'SPIRITUAL Life' is a very elastic phrase; which can either be made to mean the most hazy religiosity and most objectionable forms of uplift, or be limited to the most exclusive types of contemplation. Yet surely we should not mean by it any of these things, but something which for most of us is much more actual, more concrete; indeed, an essential constituent of all human life worthy of the name. I am not proposing to talk about mystics, or anyone who has rare and peculiar religious experience: but simply about ourselves, normal people living the natural social and intellectual life of our time. If we know much about ourselves, I think we must agree that there is something in us which, in spite of all the efforts of a materialistic psychology, is not accounted for either by the requirements of natural life or those of social life ; and which cannot altogether be brought within the boundaries of the intellectual and rational life. Though as it develops this 'something' will penetrate and deeply affect all these levels of our existence, we recognize that it is distinct from them. It is an element which is perhaps usually dormant; yet is sometimes able to
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give us strange joys, and sometimes strange discomforts. It points beyond our visible environment to something else; to a Reality which transcends the time-series, and yet to which we, because of the existence of this quality in us, are somehow akin.
By talking of 'spirit' or 'spiritual life' —terms more allusive than exact— we do not make these facts less mysterious. But we do make it possible to think about them, and consider what they must involve for our view of the nature of Reality; what light they cast on the nature of man; and finally how this quality which we call 'spiritual life' calls us, as spirits, to act. In other words, we are brought up against the three primary data of religion: God, the soul, and the relation between God and the soul. Those three points, I think, cover the main aspects of man's life as spirit. They become, as he grows in spiritual awareness and responsiveness, more and more actual to him, and more and more fully incorporated in his experience. And they are all three represented in the life of prayer; which, taken in the widest sense, is the peculiar spiritual activity of man. By prayer, of course, I do not merely mean primitive prayer—the clamour of the childish creature for help, relief or gifts from beyond—though this survives in us, as all our primitive and instinctive life still survives. I mean the developed prayer of the soul which has taken its Godward life, its link with the Eternal, seriously; has knocked and had a door opened onto a fresh range of experience. Such prayer as that is just as much a human fact as great achievement in music or poetry; and must be taken into
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account in estimating the possibilities of human life.
We begin then with this fact of something in us which points beyond physical life, however complete that physical life may be, and suggests—perhaps in most of us, very faintly and occasionally, but in some with a decisive authority—that somehow we are borderland creatures. As human beings, we stand between an order of things which we know very well, to which most of us are more or less adapted, and in which we can easily immerse ourselves; and another order, of which we do not know much, but which, if we respond to it and develop a certain suppleness in respect of it, can gradually become the most important factor in our lives. We might sum this up by saying that there is in us a fringe-region where human personality ceases to be merely natural, and takes up characteristics from another order; yet without losing concrete hold upon what we call natural life. It is in this fringe-region of our being that religion is born. It points to the fact that we need to be met and completed by an order of being, a Reality, that lies beyond us. We are in the making; and such significance as we have is the significance of a still unfinished thing.
Of course, in the pitter-patter of temporal existence it is very easy to lose all sense of this otherness and incompleteness of life; this mysterious quality in human nature. Attention, will and intelligence have all been trained in response to the physical; and turn most easily that way. We live too in a time of immense corporate self-consciousness. Modern litera-
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ture, with its perpetual preoccupation with the details of our emotional and sexual relationships, reflects this. Universals, and our relation to universals, are neglected. Yet without some recognition of our relation to Reality, we are only half-human; and if we are alert, we cannnot entirely miss all consciousness of the presence and pressure of that Reality, that eternal order, however we may represent it to ourselves. The strange little golden intimations of beauty and holiness that flash up through life, however they come, do present a fundamental problem to us. Are these intimations of Reality in its most precious aspect, the faint beginnnings of an experience, a development of life, towards which we can move; or are they mere will-o' wisps? Shall we trust them and give them priority, or regard them with the curiosity that borders on contempt? In other words, is reality spiritual? Is the only concrete reality God, as the mystics have always declared? And is that richly real and living God present to and pressing upon His whole creation, especially His spiritual creation; or is this merely a pious idea? Are man's small spiritual experiences testimonies to a vast truth, which in its wholeness lies far beyond us, or not? We have to choose between these alternatives; and the choice will settle the character of our religion and philosophy, and will also colour the whole texture of existence, the way we do our daily jobs.
