For nineteen hundred years there has been present in the human world a definite variation of human life, the true significance of which man, as a whole, has been slow to understand. With anxious intelligence, he has classified and divided those kinds of life which he calls animal and vegetable, according to many systems; all useful, all artificial, none final or exact. But when it comes to the indexing of his own race, the discernment of its veritable characteristics, he seems unable to find any better system of classification than racial groupings governed by measurements of the skull and coloration of the skin.
[EU dates the emergence of this "variation" of human life from the time of Jesus Christ. I'm not at all sure about this, and she produces no evidence. (Steiner also described the arrival of Jesus as a time when a massive change took place in the spiritual status of humanity.) DCW]
It will hardly be contended that life exhibits to us anything of her meaning or her inwardness in such variations as these; mere symptoms and results, as they are, of the lower aspects of her everlasting struggle for expression, of spirit's efforts to penetrate matter and combine with it, to get and keep a foothold upon the physical plane.
Life seen as a whole — at least as manifested on our particular speck of stellar dust — appears to be one great stream of Becoming, the mutual thrust and effort, the perpetual interpenetration of the two forms under which Reality is known to us: the inelastic tangible somewhat called matter, the free creative, impalpable somewhat called spirit.
[Summary: The history of life is one of continuous and progressive interpenetration of spirit and matter, generating progressively more complex life forms. DCW]
This struggle is one huge indivisible act — "from bottom to top of the organised world one great continuous [p4] effort"[1] — from the emergence of the amoeba to the final flowering of human consciousness; and it is to genuinely new combinations and reactions of the two powers involved in it that we must look, if we would discern the "meaning", the central reality of that amazing mystery which we so easily accept as "life".
Throughout the whole course of this struggle we observe on the side of spirit — or if you like it better, on the psychic side of life — an unmistakeable instinct for transcendence: "...an internal push, which has carried life by more and more complex forms to higher and higher destinies."[2] The greater the vitality, the higher the type, the more obvious becomes the fact that it is in via. Life appears unwilling merely to make itself at home in the material universe; determined rather to use that material universe in its persistent and creative effort towards the discovery or acquirement of something else, of "a new kind of reality over against all mere nature." [3] All its proceedings seem to support the strange declaration of the Fourth Evangelist: "it is not yet made manifest what we shall be." [4] It seems called to some victory beyond the sphere that we call physical; feels within itself cravings and intuitions which that physical environment cannot satisfy, a capacity for freedom which its own highest physical manifestations are unable to express. Thus it is that "the strongest power within the world constitutes in reality the conviction of an overworld." [5]
[Summary: There is and has been a force operating progressively on matter in a consistent direction so as to generate life forms ultimately able to perceive the Divine. DCW]
In our moments of clear sight, those moods of artistic innocence which are freed from the decomposing action of thought, we are well aware of this.
[Summary: Thought operates to obscure this perception.]
We know then that the wistful eyes of Life are set towards a vision that is also a Home — a Home from which news can reach us now and again.
[Summary: Life is depicted poetically as a person seeking to return Home. There is a force, a life-force, a spiritual energy, continually and progressively shaping life forms in the direction of an ultimate life form that will have the ability to reach "home". DCW]
Thus, looking out from ourselves to our [p.5] Universe we seem to catch a glimpse of something behind that great pictorial cosmos of "suns and systems of suns", that more immediate world of struggle, growth, decay, which intellect has disentangled from the Abyss. We feel, interpenetrating and supporting us, the action of a surging, creative Spirit, which transcends all its material manifestations: something which the least dogmatic may be willing to describe as "the living presence of an eternal and spiritual energy" [6]
An Immanent Thought in ceaseless development is then discerned by us as the Reality manifested in all existence: an artistic inspiration which, like the little inspiration of men, moulds matter and yet is conditioned by it. Piercing its way to the surface of things, engaged, as it seems to us, in a struggle for expression, it yet transcends that which it inhabits. It is a Becoming, yet a Being, a Growth, yet a Consummation: the very substance of Eternity supporting and making actual the process of Time. In such hours of lucidity, we see, in fact, the faint outline of the great paradox of deity; as it has been perceived by the mystics of every age.
