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Finite and Infinite

A Study of the Philosophy of Baron Friedrich von Hügel


ALL who were privileged to know Baron von Hügel during the last phase of his earthly life retain, in one form or another, two sharply contrasting memories. There is the memory of an immense spiritual transcendency; a personality at once daunting and attractive, an Alpine quality. Those who cherish memories of personal intercourse with him may even be inclined to think first of a volcanic mountain; for he combined a rock-like faith, a massive and lofty intellect, with the incandescent fervour, the hidden fires of an intense interior life. The piercing black eyes which compelled truth and obtained it, the awe and passion which were felt when the Baron uttered the name of his God; these will not be forgotten by any soul which came within his sphere of influence. It has been truly said of those who saw him thus, that they were ‘lost in his depth, silenced by his nobility’.

On the other hand, there is the memory of the lovable old man who could be met in the quiet streets of Kensington; making small homely purchases with much deliberation, carrying little paper bags, devoted in the detailed personal care of his little dog. The

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saint transfigured by his passionate sense of God, the scholar willing to give endless labour to the exact discrimination of some subtle point, was full of unhurried interest in humble people and simple things; able to enjoy small jokes and homely amusements, and to say with complete simplicity of an ailment or a disappointment, ‘Another little humiliation for me. What a good thing!’

This doubleness, this capacity for moving easily between the homely and the transcendental, the natural and supernatural levels, runs right through von Hügel’s life, conversation and teaching; sometimes appearing with disconcerting effect. In him the thinker and prophet, the contemplative and the father of souls existed in such close union, that we can never understand one of his aspects unless we take some account of all. There is something Augustinian in that massive passion for God which was the heart both of his philosophy and his devotion. Yet the profound and genial understanding of humanity, the homely love of creatures, which was so large a factor in his personal influence as a spiritual teacher, brought him nearer to those great French directors of the Counter-Reformation with whom, too, his sympathy was very deep. And although we must here guard against those tempting simplifications which in religion he held specially hostile to truth, these contrasting aspects of his personality do represent in a striking way that inclusive two-fold attitude towards life eternal and life successive—that double orientation—which was the distinctive mark of the Baron’s religious philosophy.

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Nor should we regard the homely strain, the gentle geniality of his contacts with the everyday world, as the deliberate condescension of a lofty soul: part, as it were, of that Alpine flora which softens for us the overwhelming majesty of a mountain range. It arose out of the very nature of his conception of Reality. Whether we call that conception, as he did by turns, a critical realism, a limited dualism, or a ‘two-step philosophy’, its essential character remains the same. It is summed up in the full title which he had intended to give to his unfinished Gifford Lectures: ‘The Reality of Finites, and the Reality of God.’ In that phrase, von Hügel stated his profound belief, as against all subjective idealism, that the human soul is in real contact with a real world; a world of objects which is truly distinct from ourselves, and possessing an existence in its own right, which transcends and is independent of our awareness. This belief in the genuine ‘reality of finites’ is of course the foundation-stone of any genuine Christian metaphysic; for the incarnation and self-imparting of the Ultimate through persons and things requires the reality of the incarnating medium, as well as that of the Absolute thus revealed. It involves the deep significance of every level of creation; yet also the fact that this signifiicance is deep and real, just because the significance of God is still more real and deep, and His relation to His world is not a relation of sheer immanence but free, distinct, many-graded, sacramental.

When we say we believe in the Creation, especially when we profess belief in each single soul’s free will, we profess the mysterious belief that God has somehow alienated a certain

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amount of His own power, and given it a relative independence of its own; that He has, as it were, set up (relative but still real) obstacles, limits, friction as it were against Himself. And thus we may well wonder at this mysteriously thin barrier between our poor finite relativity, and the engulfing infinite Absolute, a barrier which is absolutely necessary for us, for though God was and could ever be without us, God is no more God for us, if we cease to be relatively distinct from Him.

Moreover, this two-fold reality is required and guaranteed by the two- fold nature of man. The ‘incurably amphibious’ character of the human creature, conditioned by the senses yet craving the supersensual, capable of eternal life yet rooted in the time-series, with ‘two sets of duties, needs and satisfactions’ to the Visible or This World and the Invisible or the Other World: this was a present fact to von Hügel, and he did not hesitate to say that ‘this duality precedes and reaches farther than even the duality of good and evil’. Because there was in him something of the poet as well as the prophet, he possessed a penetrating sense of the significance of things; the degree and way in which they are charged with reality, always holding further depths of meaning in reserve for us, and therefore the importance of the very homily in its touching imperfection and appeal. ‘I cannot exhaustively know, I cannot adequately define even a daisy’—still less, the full range of any fact concerning the mysterious life of man.

