not advocating a religious intellectualism.
It is true that our perception of all things, even the most
divine, is conditioned by the previous content of our minds:
the "apperceiving mass." Hence, the more worthy our
thoughts about God, the more worthy our apprehensions of
Him are likely to be. Yet I know that there is in the most
apparently foolish prayer of feeling something warmly human,
and therefore effective; something which in its value for
life far transcends the consecrated sawdust offered up by
devout intellectualism. "By love," said the old mystic, "He may be gotten and holden; by thought never." A
whole world of experience separates the simple little church
mouse saying her rosary, perhaps without much intelligence,
yet with a humble and a loving faith, from the bishop who
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preferred "Oh, Great First Cause" to "Our Father," because
he thought that it was more in accordance with scientific
truth; and few of us will feel much doubt as to the side on
which the advantage lies. The advantage must always lie
with those "full true sisters," humility and love; for these
are the essential elements of all successful prayer. But surely
it is a mistake to suppose that these qualities cannot exist
side by side with an active and disciplined intelligence?
Prayer, then, begins by an intellectual adjustment. By
thinking of God, or of Spiritual Reality, earnestly and humbly,
and to the exclusion of other objects of thought; by deliberately surrendering the mind to spiritual things; by preparing
the consciousness for the impact of a new order, the inflow
of new life. But, having thought of God, the self, if it stop
there, is no more in touch with Him than it was before. It
may think as long as it likes, but nothing happens; thought
unhelped by feeling ever remains exterior to its object. We
are brought up short against the fact that the intellect is an
essentially static thing: we cannot think our way along the
royal road which leads to heaven.
Yet it is a commonplace of spiritual knowledge that, if
the state of prayer be established, something does happen;
consciousness does somehow travel along that road, the field
of perception is shifted, new contacts are made. How is this
done? A distinguished religious psychologist has answered,
that it is done "by the synthesis of love and will" — that is
to say, by the craving in action which conditions all our essential deeds — and I know no better answer to suggest.
Where the office of thought ends, there the office of will
and feeling begins: "Where intellect must stay without,"
says Ruysbroeck, "these may enter in." Desire and intention
are the most dynamic of our faculties; they do work. They
are the true explorers of the Infinite, the instruments of our
ascents to God. Reason comes to the foot of the mountain;
it is the industrious will urged by the passionate heart which
[page 107
climbs the slope. It is the "blind intent stretching towards
Him," says the Cloud of Unknowing, "the true lovely will
of the heart," which succeeds at last; the tense determination,
the effort, the hard work, the definite, eager, humble, outward
thrust of the whole personality towards a Reality which is
felt rather than known. "We are nothing else but wills,"
said St. Augustine. "The will," said William Law, "maketh
the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything. It is
the only workman in nature, and everything is its work."
Experience endorses this emphasis on will and desire as the
central facts of our personality, the part of us which is supremely
our own. In turning that will and desire towards Spiritual
Reality, we are doing all that we can of ourselves; are selecting
one out of the sheaf-like tendencies of our complex nature,
and deliberately concentrating upon it our passion and our
power. Also, we are giving consciously, whole-heartedly,
with intention, that with which we are free to deal; and self-donation is, we know, an essential part of prayer, as of all
true intercourse.
Now, intellect and feeling are not wholly ours to give. A
rich mental or emotional life is not possessed of all men; some
are naturally stupid, some temperamentally cold. Even
those who are greatly endowed with the powers of understanding or of love have not got these powers entirely under
their own control. Both feeling and intellect often insist
on taking their own line with us. Moreover, they fluctuate
from day to day, from hour to hour; they arc dependent on
many delicate adjustments. Sometimes we are mentally
dull, sometimes we are emotionally flat: and this happens
more often, perhaps, in regard to spiritual than in regard to
merely human affairs. On such occasions it is notoriously
useless to try to beat ourselves up to a froth: to make our-selves think more deeply or make ourselves care more intensely.
Did the worth of man's prayerful life depend on the maintenance of a constant high level of feeling or understanding, he
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were in a parlous case. But, though these often seem to fail
him — and with them all the joy of spiritual intercourse fails
him too — the regnant will remains. Even when his heart
is cold and his mind is dim, the "blind intent stretching to
God" is still possible to him. "Our wills are ours, to make
them Thine."