"For Thou," said Augustine, speaking for all of them, "art nothing else than supreme Being, supreme Life. For Thou art the highest and Changest not, nor does today run out its hours in Thee; and yet in Thee its hours run out, for in Thee is every moment of time." [7]
So far as our small knowledge reaches, man seems to be Life's best effort towards the expression of that indwelling Spirit's meaning and power. In him, her perfection and her restlessness — the groaning and the travailing of creation — are all too clearly expressed: yet in spite, or because, of this, the Immanent Thought has found in human consciousness its least faulty thoroughfare.
"Man, swinging-wicket set
Between
The unseen and the seen" —
[Any Saint: Francis Thompson]
[p. 6] appears to be the gate through which the elan vital must pass towards the fulfilment of its highest destinies; for in him the creative spark attains consciousness of those destinies. Here it no longer sleeps or dreams but knows. Hence he is able to link spirit immanent with spirit transcendant. While all Life's other creations have tended to adapt themselves more or less perfectly to the physical, man tends to adapt hmself to something else. A divided aim is expressed in him: he hovers uncertainly between two worlds. he is "in this world like a balance", says Boehme.[8] The "holy spark of the divine nature within him," says Law, "has a natural, strong, and almost infinite tendency or reaching after that eternal Light and Spirit of God from whence it came forth. It came forth from God, it came out of God, it partaketh of the divine nature, and therefore it is always in a state of tendency and return to God." [9] Here, in fact, Life's instinct for Transcendence breaks through at last: "Man is the meeting point of various stages of reality."[10]
If this be so, the spiritual evolution of humanity, the unfolding of its tendency towards the Transcendental Order, becomes as much a part of biology as the evolution of its stomach or its sense. In vain for Theology to set this apart as alone the work of "grace". The action of grace, the spirit of love leading life to its highest expression, is continuous from the first travail of creation even until now.
As the appearance, then, of man the toolmaking animal marks a true stage in the evolution of life, so the appearance of man the consciously spiritual animal must mark a genuine advance within the race, and must rank as it's most significant achievement. It is not to be labelled "supernatural" and ring-fenced, examined, admired, or criticised, [p. 7] apart from the general aspects of that flux in which man finds himself immersed; as we ring-fence and consider the little patches labelled, philosophy, mathematics or physical science, forgetting the fertile and measureless jungle whence we have subtracted these conceptual worlds. Such a process deprives it of its deepest meaning, and ourselves of all hope of understanding its relation to the whole.
The spiritual adventures of man, in so far as they possess significance and reality, are incidents, one and all, in the great epic of spirit, and can only be understood by by those who will take account of the whole drift of that incomplete poem as it pours forth without ceasing from the Mind of God. The path on which he travels "towards the Father's heart" is the path on which all Creation is set: he gathers up and expresses the effort and longing of the Whole; and his attainment will be the attainment of all Life. "In such a province as this", says Eucken, "the individual's own nature is not isolated but is inseparably interwoven with the whole of the All, and turns to this source for its own life-content. Thus there is no depth in the individual portions if they do not exist in the Whole, if they are not here able to unfold themselves. In each separate point, a struggle for the Whole takes place, and this struggle brings the Whole into activity."[11]
Moreover, the meaning and intention of the poem, the beauty of its rhythmic life, far exceeds the beauty of any one episode — even the greatest. in each of these we find expressing itself with the help of matter, and suffering of necessity the retarding and coarsening influence of a medium which it can and must use, but cannot wholly subdue. That which Bergson has said of the effort and thrust of physical life appears in history as yet more profoundly true of the life of the spirit.