We assume that the first alternative is the true one; that men are created spirits still in the making, and can experience a communion with that Living God,
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Spirit of all spirits, who is the Reality of the universe. What we call our religious experiences, are genuine if fragmentary glimpses of this Divine Reality. That belief, of course, lies at the very heart of real Christian theism. In thinking about it, we are not moving off to some peculiar or specialized mystical religion; we are exploring the treasures of our common faith. And the first point that comes out of it for us, I think, is the distinctness and independence of God and of Eternal Life: as realities so wholly other than the natural order and the natural creature, that they must be given us from beyond ourselves. A great deal of modern Christianity, especially that type which is anxious to come to terms with theories of emergent evolution and other forms of immanentism, seems to me to be poisoned by a kind of spiritual self-sufficiency; which tends to blur this fundamental and humbling distinction between the creature and God, and between the natural and spiritual life. It perpetually suggests that all we have to do is to grow, develop, unpack our own spiritual suit-cases; that nothing need be given us or done to us from beyond.
Were the fullest possible development of his natural resources the real end of the being of man, this might be true enough. But all the giants of the spiritual life are penetrated through and through by the conviction that this is not the goal of human existence: that something must be given, or done to them, from the eternal world over-against us, without which man can never be complete. They feel, however variously they express it, that for us in our strange borderland situation there must be two orders,
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two levels of reality, two mingled lives, to both of which we are required to respond—the natural and the spiritual, nature and grace, life towards man and life towards God—and that the life of spirit of which we are
capable must come to us, before we can go to it. 'It is surely the true
instinct of religion which fills the liturgy with references to something
which must be given to or poured out on us. 'Pour down on us the
continual dew of Thy blessing' —'Pour into our hearts such love towards Thee' —'Without Thee we are not able to please Thee.' All summed up in
the wonderful prayer of St. Augustine: 'Give what Thou dost demand;
and then, demand what Thou wilt.'
So I suppose, from the human point of view, a spiritual life is a life which
is controlled by a gradually developing sense of the Eternal, of God and
His transcendent reality; an increasing capacity for Him, so that our
relation to God becomes the chief thing about us, exceeding and also
conditioning our relationship with each other. So here the first and
second points which we were to consider—what we mean by a spiritual
life, and what a spiritual life involves for us—seem to melt into one other.
Indeed, it is almost impossible to consider them separately. For, what it means for us is surely this: that we are meant, beyond the physical, to contribute to, indeed collaborate in, God's spiritual creation; to be the willing and vigorous tools and channels of His action in Time. That is the spiritual life of man at its fullest development, the life of all great personalities; saints, artists, explorers, servants of science. It is a life infinite in its variety of expression, but marked by a certain deep
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eternal quality, a disinterested zest for perfection, in all its temporal acts.
When we come to make the personal application of these ideas, this view of the relation of our fluid, half-made personalities to God, and ask how,as individuals, we are called to act—and that is the third of the questions with which we started—we see that just in so far as this view of human life is realistic, it lays on each of us a great and a distinct obligation.Though the life of the Spirit comes from God, the ocean of our being, we have to do something about it. Utter dependence on God must be balanced by courageous initiative. Each of us has a double relationship, and is required to develop a double correspondence. First with the Divine Creative Spirit who penetrates and supports our spirits; and secondly with the universe of souls, which is enlaced with us in one vast web of being—whether our immediate neighbours of the Christian family who form with us part of the Mystical Body of Christ, or the more widespread corporation of all the children of God, of which this perhaps forms the nucleus.