Though our human situation be indeed that of a ‘poor little paper boat on the sea of the Infinite’ yet God in the very act of creation has given to our fragile existence ‘a quite absolute worth’. In all

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his teaching about life the Baron never forgot the truth, that sanity and lowliness require our reverent acceptance of both levels of our mixed experience; not an arrogant choice between them. By a succession of images—the mountain and the plain, the edelweiss and alpenrose, the corn-fields and potatoes—he struggled to convey this steady vision of a graded world: the need of nature and grace, sense and spirit, ‘the Seen and the Unseen, the Good and the Better or Best’—held together, not set in opposition—for the maturing of man’s spirit and full living-out of his peculiar call. ‘A polarity, a tension, a friction, a one thing at work in distinctly another thing’—this was for him a fundamental and inevitable character of our spiritual life. Hence the difficult balance he asked in personal religion: ‘Variety up to the verge of dissipation: Recollection up to the verge of emptiness’, since

Only the two movements of World-flight and of World-seeking, of the Civilizing of Spirituality and of the Spiritualizing of Civilization: only This world and That world each stimulating the other, although in different ways, from different sources and with different ends; only these two movements together form man’s complete supernaturalized Spiritual life.

More and more present to him, was the folly and unntruthfulness of any philosophy which sought the eternal by a mere rejection of the temporal, and the profound need of a creaturely self-immersion in finite loves and duties, if man’s thirst for the infinite was to escape arrogance. Here is the origin of the dislike, especially felt in his practical teaching, for any setting

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in opposition of the beauties and duties of Nature and the attractions of Grace; and the reiterated demand, so disconcerting to the ardent convert, for a careful cultivation of ‘non-religious interests’. 'Nature is the expression of the God of Nature, just as Grace is the expression of the God of Grace’—or, in more metaphysical terms, the full reality and overwhelming demand of the Abiding, of Eternal Life, leaves unblemished the lesser demands and realities of the successive world. This truth, the subject of a majestic passage in The Reality of God, is given in the most homely terms in one of the 'Letters to a Niece’ :

All we do has a double relatedness. It is a link or links of a chain that stretches back to our birth and on to our death. It is part of a long train of cause and effect, of effect and cause . . . but there is also, all the time, another, a far deeper, a most darling and inspiring relation. Here, you have no slow succession, but you have each single act, each single moment joined directly to God—Himself not a chain, but one great simultaneity.

And just because, as he well knew, the human passion for the Universal and Unchanging where it is present so easily becomes intense and over-strained, humble and loving attention to the chain, concern with little things, a sympathetic contact with the homely, become ever more necessary with the deepening of the transcendental sense. ‘L’esprit pour vous’, said Huvelin to his great pupil, ‘c’est un esprit de bénédiction de toute créature’: and this was the spirit the Baron strove to cultivate in all his pupils in the interior life.

In the attempt to isolate von Hügel’s chief contri-

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bution to religious philosophy, and find the key to that ‘system’ which we always want our prophets to possess, much stress has been laid on the brilliant analysis of the three elements of religion, in the opening section of The Mystical Element of Religion. But when we enter more deeply into his thought, we realize that this analysis—rightly valued, though perhaps somewhat overworked, by apologists ever since—is really no more than a particular application of his governing intuition: that of the many-levelled richness and complexity of life, the organic character of human personality, and the dangerous silliness of simplification when applied to the mysterious scene which confronts our human consciousness, or the more mysterious facts of our inner life.

Man, where he is, or thinks himself, very learned and unusually penetrating, remains terribly prone to simplify, even where simplicity means a mangling of reality.

It is this humbly realistic outlook which explains von Hügel’s deep reverence for concrete things, as the sacramental utterance of God: his doubts about abstractions, as so easily proceeding from the mere cleverness of man.

Est in re veritas
Jam non in schemate.

This outlook, profoundly in harmony with Catholic life though not always with Catholic speculation, even included considerable distrust of the claims of ‘pure mysticism’.

The mystic sense flies straight to God, and thinks it finds all its delight in Him alone.’

But a careful examination always discovers many sensible,

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institutional, and historical contributions to this suppposed ineffable experience; and suggests that the effort to achieve an entirely transcendental religion involves a perilous defiance of the true status and limitations of man. A humble recognition of the reaching-out of the divine to the human, does more for the soul’s best interests than any arrogant reaching-out of the human to the divine.

