Philonous. Are you sure you are right in saying that Aristotle held the life of contemplation to be a superhuman life? Was it not rather for him the life of man most fully man?
Theonas. It would be better to say that for him it was both at once; and it is precisely in this that he seems to me to have seen most deeply into our nature.
J. Maritain.
Such a title as 'The Philosophy of Contemplation' will seem to many people to beg two questions: one concerning the limitations of Philosophy, and the other the very character of Contemplation itself. Yet not really so; for Philosophy is the science of ultimate Reality, and Contemplation, if it is genuine, is the art whereby we have communion with that ultimate Reality. Both then declare that the true meaning of our existence
(1) The Counsell Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Ladies' College, Cheltenham, 26 March, 1930
page 2
lies beyond us; and both offer to lead us out towards it, by the contrasting routes of vision and of thought. If we took seriously—which of course we do not—Aristotle's definition of Man as a Contemplative Animal, that phrase alone might provide us with a good deal of food for reflection. For this precise thinker did not, with the exclusive mystic and the quietist, call man a Contemplative Spirit. He called him an animal, part of the natural order; distinguished from all other animals by what?—the power of Contemplation. '0 God, thou art my God: early will I seek Thee'. Alone in the rich jungle of creation, we find man wanting to do that. Surely Aristotle was right in picking out this strange desire, as the decisive thing about us.
That a scrap of transient life, pinned to this tiny planet and limited by the apprehensions of its imperfect senses and the interpretations of its yet more imperfect mind, should be filled to the brim with a passion for that which lies beyond life—this, even if it only happened once, would present a difficult problem to the determinist. But it happens frequently. Philosophy has not only to make room for the intellectual experiences of a Plato, a Descartes, a Kant, a Hegel. It must also make room for the contemplative experiences of a St. Paul, a Plotinus, an Augustine, a Francis, a Teresa; and for the fact that human life only achieves its highest levels under the direct or oblique influence of such personalities as these, and the conviction of spiritual reality and its demands which they alone seem able to convey. They give to our life something otherwise lacking, which we cannot
page 3
quite get for ourselves. Although it is not a truth which we are fond of, something deep within us insists that Mary has chosen the good, the real, the noble part; and that without her steadfast witness to the Perfection she adores our busy life of becoming would lose all significance.
'The Contemplative life is the Vision of the Principle', says St Gregory. Only man is capable of that vision, that discovery of the meaning of life. That is why he is a contemplative animal; why it is the good part, and without it there is a cleavage in his life, the fatal cleavage between idea and act.
Of course Contemplation, thus understood, means something far more fundamental than the special kind of devotion which is often called by that name in ascetic books. It means that spiritual realism, that concrete hold on the Reality of God, without which religion is hardly more than the beneficent illusion which Freud supposes it to be. It means what von Hugel called our sense of Eternal Life. 'Every man as such", said William Law, 'has an open gate to God in his soul.' Philosophy merely puts this in its own language, when it says that man is capable of the intuition of absolutes. Religion is stating the same thing in lovelier words, when it declares that the pure in heart can see God. The link between all these sayings, then, is their insistence that human personality has about it something which is not accounted for by nature, and is not satisfied by nature. We do not belong in the world of succession alone. Deeply immersed though our lives may seem to be in that world of succession, we are yet able
page 4
to know the Unchanging; and when we forget this, at once those lives are out of shape. 'Ye are of God, little children.' There is within us the seed of absolute life. Therefore in man 'most fully man', correctly adjusted to reality, contemplation, the Vision of the Principle—in other words, spiritual realism—would be the true cause of all action. There should be no cleavage between them.