[p. 8] "Often enough, this effort turns on itself; sometimes paralysed by contrary forces, sometimes distracted from that which it should do by that which it does, captured, as it were, by the very form which it is engaged in assuming, hypnotised by it as by a mirror. Even in its most perfect works, when it seems to have triumphed both over external and innate resistance, it is at the mercy of the material form which it has been forced to assume. Each of us may experience this within himself. Our freedom, in the very movements in which it asserts itself, creates budding habits which will stifle it, if it does not review itself by constant effort. Automation dogs it. the most vital thought may freeze itself in the formula which expresses it. The word turns against the idea. The letter kills the spirit.
"The profound cause of these disharmonies lies in an incurable difference of rhythm. Life as a whole is movement itself: the particular manifestations of life accept this movement unwillingly, and constantly lag behind. it ever goes forward: they tend to mark time..... Like eddies of dust raised by the passing wind, living things turn back upon themselves, borne up by the great current of Life." [12]
We ask ourselves, "What seems to be the aim of this 'great current of Life,' this wind of God blowing where it lists, in these freest, least material manifestations?" We have seen that it has tendency to transcendence; that hampered, yet served, by matter, dogged by automatism, it seeks a spiritual sphere. Yet what sphere? To what state of Reality would it adjust itself? What are the "free acts" which it struggles to perform? "Where lies the land to which the ship would go?"
To address such a question to our intellects is to invite failure in the reply; for the careful mosaic of neatly-fitted conceptions which those intellects will offer us in return [p. 9] will have none of the peculiar qualities of life; it will be but a "practical simplification of reality"[13] made by that well-trained sorting-machine in the interests of our daily needs. Only by direct contact with life in its wholeness can we hope to discern its drift, to feel the pulsations of its mighty rhythm; and this we can never contrive save by the help of those who by loyal service and ever-renewed effort have vanquished the crystallising tendencies of thought and attained an imediate if imperfect communion with Reality — "that race of divine men who through a more excellent power and with piercing eyes acutely perceive the supernal light" [14] — the artists, the poets, the prophets, the seers; the happy owners of unspoilt perceptions; the possessors of that "intuition" which alone is able to touch upon absolute things. Thanks to their disinterested attitude towards life, the fresh note of adoration which is struck in them by the impact of Beauty or of Truth, these do not wear the mental blinkers which keep the attention of the average man focussed on one narrow useful path. Hence they are capable — as the average man is not — of acts of pure perception, of an enormous dilation of consciousness, in which they appear to enter into immediate communion with some aspect of Reality.
The greater, then, man's mental detachment from the mere struggle to live, which forces him to select, label and dwell on the useful aspects of things, the more chance there is that we may obtain from him some account of the meaning of that struggle, and the aim of the Spirit of Life. "Were this detachment complete, says Bergson; "did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has never yet seen. It would excel alike in every art at the same time; or rather, it would [p. 10] fuse them all into one. It would perceive all things in their native purity."[15]
In one rare class of men, and that alone, it seems as though this detachment were indeed complete. We have in those great mystics for whom "will and vision have been one" the perfect development of the artist type. These have carrtied the passionate art of contemplation to that consummation in which the mentis dilatatio of psychology slips the leash of matter to become the mentis alienatio of the soul; and have expressed the result of their intuitions in the actual stuff of life. hence there is justice in their claim "to perceive all things in their native purity"; or as they declare in lovelier language, "all creatures in God and God in all creatures." [16]
According to the universal testimony of such mystics, the drift of life, the effort of that Creative Seed within the world, is to establish itself in Eternity: in Boehme's words, to "hide itself within the Heart of God" [17]: to attain, in pure mystic language, "union with the Absolute." This is its "increasing purpose", to this it is in via. All the degrees of its development — all the inflorescences of beauty, skill and strength — are milestones, by-paths, short cuts, false starts on this one way. It tends to the actualisation of a spiritual existence already intuitively known: to find its way to a Patria, "non tantum cernandum sed et inhabitandam," [18] which the very constitution of its being makes a promised land.