He has told us that his own intellectual evolution began in ‘a more or less idealistic philosophy of an Hegelian type, assumed to be baptizable and indeed baptized’ —a metaphysic ‘so full of the undoubted activities of the subject, as largely to overlook the distinct reality and the influence of the object’. It ended in a theology, which emphasized the distinctness and prevenience of the known Object; and the conviction, as against all subjectivism, that something ‘is really given to us every time we know, and indeed think, at all . . . so that knowledge is never primarily simply a knowledge of our own states, but a knowledge, or at least the seeking for a knowledge’, of genuine existents, independent things. Man does look out on a real world greater than all his conceiving. He is not merely face to face with the history of his own mind, and the results of its ingenious workings, but with facts of immense length and range in space and time’. And these finite facts, humbly observed and accepted, can open the soul’s eyes on that Infinite Fact ‘greater than our heart’, the Prevenient and Absolute God.

Von Hügel’s great intellect came to rest in the conviction that only this realistic view—’a Realism not of Categories or Ideas but of Organisms and Spirits’—

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tallied with our experience, whether sensible or spiritual; and moreover that it was essential to any genuine theism. Once we capitulate to subjectivist habits of mind, we can hardly save God from going into the melting-pot with His world. Here is the metaphysical basis of the generous but discriminating hospitality of his mind to realities of every size and sort; the interest in geology, the loving delight in plant and animal life, his admiration for the patient, humble labours of a Kepler or a Darwin, and reverence for the exact performance of our normal daily deeds. This sense of the deep but never merely equal significance of everything that is, and the danger of all narrowness, one-sidedness, deliberate and excessive concentration on one aspect of experience alone, is summed up in the quotation from St. Augustine which he placed at the beginning of The Mystical Element. ‘Grant unto man, O God, to perceive in little things the indication, common-seeming though they be, of things both small and great.’ On the other hand, this same principle— doubtless reinforced by those experiences which come with the maturing of the Christian inner life—surely lies at the root of that hostility to monism and all ‘levelling-down pantheisms' which grew with the growth of his thought; so that he could give it as his deepest and perhaps his most controversial conviction, that ‘religion has no subtler and yet also no deadlier enemy in the region of the mind, than every and all monism’.

When we come from these considerations to look at von Hügel’s achievement, stretching from the long studies which prepared The Mystical Element to the

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last, unfinished work, in which he had hoped to sum up and arrange his final conclusions upon the deepest things of life, we see how this ‘two- step reading of Reality’ became ever more and more central for him. It is true that The Reality of God, as finally published after his death, consists only of such fragments of his projected Gifford Lectures as it was found possible to rescue and arrange: a work of great difficulty, performed with the utmost devotion and skill. Nevertheless, whilst other parts of his writings are richer, warmer, more intimate in tone than this, they all gain by a careful comparison with it. Fortunately the introduction was left in a completed state; and this gives an invaluable clue to the general scheme, and makes it possible to place in correct relationship the isolated passages that succeed it. It shows the great lines on which the Baron had planned this work; which, had he lived to finish it, would have given us something as near to a system as was possible to so richly generous, so unfenced a mind. The very title which he proposed for it, ‘ The Reality of Finites and the Reality of God’, sums up, as we have seen, the central conviction which governs his philosophy; and which became ever more explicit as his mind and soul matured. It means that genuine doubleness of our status and our experience, linked to and learning from the simultaneous and the successive aspects of Reality, which is the clue to the paradox of human life: and because of this the immense importance of the concrete, sensible, finite world of our temporal existence, as the scene within which alone our capacity for the infinite can expand.

Therefore a meek creature-

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liness is the first term of all genuine spirituality, and an excessive abstraction from the here-and-now the most insidious of our ghostly temptations.

Materialism readily appears as the arch-enemy of the spirit; yet, erroneous as materialism is, it very certainly is not the most dangerous of the spirit’s enemies. Never to lose the sense that we human beings are body as well as soul, not only here but, in some way and degree difficult or impossible to picture, also in the hereafter, is to keep ourselves sane and balanced.

In this introduction, which is an important document for the right understanding of the Baron’s doctrine of knowledge, he laid down three principles which were to control the development of the whole work.

They are seen when we examine them, to be various expresssions of that realistic outlook, the intense love and reverence for the factual, the objective, which formed one-half of his characteristic reaction to life.