Here then we have a doctrine which is embedded in the very substance of Christian philosophy: a doctrine which, if we took it seriously, must affect not only our philosophy but our psychology too, and not only these abstract studies, but our whole conduct of life. It would determine our social structures, our educational aims; and movement towards its more perfect actualization would be the only progress worthy of the name. In spite of the so-called revival of mysticism, however, I do not think anyone will contend that this doctrine is now taken seriously either by philosophy or by religion. We talk and write easily and freely about spiritual values and the spiritual life ; but we remain fundamentally utilitarian, even pragmatic, at heart. We want spiritual things to work; and the standard we apply is our miserable little notion of how they ought to work. We always want to know whether they are helpful. Our philosophy and religion are oriented, not towards the awful Vision of that Principle before which Isaiah saw the seraphim veil their eyes; but merely towards the visible life of man and its needs. We may speak respectfully of Mary, and even study her psychology; but we feel that the really important thing is to
page 5
encourage Martha to go on getting the lunch. Yet the whole witness of religious history supports St. Luke and Aristotle and St. Gregory. Understood in the deepest and widest sense, Contemplation is the very life blood of religion. It is and has ever been the one thing needful, 'the life of man most fully man'. Be still and know that I am God. It cannot be done in any other way. It is true that he who runs may read; but he cannot so easily observe the stars.
So here is something which the religious philosopher cannot neglect. It is his duty to heal the conflict between practical life and contemplative life. He must remind our institutional and philanthropic Marthas that the whole sanction for their activities—the only reason why religion exists at all—abides in the fact that men and women do possess a sense of God, of Eternal Life; that they are contemplative animals. That one fact lies at the root of all creeds, all churches, all prayer. It is, in fact, one of the key-pieces in the intricate puzzle of our mental and spiritual life. It is a very awkwardly shaped piece for the intellectualist and for the naturalist; but we have got to find its place in the scheme. It is true that we cannot yet make it fit quite neatly. For this, we need much further knowledge of our own many-levelled mental life on one hand, and of the relation between differrent kinds of knowledge—spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic—on the other hand. But that is no reason for leaving it in the box; and ignoring the plain fact that it is one of the most important pieces in the religious complex, and may yet prove the clue to the
page 6
whole pattern of life. Whatever we choose to call it, it represents the most distinctive and unquenchable of all man's passions, the strangest of his endowments; what Plotinus called his Sense of the Yonder. Thus our whole philosophy of life must be conditioned by the position we give to it; and Christianity, though so much more than a philosophy of life, must have a philosophic scheme, and must make that scheme wide enough and deep enough to accommodate the largest possible number of religious experiences and facts. It is from this point of view that modern philosophies of religion often seem rather thin, tight and academic; terribly inadequate to the profound experiences of the Saints, who are after all our chief sources of information, the seers, explorers, artists, great navigators of the Ocean of God.
If we do not dismiss them as mere aberrations—and psychology is finding it more and more difficult to do this—the facts of the contemplative life, both in its general diffuse manifestations and its vivid embodiiments, involve certain theological and philosophical consequences. The Abbe Bremond, who has devoted two volumes of his great Histoire Litteraire to the history and psychology of this subject, speaks without scruple of the 'metaphysic of the saints'. And the true peculiarity of the 'metaphysic of the saints' is the fact that it is controlled by the fruits of contemplation, the certainty of first-hand contact with a spiritual reality that is beyond but not against reason. Therefore a central place in Christian philosophy—indeed, in any really spiritual philosophy—must be left for this strange passion, this peculiar way
page 7
of knowledge; we cannot avoid our obligations by sending its best products to the convent, and its worst to the asylum. But far more thought and exploration than we have given it yet lies before those who want to harmonize this department of human experience with the rest. The best modern work on this subject, and on the psychology of religious experience—which is all part of it—suggests that we are at last beginning to move towards a more satisfactory theory of contemplation than any held in the past generation by those who explored it either from the direction of religion or the direction of science; one which will interpret tradition in the light of experience, and bring us nearer to an understanding of the close relation between religious truth and poetic truth. The most important part of this work has been done in France: by the Abbe Bremond, whose remarkable essay on 'Prayer and Poetry' is now widely known, by the psychologist and theologian Marechal, and by the philosopher Jacques Maritain. Yet this work is, to a large extent, the recovery and re-statement. of doctrine once generally held by spiritual men, and found to be endorsed by their expenence.