The Kingdom of Heaven, says the Gospel, is taken by
violence — that is, by effort, by unfaltering courage — not by
cleverness, nor by ecstatic spiritual feelings. The freedom
of the City of God is never earned by a mere limp acquiescence
in those great currents of the transcendent order which bear
life towards its home. The determined fixing of the will upon
Spiritual Reality, and pressing towards that Reality steadily
and without deflection; this is the very centre of the art
of prayer. This is why those splendid psychologists, the
mediaeval writers on prayer, told their pupils to "mean only
God," and not to trouble about anything else; since "He who
has Him has all." The most theological of thoughts soon
becomes inadequate; the most spiritual of emotions is only
a fair-weather breeze. Let the ship take advantage of it by
all means, but not rely on it. She must be prepared to beat
to windward if she would reach her goal. [EU was a competent sailor from her childhood. DCW]
In proportion to the strength and sincerity of the will,
in fact, so shall be the measure of success in prayer. As the
self pushes out towards Reality, so does Reality rush in on it. "Grace and the will," says one of the greatest of living writers
on religion, "rise and fall together." "Grace" is, of course,
the theological term for that inflow of spiritual vitality which
is the response made by the divine order to the human motions
of adoration, supplication, and love; and according to the
energy and intensity with which our efforts are made — the
degree in which we concentrate our attention upon this high
and difficult business of prayer — will be the amount of new
life that we receive. The efficacy of prayer, therefore, will
be conditioned by the will of the praying self. "Though
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it be so, that prayer be not the cause of grace," says Hilton, "nevertheless it is a way or means by which grace freely
given comes into the soul." Grace presses in upon life perpetually, and awaits our voluntary appropriation of it. It
is accessible to sincere and loyal endeavour, to " the true
lovely will of the heart," and to nothing else.
So much we have said of will. What place have we left
for the operation of feeling in prayer? It is not easy to disentangle will and feeling; for in all intense will there is a strong
element of emotion — every volitional act has somewhere at
the back of it a desire — and in all great and energizing passions
there is a pronounced volitional element. The "synthesis
of love and will "is no mere fancy of the psychologist. It
is a compound hard to break down in practice. But I think
we can say generally that the business of feeling is to inflame
the will, to give it intention, gladness, and vividness; to convert it from a dull determination into an eager, impassioned
desire. It links up thought with action; effects, in psychological language, the movement of the prayerful self from a
mere state of cognition to a state of conation; converts the
soul from attention to the Transcendent to first-hand adventure
within it. "All thy life now behoveth altogether to stand
in desire," says the author of the Cloud of Unknowing to the
disciple who has accepted the principle of prayer; and here
he is declaring a psychological necessity rather than a religious
platitude, for all successful action has its origin in emotion
of some kind. Though we choose to imagine that "pure
reason" directs our conduct, in the last resort we always
do a thing because of the feeling that we have about it. Not
necessarily because we like doing it; but because instinctive
feeling of some sort — selfish or unselfish, personal, social,
conventional, sacrificial; the disturbing emotion called the
sense of duty, or the glorious emotion called the passion of
love — is urging us to it. Instinctive emotions, more or less
sublimated; Love, Hatred, Ambition, Fear, Anger, Hunger,
[page 110]
Patriotism, Self-interest; these are the true names of our
reasons for doing things.
If this be true of our reactions to the physical world, it
is none the less true of our intercourse with the spiritual world.
The will is moved to seek that intercourse by emotion, by
feeling; never by a merely intellectual conviction. In the
vigour and totality with which the heroes of religion give
themselves to spiritual interests, and in the powers which they
develop, we see the marks of instinctive feeling operating
upon the highest levels. By "a leash of longing," says the
Cloud of Unknowing again, man is led to be the servant of
God; not by the faultless deductions of dialectic, but by the
mysterious logic of the heart. He is moved most often, perhaps, by an innate unformulated craving for perfection, or
by the complementary loathing of imperfection — a love of
God, or a hatred of self — by the longing for peace, the miserable sensations of disillusion, of sin, and of unrest, the heart's
deep conviction that it needs a changeless object for its love.
Or, if by none of these, then by some other emotional stimulus.