For those who see life thus, sustained and fed by a present God, and who can say with St. Augustine, 'I should not exist wert not Thou already with me', the idea of mere self-determination, self-expression as an end in itself, becomes ridiculous. Further than this, the notion of souls, persons, as separate ring-fenced units, is also seen to be impossible. In many ways that are perceptible, and many others so subtle as to be imperceptible, we penetrate and affect one another. The mysterious thing called influence points
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to our far-reaching power and responsibility, and the plastic character of the human self. Because of this plasticity, this inter-penetration of spirits, those who have developed their capacity for God, have learnt, as St.John of the Cross says, how to direct their wills vigorously towards Him, can and do become channels along which His life and power can secretly but genuinely transform some bit of life. Devotion by itself has little value, may even by itself be a form of self-indulgence, unless it issues in some costly and self-giving action of this kind. The spiritual life of any individual, therefore, has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore the more truly personal it will be. It is, in the truest sense, in humanity that we grow by this incorporation of the spiritual and temporal, the deeps and the surface of life; getting more not less rich, various and supple in our living out of existence. Seen from the spiritual angle, Christian selves are simply parts of that vast organism the Church Invisible, which is called upon to incarnate the Divine Life in history, and bring eternity into time. Each one of us has his own place in this scheme, and each is required to fulfil a particular bit of that plan by which the human world is being slowly lifted Godward, and the Kingdom of God is brought in. This double action—interior and ever-deepening communion with God, and because of it ever-widening, outgoing towards the world as tools and channels of God, the balanced life of faith and works, surrender and activity—must always involve a certain tension
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between the two movements. Nor, as St. Paul saw, should we expect the double movement to be produced quite perfectly in any one individual: not even in the saints. The body has many members, some of them a very funny shape, but each with their own job. The man of prayer and the man of action balance and complete one another. Every genuine vocation must play its part in this transformation in God of the whole complex life of man.
Men are the only created beings of which we have knowledge, who are aware of this call, this need of putting themselves in one way or another at the disposal of Creative Spirit; and this characteristic, even though it be only occasionally developed to the full in human nature, assures us that there is in that nature a certain kinship with God. So every human soul without exception, because of this its mysterious affinity with God, and yet its imperfect status, its unlikeness from God, is called to undertake a growth and a transformation; which shall make of it a channel of the Divine energy and will. Such a statement as this, of course, is not to be narrowed down and limited to that which we call the 'religious' life. On the contrary it affirms the religious character of all full life. For it means a kind of self-oblivious faithfulness in response to all the various demands of circumstance, the carrying through of everything to which one sets one's hand, which is rooted in a deep—though not necessarily emotional—loyalty to the interests of God. That conception expands our idea of the religious life far beyond the devotional life; till there is room in it for all the multiple activities of man in so far
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as they are prosecuted in, for, and with the Fact of all facts, God-Reality. I need not point out that for Christians the Incarnation—the entrance of God into History—and its extension in the Church bring together these two movements in the soul and in the human complex; and start a vast process, to which every awakened soul which rises above self-interest has some contribution to make. As we become spirituually sensitive, and more alert in our response to experience, I think we sometimes get a glimpse of that deep creative action by which we are being brought into this new order of being, more and more transformed into the agents of spirit; able to play our part in the great human undertaking of bringing the whole world nearer to the intention of God. We then perceive the friction of circumstance, the hard and soft of life, personal contacts andopportunities, love and pain and dreariness, to be penetrated and used by a Living Influence, which is making by this means both changes and positive additions to our human nature; softening, deepening, enriching and moulding the raw material of temperament into something nearer the artist's design.
Next, let us look for a moment at Prayer, as the special reflection and expression of this relation of God and soul of which we have been thinking. Prayer is, if not the guarantee, at least a mighty witness to the reality of the spiritual life. If we were merely clever animals, had no kinship with God, we could not pray: no communion between Him and us would be possible. Prayer, in its three great forms of Worship, Communion and Intercession, is after all a purely
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spiritual activity; an acknowledgement of the supreme reality and power of the spiritual life in man. As St. Thomas says, it is a 'marvellous intercourse between Infinite and finite, God and the soul'.
If the first term of the spiritual life is recognition in some way or other of the splendour and reality of God, the first mood of prayer—the ground from which all the rest must grow—is certainly worship, awe, adoration; delight in that holy reality for its own sake. This truth has lately returned to the foreground of religious thought; and there is little need to insist on it afresh. Religion, as von Hügel loved to say, is adoration; man's humble acknowledgement of the Transcendent, the Fact of God—the awe-struck realism of the seraphs in Isaiah's vision—the meek and loving sense of mystery which enlarges the soul's horizon and puts us in our own place. Prayer, which is so much more a state and condition of soul than a distinct act, begins there; in the lifting of the eyes of the little creature to the Living God, or perhaps to the symbol through which the Living God reveals Himself to the soul.