What then do we mean by Contemplation? What is it? When we have considered this, we may see more clearly its place in our view of the human mind and its workings—psychology: and our view of the nature of reality—philosophy. I take it that, in the widest sense, we mean by Contemplation the human self's method of stretching out towards truth which lies beyond and above his reason; his communion
page 8
with a reality which is not given us by the senses, or reached by logical thought. Though it may include the sort of pantheistic reverie sometimes called Nature Mysticism, real Contemplation goes far deeper than this; for its true object is that mysterious Something Other, the Holy and Unchanging, which gives meaning to life. If we take our stand by the contemplative and ask how life seems to him, he will probably say, in his own special language, that it seems to him to be a shifting, intricate half-real process, over against Something Else, transfused by Something Else, which is not shifting but is wholly real: something abiding, fully given, prevenient, as theology would say. He will add, that for him the visible world derives all its significance from that Something Else; and that the hours in which he has communion with It are, as St. Gregory has it, 'alone the true refreshment of the mind'. At moments, of course—as St. Augustine says in 'the flash of a hurried glance'—all, or nearly all, of us, tend to see existence like that. Therefore the contemplative experience is something which we ought not to find it difficult to believe in; even though our own share in it be faint or rare.
When we consider such crumbs of spiritual experiience as have been vouchsafed to us, or look at the general witness of the race, we see that at a certain level of consciousness, this sort of apprehension always tends to emerge. There is a pause in our normal useful busy correspondence with the world of use and wont. Another inhabitant comes to the window of the soul; and looks with awe and joy upon another landscape, seen because sought, and possessed because
page 9
desired. We all know, that is to say, however badly we express it and however firmly we ignore it, that there is a certain duality in our life: we are not truly one, but truly two. 'In the course of the normal development of man', says Bremond, 'there occur moments in which the discursive reason gives place to a higher activity, imperfectly understood and indeed at first disquieting.' This higher activity—this hidden inhabitant—is intuitive rather than logical in its methods. It knows by communion, not by observation. It cannot give a neat account of its experience: for this experience overflows all categories, defies all explanations, and seems at once self-loss, adventure, and perfected love. If we attempt to analyse and pigeon-hole what it gives us, we ruin it at once. But if we accept the evidence it forces on us we have to allow that there are two kinds of real knowledge accessible to man. One kind of knowledge is like seeing within a narrow, but sharply focussed area. The other kind of knowledge is more like bathing in a fathomless ocean, or breathing an intangible and limitless air. It gives contact and certitude, but not understanding: as breathing or bathing give us certitude about the air and the ocean, but no information about their chemical constitution.
Experience as a whole supports this distinction of two quite different capacities in man; two different ways of getting two different sets of knowledge. We commmonly call one rational, and the other intuitive; one logical and the other poetic; one doctrinal, the other devotional. But these words merely advertise our ignorance. Experience is perpetually hinting that we
page 10
are far more mysteriously compounded than psychology will yet acknowledge; that we have, as human beings, contact with many levels of reality. In moments of heightened sensitiveness, and especially under the peculiar influence of aesthetic feeling—which still awaits explanation from naturalistic psychology—the psyche loosens its frenzied grip on the obvious world and becomes aware—dimly yet most vividly—of deeper, richer, more universalized realities than the logical reason can reach. But the fullest awakening of this faculty, the most intense, awestruck, and delighted apprehension of Absolutes, remains the special prerogative of religion. The peculiar activity of religion which we call in its widest sense prayer, and in its intense form contemplation, is orientated towards this. And wherever men are religious at all, this activity arises and this power is developed with more or less completeness.
Nor are we to think of this Reality as less concrete, less rich, more thin and abstract, than the world of our sensory experience. The vision of the Principle, however vague and dim our sight, is the vision of Absolute Plenitude, of All that is. 'O! the depth of the riches!' cries St. Paul. Such dimness and vagueness as accompany our contact with it, and such contradictions as occur in the descriptive efforts of the mystics, striving to reconcile the extremes of amazement and love, must be attributed to our uncertain touch, our still embryonic spiritual sense. Hence too the tension, and sometimes abnormal mentality, which accompany these adventures upon the very frontiers of the human world. Yet when
page 11
even the fullest allowance has been made for all this, and for the fact that here man's reach must ever exceed his grasp; how impressive is the combined witness of corporate and personal religion to the realistic character of its Object, and the breadth and height and depth of that region to which the soul attains in contemplation.