A wide range of feeling states — some, it is true, merely
self-seeking, but others high and pure — influence the prayerful
consciousness; but those which are normal and healthy fall
within two groups, one of subjective, the other of objective
emotion. The dominant motive of the subjective group is
the self's feeling of its own imperfection, helplessness, sinfulness, and need, over against the Perfect Reality towards
which its prayer is set; a feeling which grows with the growth
of the soul's spiritual perceptions, and includes all the shaded
emotions of penitence and of humility. "For meekness in
itself is naught else but a true knowing and feeling of a man's
self as he is." The objective group of feelings is complementary to this, and is centred on the goodness, beauty, and
perfection of that Infinite Reality towards which the soul is
stretching itself. Its dominant notes are adoration and love.
Of these two fundamental emotions — humility and love —
[page 111]
the first lies at the back of all prayer of confession and petition,
and is a necessary check upon the arrogant tendencies of the
will. The second is the energizing cause of all adoration:
adoration, the highest exercise of the spirit of man. Prayer,
then, on its emotional side should begin in humble contrition
and flower in loving adoration. Adoring love — not mere
emotional excitement, religious sentimentality or " spiritual
feelings " — but the strong, deep love, industrious, courageous
and self-giving which fuses all the powers of the self into one
single state of enormous intensity; this is the immortal element
of prayer. Thought has done all that it may when it has set
the scene, prepared the ground, adjusted the mind in the
right direction. Will is wanted only whilst there are oppositions to be transcended, difficult things to be done. It represents the soul's effort and struggle to be where it ought to be.
But there are levels of attainment in which the will does not
seem to exist any more as a separate thing. It is caught in
the mighty rhythms of the Divine will, merged in it and surrendered to it. Instead of its small personal activity, it forms
a part of the great deep action of the Whole. In the higher
degrees of prayer, in fact, will is transmuted into love. We
are reminded of the old story of the phcenix: the active
busy will seems to be burned up and utterly destroyed, but
living love, strong and immortal, springs from the ashes and
the flame. When the reasonable hope and the deliberate
wilful faith in which man's prayer began are both fulfilled,
this heavenly charity goes on to lose itself upon the heights.
Within the normal experience of the ordinary Christian,
love should give two things to prayer; ardour and beauty.
In his prayer, as it were, man swings a censer before the altar
of the Universe. He may put into the thurible all his thoughts
and dreams, all his will and energy. But unless the fire of
love is communicated to that incense, nothing will happen;
there will be no fragrance and no ascending smoke. These
qualities — ardour and beauty — represent two distinct types
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of feeling, which ought both to find a place in the complete
spiritual life, balancing and completing one another. The
first is in the highest degree intimate and personal; the second
is disinterested and aesthetic.
The intimate and personal aspect of spiritual love has
found supreme literary expression in the works of Richard
of St. Victor, of St. Bernard, of Thomas a Kempis, of our own
Richard Rolle, Hilton, and Julian of Norwich, and many
others. We see it in our own day in its purest form in the
living mystic who wrote The Golden Fountain. Those who
discredit it as "mere religious emotionalism " do so because
they utterly mistake its nature; regarding it, apparently, as
the spiritual equivalent of the poorest and most foolish, rather
than the noblest, most heroic, and least self-seeking, types
of human love. "I find the lark the most wonderful of all
birds," says the author of The Golden Fountain. "I cannot
listen to his rhapsodies without being inspired (no matter
what I may be in the midst of doing or saying) to throw up
my own love to God. In the soaring insistence of his song
and passion I find the only thing in Nature which so suggests
the high soaring and rapturous flights of the soul. But I am
glad that we surpass the lark in sustaining a far more lengthy
and wonderful flight; and that we sing, not downwards to an
earthly love, but upwards to a heavenly." Like real human
love, this spiritual passion is poles asunder from every kind
of sentimentality. It is profoundly creative, it is self-giving,
it does not ask for anything in exchange. Although it is the
source of the highest kind of joy — though, as à Kempis says,
the true lover "flies, runs, and rejoices; is free, and cannot
be restrained" — it has yet more kinship with suffering than
with merely agreeable emotions. This is the feeling state,
at once generous and desirous, which most of all enflames the
will and makes it active; this it is which gives ardour and
reality to man's prayers. " For love is born of God, and
cannot rest save in God, above all created things."