It is mainly because we are unaccustomed to a spiritual outlook which is centred on the infinite mystery of God and not merely on ourselves and our own needs and desires, that we so easily become confused by the changes and chances of experience. And for modern men, confronted as we all are by a swiftly changing physical and mental universe, sweeping away as it must many old symbolic constructions, but giving in their place a fresh and humbling sense of the height and depth and breadth of Creation and
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our own small place in it, it is surely imperative to establish and feed this adoring sense of the unchanging Reality of God. It is easy so long as the emphasis lies on us and our immediate interests to be baffled and depressed by a sense of our own futility. Our whole life may seem to be penned down to attending to the horrid little tea-shop in the valley; yet this and every other vocation is ennobled, if we find time each day to lift our eyes to the everlasting snows. I think we might make far greater efforts than we do, to get this adoring remembrance of the Reality of God, who alone gives our work significance, woven into our everyday lives. There is no more certain method of evicting pettiness, self-occupation and unrest; those deadly enemies of the spiritual self.
It is within this penetrating sense of God Present yet Transcendent, which braces and humbles us both at once, that the second stage of prayer—a personal self-giving that culminates in a personal communion—emerges and grows. Here we have the personal response and relationship of the self to that God who has evoked our worship. Adoration, as it more deeply possesses us, inevitably leads on to self-offering: for every advance in prayer is really an advance in love. 'I ask not for thy gifts but for thyself,' says the Divine Voice to Thomas à Kempis. There is something in all of us which knows that to be true. True, because of the fact of human freedom; because human beings have the awful power of saying Yes or No to God and His purposes, linking up our separate actions with the great divine action, or pursuing a self-centred or earth-centred course. This is the heart of practical
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religion, and can be tested on the common staff of our daily lives. It is this fact of freedom which makes Sacrifice, with its elements of personal cost and confident approach, and its completion in communion, the most perfect symbol of the soul's intimate and personal approach to God. If worship is the lifting up towards the Infinite of the eyes of faith, self-offering is the prayer of hope: the small and fugitive creature giving itself, its thoughts, deeds, desires in entire confidence to the mysterious purposes of Eternal Life. It is summed up in the great prayer of St. Ignatius: 'Take Lord, and receive!'
But as the realistic sense of God in Himself which is the basis of adoration leads on to a realistic personal relationship with Him in self-offering and communion: so from this self-offering and communion, there develops that full and massive type of prayer in which spiritual power is developed, and human creatures become fellow workers with the Spirit, tools and channels through which God's creative work is done. That is the life of Charity: the life of friendship with God, for which we were made. Growth in spiritual personality means growth in charity. And charity—energetic love of God, and of all men in God—operating in the world of prayer, is the live wire along which the Power of God, indwelling our finite spirits, can and does act on other souls and other things; rescuing, healing, giving support and light. That, of course, is real intercession; which is gravely misunderstood by us, if we think of it mainly in terms of asking God to grant particular needs and desires. Such secret intercessory prayer ought to penetrate and accompany all our
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active work, if it is really to be turned to the purposes of God. It is the supreme expression of the spiritual life on earth: moving from God to man, through us, because we have ceased to be self-centred units, butare woven into the great fabric of praying souls, the 'mystical body' through which the work of Christ on earth goes on being done. We talk about prayer thus by means of symbols; but as a matter of fact we cannot really rationalize it without impoverishing it. It leads us into the world of mystery where the Creative Spirit operates; in ways beyond and above all we can conceive, yet along paths which touch and can transform at every point our humble daily lives and activities. Thus prayer, as the heart of man's spiritual life—his Godward response and striving—is seen to be something which far exceeds devotional exercises; and is and must be present in all disinterested striving for Perfection, for Goodness, for Truth and Beauty, or for the betterment of the children of God. For it means the increasing dedication and possession of all our faculties by Him; the whole drive of our active will subdued to His design, penetrated by His Life and used for His ends.
And last, coming down to ourselves, how does all this work out in the ordinary Christian life? It works out, I think, as a gradual growth in the soul's adherence to God and co-operation with God, achieved by three chief means: 1. Discipline, mental, moral, and devotional. 2. Symbolic and sacramental acts. 3. Ever-renewed and ever more perfect dedication of the will; death to self. This point, of course, is incomparably the most important, The others have their chief
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meaning in the fact that they contribute to and support it.
Discipline. This includes the gradual training of our faculties to attend to God, by the regular practice of meditation and recollected vocal prayer. Also such moral drill as shall conduce to the conquest of the instinctive nature; the triumph of what traditional asceticism calls the 'superior faculties of the soul', or, in plain English, getting ourselves thoroughly in hand. At least, in the experience of most souls, this will involve a certain moderate amount of real asceticism, a painful effort to mortify faults of character, especially those which are ramifications of self-love, and a humble submission to some elementary education in devotional routine. Under this head we get an ordered rule of life, voluntary self-denials, and a careful detachment of the emotions from all overwhelming attractions which compete with God. Acceptance of the general methods and regulations of the Church also comes in here, as the first stage in that very essential process, the socializing and incorporation of the individual life of prayer; that it may find its place, and make its contribution to the total life of the Mystical Body of Christ. None of this is actual prayer; but all of it, in various degrees, must enter into the preparation of the self for prayer.