It is strange that the immense importance of these facts has not been more generally realized: for here we lay our finger on the organ of man's spiritual knowledge. We use the word Spiritual easily and lightly. Yet, if we look at it with detachment, what a queer word it is—what a queer concept it is—for the human animal to have achieved. So useless, indeed meaningless, from the naturalistic point of view; yet entwined in all that we feel most valid, most worth having in life. If we were suddenly asked to define what we meant by the word Spiritual, most of us would feel as baffled as St. Augustine when he was asked to define Time. We too know what it is, until we are asked to describe it. For this is a word that stands for the Something Other, sought and found in human religion: and, more than this, for a whole range of most real and deep demands and activities, set towards the unchanging and away from the changeful surface of our life. We are constantly compelled to resort to it, in order to find a place for the richest and loveliest developments of that life; for it is just these developments that elude all rational explanation. Heroic sanctity, the instinct of sacrifice, the redemptive power of suffering: these solid facts are quite incompatible with naturalism but entirely harmonious with
page 12
the world of spiritual reality to which the soul tends in contemplation.
If we put this view of human experience side by side with the scientific view of human experience, what does it require of us, in the way of an enlargement of our conception of the nature of man? What adjustments of psychology does it involve? Surely the first question which it forces upon us is this: Is there indeed a faculty, a way of knowledge, in man, distinct from the senses and from discursive and conceptual thought, which can give us genuine knowledge of a sort that cannot ever be obtained by means of the senses or of discursive thought? Is the contemplative or poetical consciousness something distinct from ordinary consciousness? When Keats uttered that celebrated, but much misunderstood and rather badly worded aspiration, '0 for a life of sensation rather than thought!' was he merely desiring agreeeable aesthetic feeling, or was he reaching out to a direct but dimly understood communion with the reality of things? Was he being very superficial, or very profound? However differently they frame or justify their answers, poets, artists and saints agree that he was being very profound. It is their universal testimony that they are not only conscious of a world of reality and beauty shown to them and affecting them. They are also conscious of something else, conveyed by it, or of a distinctive state or condition in themselves; a sort of life, usually latent, which has been stirred to activity. They may describe it in various ways, but all make plain this two-fold character of their fullest knowledge.
page 13
Stated in its most absolute and provocative form, this means that Man has not only a natural but a supernatural environment; and not only a supernatural environment, but also a supernatural life: that he already belongs to the world of Being as well as the world of Becoming, and under certain conditions can enter here and now into his double heritage. Keats, I think, had discovered and was trying to express this two-fold character of human consciousness: for he knew that the secret roots of poetry, as of religion, were planted in the world to which he had access in that generalized awareness, that quiet receptive state which he unfortunately called, because he could find no better term for it, 'sensation rather than thought'. He meant the same thing as that very different poet Matthew Arnold, when he said it was the peculiar privilege of poetry to give us 'a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense' of contact with the real life of things.
That saying, translated to the theological level, conveys more accurately than many disquisitions on mysticism, the character of contemplation. It gives a full, new, intimate sense of contact with real life: in this case, the life of spiritual things. It confers poetic, not scientific, knowledge of God. Not by way of thought, but by way of a willed yet passive receptivity. Not through the logical mind, or the stimulation of the senses; but through something else. So the poet and the contemplative stand side by side—Plotinus and Coleridge, Keats and St. John of the Cross—witnessing each in their own manner to an immense tract of human experience which is commonly
page 14
ignored, or at best indulgently allowed by us. And yet this is the most significant and most characteristic part of human experience; for here man discloses his transcendental nature, his inherent power of desiring and discerning Eternal Life, his passion for absolutes, for God, the Supreme Object of philosophy and religion.