[page 113]
But there is another form of objective emotion besides this
intimate and personal passion of love, which ought to play
an important part in the life of prayer. I mean that exalted
and essentially disinterested type of feeling which expresses
itself in pure adoration, and is closely connected with the sense
of the Beautiful. Surely this, since it represents the fullest
expression of one power in our nature — and that a power
which is persistently stretched out in the direction of the
Ideal — should have a part in our communion with the spiritual,
as well as with the natural world. The Beautiful, says Hegel,
is the spiritual making itself known sensuously. It represents,
then, a direct message to us from the heart of Reality; ministers
to us of more abundant life. Therefore the widening of our
horizon which takes place when we turn in prayer to a greater
world than that which the senses reveal to us, should bring
with it a more poignant vision of loveliness, a more eager
passion for Beauty as well as for Goodness and Truth. When
St. Augustine strove to express the intensity of his regret for
wasted years, it was to his neglect of the Beauty of God that
he went to show the poignancy of his feeling, the immensity
of his loss. " Oh Beauty so old and so new! too late have
I loved thee!"
It needs a special training, I think — a special and deliberate
use of our faculties — if we are to avoid this deprivation; and
learn, as an integral part of our communion with Reality,
to lay hold of the loveliness of the First and Only Fair. " I
was caught up to Thee by Thy beauty, but dragged back again
by my own weight," says Augustine in another place; and
the weight of the soul, he tells us, is its love — the pull of a
misplaced desire. All prayer which is primarily the expression
of our wants rather than our worship, which places the demand
for daily bread before instead of after the hallowing of the
Ineffable Name, will have this dragging-back effect.
Now, as the artist's passion for sensuous beauty finds expression in his work, and urges him to create beauty as well as
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he can, so too the soul's passion for spiritual beauty should
find expression in its work; that is to say, in its prayer. A
work of art, says Hegel again, is as much the work of the
Spirit of God as is the beauty of Nature; but in art the
Holy Spirit works through human consciousness. Therefore man's prayer ought to be as beautiful as he can make it;
for thus it approaches more nearly to the mind of God. It
should have dignity as well as intimacy, form as well as colour.
More, all those little magic thoughts — those delicate winged
fancies, which seem like birds rejoicing in God's sight — these,
too, should have their place in it. We find many specimens
of them, as it were stuffed and preserved under glass shades,
in books of devotion. It is true that their charm and radiance
cannot survive this process; the colour now seems crude,
the sheen of the plumage is gone. But once these were the
living, personal, spontaneous expressions of the love and faith
— the inborn poetry — of those from whom they came. Many
a liturgic prayer, which now seems to us impersonal and
official — foreign to us, perhaps, in its language and thought —
will show us, if we have but a little imaginative sympathy,
the ardent mood, the exquisite tact, the unforced dignity, of
the mind which first composed it; and form a standard by
which we may measure our own efforts in this kind.
But the beauty which we seek to incorporate into our
spiritual intercourse should not be the dead ceremonious
beauty which comes of mere dependence on tradition. It
should be the freely upspringing lyric beauty which is rooted
in intense personal feeling; the living beauty of a living thing.
Nor need we fear the reproach that here we confuse religion
with poetry. Poetry ever goes like the royal banners before
ascending life; therefore man may safely follow its leadership
in his prayer, which is — or should be — life in its intensest
form. Consider the lilies: those perfect examples of a
measured, harmonious, natural and creative life, under a form
of utmost loveliness. I cannot help thinking that it is the
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duty of all Christians to impart something of that flower-like
beauty to their prayer; and only feeling of a special kind will
do it — that humble yet passionate love of the beautiful, which
finds the perfect object of its adoration in God and something
of His fairness in all created things. St. Francis had it strongly,
and certain other of the mystics had it too. In one of his
rapturous meditations, Suso, for whom faith and poetry were
— as they should be — fused in one, calls the Eternal Wisdom
a " sweet and beautiful wild flower." He recognized that
flowery charm which makes the Gospels fragrant, and is
included in that pattern which Christians are called to
imitate if they can. Now, if this quality is to be manifested
in human life, it must first be sought and actualized, consciously or unconsciously, in prayer; because it is in the pure,
sharp air of the spiritual order that it lives. It must spring
up from within outwards, must be the reflection of the soul's
communion with "that Supreme Beauty which containeth
in itself all goodness"; which was revealed to Angela of
Foligno, but which "she could in no wise describe." The
intellect may, and should, conceive of this Absolute Beauty
as well as it can; the will may — and must — be set on the
attaining of it. But only by intuitive feeling can man hope
to know it, and only by love can he make it his own. The
springs of the truest prayer and of the deepest poetry — twin
expressions of man's outward-going passion for that Eternity
which is his home — rise very near together in the heart.
END