Next, Symbolic Acts. Even if we can dare to say that there is such a thing as an absolute, and purely spiritual communication of God with the soul (and such a mystically inclined theologian as von Hügel thought that we could not say this), such absolute communications are at best rare and unpredictable
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flashes; and even where they seem to us to happen, are confined to the highest ranges of spiritual experience. They could never form its substance; and it would be an intolerable arrogance on our part—a departure from creatureliness bringing its own punishhment with it—if we planned our inner life on such lines. We are sense-conditioned, and must use the senses in our approach to God; accepting the humbling truth that His absolute being is unknowable, and can only be apprehended by us under symbols and incarnational veils. This of course is both Christianity and common sense. But as well as this, we have to acknowledge that the real nature of His work within the soul is also unknowable by us. When we enter the phase of suffering, this truth becomes specially clear. Only by its transforming action within the mental or volitional life, purifying, illuminating, stirring to fervour or compelling to sacrifice, can we recognize the creative working of God. And even these inward experiences and acts, vital as they are for us, are still only symbolic in their conveyance of God. Recejac's celebrated definition of mysticism, as 'the tendency to approach the Absolute morally and by means of symbols', covers, when we properly understand it, the whole spiritual life of man; for the ground of the soul where His Spirit and our freedom meet, is beyond the reach of our direct perceptions. There is therefore no realistic religion for the human creature which is not expressed in symbolic acts. We cannot cut our world into two mutually exclusive parts and try to achieve the Infinite by a rejection of the finite. And when and if those more
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profound and really mystical depths of prayer are reached where we seem indeed to be subdued to a Presence and Action which has no image, and of which we can say nothing at all—when the eterna background has become the eternal environment and we are sunk in God—then that very sense of an entire passivity which accompanies the soul's deepest action, of being, as ]acopone says, 'drowned in the DivineSea', is surely one more tribute to the part played by symbolism in the normal process of the spiritual life.
And last, the essence of that life, Dedication of the Will. This of course is the ever-deepening temper of all personal religion worthy of the name. In its first movement it constitutes conversion; in its achieved perfection it is the very substance of the unitive life of the saint. But between those two points there is much work to be done and much suffering to be borne, by those in whom this self-transcendence, this superrnatural growth, is taking place. Because of the primary importance of God's over-ruling action, and yet also the great importance of the self's free and willing activity, there must be within any full spiritual life, at least until its final stages, a constant tension between effort and abandonment, loving communion and ethical struggle, illumination and purification, renunciation of the will and deliberate use of the will: as the natural and supernatural aspects of personality, both invaded and subdued to the divine purpose, come into play, and the Will of God for that soul is expressed in calls to concrete activity, or to inward abandonment. So too in the actual
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life of prayer we ought to expect, and practise in some degree, both the deliberate effort of intercession and the abandoned quiet of contemplation. And as the soul grows in suppleness under these alternating stimulations—these 'stirrings and touches of God', as the mystics so realistically call them—so its sense of the divine action, which is always there but not always recognized, becomes more distinct and individuated: until at last,—in the full theopathetic life of the mystical saint, it becomes a perfectly responsive tool of the creative will. 'I live yet not I.' That of course is a real statement of experience, not a piece of piety: an experience which is reflected in the abnormal creative activities and spiritual power of the saints, from Paul of Tarsus to the Cure d'Ars.
And with this, I think, we reach the answer to the question with which we began: what exactly is the spiritual life? It is the life in which God and His eternal order have, more and more, their undivided sway; which is wholly turned to Him, devoted to Him, dependent on Him, and which at its term and commonly at the price of a long and costly struggle, makes the human creature a pure capacity for God. And as regards the actual prayer, the secret correspondence which accompanies this growth, this will tend mainly to fulfil itself along two paths: upwards to God in pure adoration—outward to the world in intercession. The interweaving ofthese two movements in the special way and degree in which they are developed by each soul, is the foundation of the spiritual life of man.