And this cloud of witnesses requires of psychology, that it finds room somehow for the distinction which was first stated by the Platonists, and on which 'spiritual' persons have insisted ever since: the distinction between a 'higher' and a ' lower' self in man, that 'somewhat' in him which—however he defines it—is capable of eternity, and that natural being he shares with the animal world. 'There is a root or depth in thee" says William Law. 'This depth is the unity, the eternity, I had almost said the infinity of thy soul, for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it any rest, but the infinity of God.' What we call contemplation is simply the activity of this fundamental hidden self; reserved, silent, but now and then emerging in response to every stimulus which has in it the savour of the Infinite. Even though we never get a clear and steady conception of it—for the soul, as Claudel says, is silent when the mind looks at it—we all know in our own experience that this distinction answers to facts. Martha and Mary do live together in the house of the soul. One is absorbed in multiplicity; the other is gathered into unity. Martha, the extrovert, is busy and loquacious. Mary, the introvert, keeps her secret to herself. One acts, the other
page 15
adheres. Together they witness to the two-fold action of the psyche; and the two-fold character of that world, both temporal and eternal, in which the psyche is placed. To ignore this duality is to impoverish our view of human nature, and I doubt whether psychology in the true sense is going to establish itself on a firm basis until it consents to recognize this. Nor will practical human life, which is after all psychology expressed in action, achieve harmony and power till it is submitted to the same truth. The integration of prayer and action, tempering and re-inforcing each other—depth to balance expansion, and surrender to balance power—this alone can give to human life the richness of reality. Adam must return to contemplation, heal the cleavage in his nature, and accept the full destiny of a creature called to be a link between eternity and time.
I think that a study of method and result in religion, and still more plainly perhaps a study of method and result in creative art—that most fruitful field of research for the religious philosopher—helps us to establish a little more clearly the character and method of this contemplative or transcendental sense. What is the characteristic which confers greatness on a work of art? Surely the fact that in some degree it weaves together two worlds; gives sensuous expression to the fruits of contemplation, and conveys to us a certain savour of the Infinite by means of finite things. The power of conveying ecstasy, said Arthur Machen years ago, is the touchstone and secret of art; and ecstasy is simply a strong name for the release of the transcendental sense, which here com-
page 16
municates its results by means of material given by the senses. Thus and only thus, can we account for the peculiar stimulus which is given by great art to something in us, which ordinary arguments cannot reach: the solemn thrill of the numinous, removed perhaps at several degrees but still operative, which is felt when we stand in the Cathedral of Chartres, listen to a Beethoven symphony, or read 'The Ancient Mariner'.
Such a work of art, if it is to perform this, its essential office, requires of the artist three things. (i) The contact in his soul's deeps with the reality which lies beyond sense. (ii) Its translation into symbolic forms which are accessible to the senses, and with which the rational mind can deal. (iii) The energetic will, which selects, moulds and creates from this material a picture, a melody, a poem. The whole artistic and poetic process is a process of incarnation: contemplation issuing in action. Martha and Mary have collaborated in the construction of a bridge along which news from the eternal comes into the sensible world, and enters through this door the field of normal consciousness.
In this respect, the greater part of the literature of religion, and especially all that part which seeks to convey the special experiences of religion, is poetic literature. Many of our muddles and disputes about it would vanish if we would acknowledge this patent truth. Religious literature is trying to convey one thing in terms of another thing: and must do so, if it is ever to reach our minds, which, after all, are tuned-in to the wave-lengths of the visible world. It
page 17
obeys, in fact, the rules of artistic creation; and we shall appreciate it much better if we remember this. In Bremond's words, the religious writer is always at work 'turning prayer into poetry', bringing purely spiritual material within reach of our sense-conditioned minds: and the more thoroughly he does this, the better we understand him.
Read without prejudice, such different works as St. Augustine's Confessions, the Revelations of Julian of Norwich or the Divine Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena, make this plain to us. All these describe to us under symbols, a vision of that which in its reality lies far beyond sight and beyond symbol; and they do this by the deliberate and selective exercise of the creative will, weaving a garment in which their vision of God can be clothed. The raw material of this garment is sure to be taken—indeed, can only be taken—from their stock of beliefs, memories, and traditions, and from their visible surroundings. In other words, apperception plays a large part in the creation of spiritual literature. Thus Ezekiel sees a vision obviously inspired by the masterpieces of Chaldean art that surround him. Yet borne upon the wings of those Living Creatures, he truly apprehends the power and the splendour of God. Thus John in Patmos sees a vision for which Ezekiel provides the pictorial form; yet within this familiar symbolism he apprehends the deeper Christian mystery of 'the Lamb that is slain from the foundation of the world'. In each case then the image, of which the provenance is so easily traced by us, is merely the carrying medium of something else: something not
page 18
to be obtained by thinking, but by some other activity of the soul, and which cannot be accounted for by the operations of the surface-mind. We may say indeed of the work of the great religious artist what Professor Lowe says in that illuminating book, The Road to Xanadu, of the work of the great poet:
From the empire of chaos a new tract of cosmos has been retrieved; a nebula has been compacted—it may be—into a star.