(1) As against all ‘theories of development’ he declares his method to be based on the patient and loving examination of the Given; that which now is. It is to be analytic rather than genetic: accepting with docility such present facts and achievements of morals, faith or knowledge as we find in the field, without seeking to explain, reduce or discredit them by reference to their primitive origin or embryonic forms. The most careful dissection of the seed tells us little about the intricate splendour of the tree which actually confronts us, with its witness to the mysterious reality of life.

(2) This means that the material of the inquiry is not speculative and notional, but actual; ‘is-ness,

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not ought-ness'. No arid cleverness, no brainy theories, will ever show man the Reality of God or even the reality of his own soul. The only valid witness of the finite to the Infinite is the witness of real existents; and is experienced in ‘that tough, bewildering yet immensely inspiring and truthfully testing thing, life as it is and as it surrounds us from the first’.

To realize this fact of the mysterious ‘richness of life’ around and within us was, he ever felt, the first step on the road to Reality.

(3) And, controlling our use of this living and present material, there is the never-to-be-forgotten fact of its closely knit organic character; forbidding us to attach any ultimate reality to our neat divisions, abstract notions, diagrams and schemes, our arbitrary separation of ‘sense’ from ‘ spirit’, ‘thought’ from ‘thing’. A profound consciousness of ‘the strange but very certain and in the long run delightful interaction of anyone thing with any thing else’ was fundamental to von Hügel’s realistic outlook upon life. It gave a particular quality to his view of man’s social, historical, and religious situation; compelling breadth, suppleness and generosity, forbidding water-tight compartments, the deadly ‘Either-Or’ of the exclusive mind, and all attempts to set up an opposition between visible and invisible religion, the logic of heart and of head. ‘The penetration of spirit into sense, of the spaceless into space, of the Eternal into time, of God into man’—this he held to be the essential truth which Christianity revealed; and it was a truth which he found fully operative on every level of existence.

I cannot but think that this intense consciousness

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of the close-knit texture of our experience—the interpenetration of the realities within which we live and move—will come to be recognized as von Hügel’s ruling intuition, and one of the chief contributions made by him to religious thought. Its influence is apparent in all his work, practical and philosophic. He was instinctively repelled by the closed system, the pietistic outlook, the ring-fenced soul: his world, whether seen in natural, social or spiritual regard, was full, rich, various, many-graded, living and organic through and through. All demand for clear definition, exclusive characters, hard edges—for ‘pure’ spirit, ‘pure’ experience, ‘pure’ thought and the rest—he regarded as the manifestation of a babyish arrogance; a shallow refusal to accept the reality of our human situation.

That situation, as he saw it in its religious aspect, was summed up by him in a celebrated passage:

Spirit and spirit, God and the creature, are not two material bodies, of which one can only be where the other is not; but, on the contrary, as regards our own spirit, God’s Spirit ever works in closest penetration and stimulation of our own; just as, in return, we cannot find God’s Spirit simply separate from our own spirit within ourselves. Our spirit clothes and expresses His; His Spirit first creates and then sustains and stimulates our own.

Entirely faithful to institutional Christianity in its most uncompromising form, it was largely on this doctrine of the interpenetration of realities that von Hügel’s apologetic was built. For here he found a formula by which it was possible to justify the manifest dependence of man on the sensible and contingent,

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as the vehicle of the spiritual and abiding; and explain the ruin which so commonly overtakes those who repudiate visible embodiments in favour of an entirely invisible religion. Sacraments, symbols, history and liturgy, ceremonial acts; all these, he felt, can and do convey in various degrees and ways the Reality of God to sense-conditioned creatures, and are discarded at our peril. We cannot safely comb out our complex being into separate strands, and set aside some as specially susceptible of the divine. Because ‘Nature and Grace are closely inter-related parts of one great whole’, the Supernatural, everywhere present, can and does reach us along sensible paths and awaken us by natural means. This, which represents one of von Hügel’s deepest convictions, is of course the essence of the Catholic claim; and it was put by him with unparalleled force.

I kiss my child not only because I love it; I kiss it also in order to love it. A religious picture not only expresses my awakened faith; it is a help to my faith’s awakening. . . It is not magic, but a sheer fact traceable throughout our many-sided life, that we often grow, mentally and spiritually, almost solely by the stimulation of our senses or almost solely by the activity of other minds.