Yet in this effort of translation, the artist—whether he is trying to give us aesthetic or religious truth—must always descend one step from the levels of conntemplation; and in doing so must leave something behind. He always knows this, and it is the tragic element in his vocation. This is equally true of the phIlosopher Plotinus with his strange and almost stammering hints about the Yonder, and his final cry, 'He who knows this will know what I mean'; of the great religious genius of Augustine, frustrated and delighted by that Holy Joy of which there is nothing he can say; of the unlettered Angela of Foligno, exclaiming 'Not this! not this! I blaspheme', as she struggles to put her overwhelming experience of God into words; of the learned mystic, Tauler, driven beyond all the ordinary resources of image to speak of 'the Abyss which is unknown and has no name . . . more beloved than all that we can know.' Beethoven fighting with the limitations of sound and rhythm, Dante, at the end of the Paradiso, recognizing the utter inadequacy of the poet to the final vision of Reality—'My own wings were not fitted for this
page 19
flight'—assure us by their very failure of a splendour which cannot be revealed. The poet, says Bremond, is a broken-down mystic. Better perhaps to say, a mediator, an interpreter, who brings us at his own cost the news of eternal life. One who might have had the good part of Mary, but deliberately accepts the more homely office of Martha; and dishes up some fragments of the heavenly feast for his fellow men. The heart of his experience of truth or of beauty, based as it is on an inarticulate though vivid communion—on love rather than thought—remains incommunicable; and he knows this. Nothing is more striking in the literature of contemplation, and of high aesthetic experience, than its steady and unanimous witness to an overplus, an experienced reality, a joy and richness, which can never be conveyed save by allusion. Hence its language must always have a fluid and poetic quality, must suggest more than it ventures to define; for it always points beyond itself, and carries an aura of suggestion. Theology becomes a dead language the moment it forgets this fact. 'Then only', says St. Gregory, ' is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot know anything concerning Him'. 'There is a distance incomparable', says à Kempis, 'between the things men imagine by natural reason, and those which illuminated men behold by contemplation.' And St. Thomas, yet more strongly: 'Divine things are not named by our intellect as they really are in themselves, for in that way it knows them not.' And Ruysbroeck: 'It is beyond ourselves that we are one with God.' Supra-rational
page 20
experience; that, however much the intellectualist and utilitarian may dislike it, is at once the paradox and life blood of religion, as it is of creative art. The saints are always telling us of contact with another level of life, which convicts, delights and transfigures them; that 'Clear day of eternity which never changes state into its contrary'. They tell us about it very clumsily, and often by symbols which may or may not be acceptable to us; but they always manage to convey a sense that they have had contact with Absolutes.
A church that has forgotten this, which has abandoned the transcendental temper and fallen from contemplation, has lost the meaning of its own activities. For the whole business of expressive religion—literary, ceremonial, and sacramental—is to give something of one thing, in terms of another thing. It has got to give man's deepest intuitions of a Reality which lies beyond the senses, in such a way that this can combine with the material given by the senses. To put it in strict terms, its business is the symbolic communication of Absolutes. It is called upon to bridge the gap between mystical and rational knowledge—move to and fro between Contemplation and Meditation—and for this it will need all the resources of history, of drama, of liturgical and aesthetic suggestion. Therefore a philosophy of religion which emphasizes the supra-rational character of faith, and remembers that the Church is a society of contemplative animals, can never be—as some suppose —hostile to institutions and external forms. It does not support the shallow notion that there is a
page 21
necessary contrast between ceremonial and spiritual religion, by any arbitrary limitation of the materials which can be used in this great art-work of the soul. On the contrary it knows that man's craving for God and instinct for God require all possible paths of discharge—social, intellectual, ritual, traditional—if the richness of their content is to be expressed.
Such a philosophy as this, I believe, will provide the most promising and solid foundation on which to build that modern apologetic for institutional religion which the Church so badly needs. It is never the genuine mystic who talks about 'dead forms'. He can reach out, through every religious form, to that Eternal Reality which it conveys. For him, every church will be a bridge-church, and all the various experiences of religion graded and partial revelations of the Being of Beings, the one full Reality—God. Conscious of the double nature of his own experience, of the two strands which are present in that incarnate poem we call human life, he is not much troubled by the crude and imperfect means which may be used by religion to convey its ineffable truths: for the most childish and the most sophisticated images may be equally far from representing the holy reality, yet equally able to convey it. The great thing is that the conveyance should take place, and in a way that can reach a wide variety of souls. For this, he knows it must be combined with familiar material which these souls can understand. And that means an amalgam in which there is something of spirit, and also something of sense: something divine and something human too. It means, in fact, incarnation.
page 22
If this be true, then it is surely an important function of religious exercises to release and nourish the contemplative sense; and we obtain from this a standard by which to measure their success or failure. The church in which we breathe the very atmosphere of worship—the liturgy that enchants as well as informs—these are doing the work to which external religion is called: making a bridge between the temporal and the eternal world. This is magnificently taught by that master psychologist St. Ignatius, when he makes all the elaborate discipline of the 'Spiritual Exercises', all the moral probing, the deliberate visualizing, and detailed meditation of Scripture, fade away in the end before one thing: which he calls 'a contemplation to procure the love of God'.
Leading on from this, it seems worth while to ask what this view of the nature of contemplation, this restoration of a belief in the distinctness of Spirit, the double character of man's life, is going to do for dogmatic religion. Surely a great deal. For in the first place it calls upon theology to put the Transcendent first; to remember that its chief business is always with God, and its abiding temper must be adoration. This is already beginning to be realized, and accounts for the enormous influence of such thinkers as Otto and Karl Barth. Though in his struggles to tell some fragments of that which he has known the contemplative often uses pantheistic language, his very reaction is a tribute to the otherness and transcendence of God. Further, his steady and awe-struck witness to the unsearchableness of the Eternal rebukes the fatuous assumption that we can make a diagram of
page 23
the Divine nature, or speak with assurance about 'getting new conceptions' of Him. There is a stern realism about the greatest utterances of the mystics, which shows that the solemn dread which Otto has shown to be a part of all full experience of the Numen, enters into their deepest apprehensions of Reality. Were these reports accepted as evidence, they might help to cure the unpleasant and almost impudent familiarity which colours a certain type of popular theological writing.
Secondly, as regards the problems surrounding theological re-statement, a good many difficulties would resolve themselves if we recognized more clearly and less nervously the necessary part which is played by symbol and image in all religious formulas, and the fact that in those formulas we are always dealing with a translation, or rather paraphrase, of a text which we cannot read. For here the Thomist distinction between 'sign' and 'thing' is experienced by the soul in its extreme form.
Thirdly, this view of contemplation might lead to a better estimate of the relation between prayer and faith. For genuine prayer, as all its great initiates have insisted, is the communion of the human spirit with the Spirit of Spirits; a responsive movement towards a prevenient Reality. It is rooted in ontology: an appeal from the successive to the Abiding. Even in its crudest forms, then, it is already a sort of contemplation. Its very essence is a mysterious contact, which gives us a certain realistic experience of the Infinite: and by disciplined attention and willed self-abandonment this experi-
page 24
ence can be deepened, steadied, enhanced. Hence its witness to Reality should be accorded the respectful attention we give to any 'real existent'. The attempts of naturalistic psychology to explain it on subjective lines all break down before any honest and persistent study of its real character and achievements. Therefore what happens to us in this vast and varied world of prayer—the world of our specifically religious experience—will greatly and rightly influence our beliefs. As there can be no valid and realistic doctrine of prayer which does not rest on and involve a doctrine of God; so no doctrine of God can be adequate which does not take account, and even very great account, of the life of prayer. In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth. Lex orandi lex credendi is true, then; perhaps in a far more actual sense than those who first made that axiom supposed. It is only by a fuller entrance into this world of prayer that we obtain a standard by which to interpret religious history; which tells us of other contacts, other experiences of Eternal Life. Here alone we can develop the spiritual sympathy, the peculiar sensitiveness, which is essential to the understanding of spiritual truth: for religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood. Dogmatic theology is largely concerned with Truth as seen from within the house of prayer and contemplation. For here, within the house, though the lighting is dim, and some of the furniture is clumsy, and much that we vaguely perceive is beyond our comprehension, we do at least realize the use of those
page 25
pipes and chimney-pots which looked so queer and disconcerting from outside. Our difficulty in giving living content to our religious formulas, the dreadful sense of unreality which clings to many of the definiitions of faith, arise very largely from the fact that we are thus viewing from the outside that which can only disclose its meaning when seen from within. Thus for instance, the problems of Christology entirely change their form and colour when they are viewed within this atmosphere; gaining a new mystery, beauty and depth.