Nor is the power of conveying the Supernatural necessarily dependent on the precise quality and credentials of the conveying medium: which may and often does become penetrated by a significance undreamed by those who first devised it. The validity of the Christian sacraments is not threatened by even the most startling discoveries of comparative religion. Devotions which have no primitive sanction can yet

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convey the Supernatural, and so ‘form saints and great saints’. The easy contempt of the educated mind for ‘superstitions’ is more often an evidence of shallowness than of depth. The spiritual treasure found in the Scriptures by ‘humble tunnelling’ is undamaged by the explorations of the Higher Criticism. It matters little that those Psalms which best evoke our sense of God were composed to meet special historic or liturgic requirements: since it is none the less true that ‘precisely through these particular occasions of time and space, they succeeded in uttering the deepest and most universal aspirations of the heart towards God'.

In Dante’s picture of the ship of souls singing In exitu Israel as they sail towards the Mount of Purification, we have a perfect image of this fusion within man’s spiritual life of historic, liturgic, and supersensual realities.

Moreover this argument is not to be regarded as a mere piece of pragmatism; nor need we confine it to Christian practice alone. It has a universal validity within the lives of all God-seeking men, and helps us to understand the saints of other creeds. In all such cases, says von Hügel, ‘what happens as a rule is simply this—the soul seeking God feeds upon such elements as it can assimilate in the tradition surrounding it; and divine grace under cover of these elements feeds and saves this soul’.

They are in fact special instances of the interpenetration within our experience of natural and supernatural realities: the yeast of the Spirit ever at work in the dough of the common life, the simultaneous ever present in the successive.

The same principle governed the Baron’s view of the

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Church. He saw it not only as a mighty concrete institution within history; though this aspect, too, had for him great importance. It was to him, above all, ‘a great hierarchy and interconnection of souls’; souls at every stage of growth and enlightenment, each with its own unexchangeable office, its own vocation and attrait, helping and completing one another.

Each, so far as it was truly living, was growing up towards ‘love, full being, and creative spiritual personality’; that type and degree of holiness wherein it could best contribute to the purposes of the whole.

We all need one another ... souls, all souls, are deeply interconnected. The Church at its best and deepest is just that—that interdependence of all the broken and meek, all the self-oblivion, all the reaching out to God and souls . . . nothing is more real than this interconnection. We can suffer for one another . . . no soul is saved alone and by its own efforts.

Yet this interaction of souls, this mysterious but most actual Communion of Saints, depends for its life and reality on that deeper Life and Reality which penetrates and binds it in one—’The Sustainer and Filler of all that splendour ... God, the great prevenient Spirit who works within and through this His kingdom of spirits’. And with these words, so characteristic in their fusion of the Personal and the Spaceless, we reach the fourth and all-embracing character of von Hügel’s religious realism. The objective reality of finites, the genuine importance for us of the Here and Now, the Concrete, the Organic, rests on, is wholly immersed in, the Reality of all Realities; the personal and objective Being of God. No study of his mind

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and soul can be complete which does not lead up to this, his over-ruling intuition: the profound, adoring certitude of the Perfect, the Abiding, the Divine, as the Root of all Being, and the Fount of all joy.

What a happiness, what a joy it is to be quite sure that there is a God, not anything built up by mere human reasoning, no clever or subtle hypothesis, nothing particularly French or German or English, but something as infinitely more real than the air around us, and the pollen of the flowers, and the flight of the birds, and the trials and troubles and the needs of our little lives, stimulated and enriched by the lives of creatures so different from ourselves, touching us continually all round; and the fundamental assurance is not simply one of variety or even of richness, it is an assurance accompanying and crowning all such sense of variety, of a reality, of the Reality, one and harmonious, strong and self -sufficing, of God.

This peculiar awareness of the Eternal seems to have been present in Friedrich von Hügel from childdhood: and among the most illuminating passages in The Reality of God are those which reveal to us the close connexion between his final philosophic standpoint—apparently so closely reasoned, so well founded on history and psychology—and these innate dispositions. His immense influence as a religious thinker, which can be detected behind all the great movements of the religious soul in post-war Europe, is not in the last resort the influence of a great intellect. It derives from the rich and balanced vision, the experimental love, of a disciplined spiritual genius: characters which he has himself summed up as those of ‘the moderate Theistic Christian mystic’.

At five and six years of age, I possessed a sense, not only of God in the external, especially the organic world, but of

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a mysterious divine Presence in the churches of Florence. Thus historical religion was with me, together with metaphysical (and natural) religion, from the first. . . I remember very vividly how my delight was precisely in the fact that, beautiful as the external nature was, God did not consist even in its full totality, but was a Life, an Intelligence, a Love distinct from it all, in spite of His close penetration of it all. Thus Otherness was as [much] part of the outlook as was Reality.

In this vivid, first-hand sense of God’s distinctness which the Baron humbly believed that he ‘shared with many another child’, we can surely find the living germ from which his whole philosophy of religion arose.

Developed and explicated under the two-fold influence of intellectual labour and spiritual experience, the Immense attraction and authority of his teaching comes, more than all else, from the unmistakable note of awe-struck certitude which is heard whenever he turns from analysis to statement, from the doings of man to the Being of God. Other elements, ethical and historical, were added to the child’s intuition. It was tested by much suffering and by the inevitable tension between the critical mind and the adoring soul. But it remained central; and is always present in those superb outbursts, full of tenderness and passion, which witness to the primacy of the Supernatural—or, as he loved to say, the ‘Over- againstness of God’. These, revealing to us the heart of his faith and love are the most truly significant utterances of the scholar-saint. Of his own soul at least, his contention was true, that religion is at bottom a ‘metaphysical thirst’.

Those who are familiar with the religious currents in contemporary European life, tell us that the out-

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standing character of the most living Christianity is its revolt from subjectivity, its vigorous insistence on the objective and independent Reality of God, the Wholly Other. In their varying ways Otto, Barth, and Brunner, have developed and stressed this note with an exclusive intensity; placing the awe and abasement of the creature over against the unsearchable Divine Majesty—Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans— in the forefront of their religious demand. ‘Pure and exalted stands the power of God’, says Barth, ‘not beside, and not over, but on the other side of all conditioned-conditioning powers . . . the First and the Last, and as such the Unknown, but nowhere and never a Magnitude amongst others in the medium known to us.’ No one can deny the value of this prophetic message, well-named by its chief proclaimer a ‘theology of correction’. It has restored to the Christian world that awe-struck upward glance, that sense of the Holy and the Transcendent, which is the salt of religion, and had nearly vanished beneath the floods of humanitarian piety.

Yet its almost inhuman other-worldliness, its contempt for ‘religious experience’, forms, ceremonies, and sacraments, have produced an inevitable reaction. The ‘world-embracing temper’ of Christian incarnational philosophy has reasserted itself. The delighted realization of God’s self-revelation in Nature, and with this a fresh sense of the sacred character of physical and temporal life as the scene of the Christian triumph, are returning to their rightful place in the theological complex. To some extent the incarnational teaching of Father Lionel Thornton, and more fully that of the

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Swedish theologians Nygren and Aulen, with its emphasis on the Divine Agape, are here representative; but the spiritual life of young Germany, in so far as it is Christian, is strongly coloured by this circle of ideas. Last, in revolt from the arid intellectualism and the merely individualist outlook of the past generation, a deeper need for the organic, the institutional and the sacramental elements of religion has made itself felt. This is perhaps chiefly seen in the Catholic liturgic revival; but its influence is also recognizable in the Anglican Communion, and the chief reformed Churches of the Continent.

These three trends towards the transcendental, the incarnational, and the institutional, have appeared in distinct and even competitive forms.

As a result, each has tended to a certain excess and want of balance; to the great detriment of religion as a whole. For all three are profoundly necessary to the rich totality of man’s spiritual life; and should form a trinity in unity within which the soul matures. The awe-struck sense of the Eternal Perfect, the deep and tender love of natural life, the grateful use of Tradition and its embodiment in the Church, temper and reinnforce each other. They form the triangular outline of the worshipping life. Yet it is strange that those who each pursue and proclaim one element, and forget, refuse, or minimize the rest, should ignore their synthesis in the work of the one great modern teacher of religion who has held in equal balance and humble reverence the reality of finites, and the Reality of God.

Back to Contents

Next: Additional Note—Baron von Hügel as a Spiritual Teacher

 

1906 - The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary

1911 - Mysticism

1912 - Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing

1913 - The Mystic Way

1914 - Introduction: Richard Rolle - The Fire of Love

1915 - Practical Mysticism

1915 - Introduction: Songs of Kabir

1916 - Introduction: John of Ruysbroeck

1920 - The Essentials of Mysticism, and other Essays

1922 - The Spiral Way

1922 - The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (Upton Lectures)

1926 - Concerning the Inner Life

1928 - Man and the Supernatural

1929 - The House of the Soul

1933 - The Golden Sequence

1933 - Mixed Pasture: Twelve Essays

1936 - The Spiritual Life

1943 - Introduction to the Letters of Evelyn Underhill
by Charles Williams

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