Along these lines, perhaps, the modern world may be brought to realize that religion is not to be justified by the improvements it may effect in this world; but by the news that it gives of another world. It is true that when this news—this metaphysical reality—is brought into human life and becomes dominant, all our reactions to the physical are profoundly modified. The more Eternal Life permeates our mentality, the more deep and rich becomes our interpretation of temporal life, and the higher our standard of responsibility rises. And were the fusion between contemplation and action complete, the Kingdom of God—which is already within, in the ground of our personality—would be manifest in space and time. But the moment religion begins to place these practical advantages in the foreground and depart from disinterested adoration, she has cut herself off from her sources of power.
Finally, if we accept—of course under due safeguards—the central experiences of the contemplative, his claim to a certain freely given contact with Abso-
page 26
lutes, as giving us real news about the universe; what effect will this have upon pure philosophy?
First, it is wholly incompatible, not only with any mechanistic theory of reality and any form of subjective idealism; but also with those sloppy levelling-down types of monism, which seem to offer an easy (far too easy) reconciliation of religion and science, and form the back-bone of much popular apologetic. Next, as against naturalism, it presses upon us a conviction of the concrete reality and distinctness of the Supernatural. For, though the psychological accidents that often accompany contemplation may be very neatly explained by physiology, or even bioochemistry, both the essential experience and its transforming results are still left over. These, if we take them seriously, force us to admit the existence of a knowledge wholly other in method and content than our knowledge of the natural world: a knowledge which in its wholeness impresses itself on the whole self, in so far as that self turns towards it with a receptive attention. For the contemplative experience bears its own witness to the character of God; correcting the modern emphasis on visible nature as the capital scene of His self-disclosure to man. It leads the self into a level of life other than that of nature, and shows it the rich and mysterious web of existence in spiritual regard.
Hence the genuine knowledge of Divine Immanence which grows with the deepening of man's prayer is always the knowledge of a Divine Otherness: and the constantly heard invitations to seek and find God in nature—that is to say in the physical scene,
page 27
or rather our imperfect and ever-changing apprehension of the physical scene—may result in actual damage to the deepest interests of religion, if it is allowed to obscure the primacy of those revelations of an unchanging reality made only in that deep communion where the spirit 'seeks God in her ground'. For then, something enters human experience from beyond the range of sensible perception and intellectual analysis; requiring from us the acknowledgement that we, though immersed in the temporal, do live and have our being within the mysterious precincts of an eternal world, supra-sensible indeed but not wholly unknowable. Whatever guess we make about the ultimate nature of Reality, it must leave room for the fact that the fullest human experience always has this dual character. That discovery of one world in and through another world, which is the essence of sacramentalism, speaks to us as it does just because we too are double: really things of spirit and really things of sense. I do not wish to use the controversial word dualism: but only to point to some facts of experience which the monist never seems to take sufficiently seriously.
Last, when stripped of the symbolic language in which it is always conveyed to us, philosophy finds that the experience of contemplation is at bottom an experience of value: of the quality, not the quantity, of Ultimate Truth. We obtain from genuine mystical literature a united witness to the splendour, the joy, the inherent goodness of this Ultimate; and of its immanence, its insistent living pressure on the still undeveloped, half-grown consciousness of Man. Be-
page 28
cause of that experience, philosophy—and especially the philosophy of religion—cannot rest content with any theory of life and knowledge which is not sufficiently wide and deep to include and interpret St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as the last findings of naturalistic psychology. Not only that St. Thomas who so patiently classified and explained the gropings of the intellect towards God; but the far greater and more significant St. Thomas who quietly put away his pen and parchment saying: 'I have seen too much, I can write no more.' The St. Thomas who had passed from knowledge to wisdom, and from reason to contemplation.