"Movement itself," this spirit life of man has tried, as we might expect, many paths towards that union with the Real, that transcendance which it seeks. All through the history of humanity we find it experimenting here and there, sending out exploring tentacles into the [p. 11] unseen. But life has only one way of of attaining any stage or state: she must grow to it. Hence the history of the spirit is for us the history of a growth. Here we see, in fact, creative evolution at work; engaged in the production of species as sharply marked off from normal humanity as "normal" humanity supposes itself to be marked off fom the higher apes. The elan vital here takes a new direction, producing profound modifications which, though they are for the most part psychical rather than physical, yet also entail a turning of the physical machinery of thought and perception to fresh uses — a cutting of fresh paths of discharge, a modification of the normal human balance of intuition and intelligence.
The soul, says a great psychologist, is no more absolute and unchangeable than the body. "It, too, is a mobilised and moving equilibrium. Much once central is now lapsed, submerged, instinctive or even reflex, and much once latent and budding is now potent and in the focus of consciousness for our multiplex, compounded and recompounded personality." [19] We know that this soul, this total psychic life of man, is something much greater than the little patch of consciousness which most of us idly identify with "ourselves". It is like a sword — the "sword of the spirit" — only the point of which penetrates matter , sets up relations with it, and cuts the path through which the whole of life shall move. But behind that point of conscious mental activity is the whole weight and thrust of the unseen blade; that blade which is weapon and warrior in one. Long ages of evolution have tempered the point to the work demanded of it by daily life. In its ceaseless onward push it cuts in one direction only: through that concrete "world of things" in which man finds himself, and with which he is forced to deal. The brain, through which it acts, with which, as it were, its living point is shod, closes it in, limits and defines [p. 12] its operation: is on one hand a tool, on the other a screen. Had our development taken another path than that which we know and so easily accept, then much now latent might have budded, much now patent might have lapsed, and the matter of the brain, amenable to the creative touch of life, would have become the medium by which we oriented ourselves to another world, perceived and expressed another order of reality, now — and perhaps for ever — unknown.
In the mystics we seem to have a fortunate variation of the race, in which just this thing has come about, Under the spur of their vivid faculty of intuition they "gather up all their being and thrust it forward" — the whole personality, not it's sharp intellectual tip alone — on a new, free path. Hence it is that they live and move in worlds to us unrealised; see other aspects of the many-levelled, many coloured world of Reality. Living with an intensity which is beyond the scope of "normal" men, deeper and deeper layers of existence are revealed to them. As a result, we may say of them that which Eucken has said of the founders of the great historical religions —
"Nothing gives the presence of an overworld within the human circle more convincing energy than the unswerving constancy with which such personalities are rooted in the Divine; than the manner in which they are completely filled by the thought of this one relation; and than the simplicity and nearness which the great mystery has acquired for them. Hearts have never been won and minds have never been swayed without the presence of a regal imagination which understands how to win visible forms from an unseen world and to penetrate through all the multiplicity of things into a kingdom of fuller life. Nothing so elevated above the ordinary everyday existence is to be found as this, and nothing has governed in so compelling a manner the hearts of men as such a secure growth and such a presence of a new world." [20] [p. 13]
Thus it is that when Angela of Foligno says, "I had comprehension of the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the Abyss and all things else; and therein I beheld naught save the divine power in a manner which is verily indescribable, so that through greatness of marvelling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying, 'This whole world is full of God'" [21] — when we read this, an intuition deep within us replies that it can here recognise the accent of truth. Again, when St Augustine makes the confession — so irrational from the point of view of common sense — "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts shall have no rest apart from Thee," [22] that same remorseless echo sounds within the soul. Though we may live at levels far removed from those at which such immediacy of perception becomes possible for our consciousness, yet we understand the language of those who cry to us from the heights. The germ of their transcendent being is latent in us, for "whatsoever God is in His Nature, the spirit of man is in itself."[23] There are no breaks in the World of Becoming; Life, though it be instinct with spontaneity, though it cut new paths for its branching stream in fresh unimaginable directions, behave in a thousand incalculable ways, ever remains one. As the past history of the whole is present in each streamlet, so in each streamlet a capacity for ocean lurks. "I am the living water," says Life: "Let those who thirst for knowledge come to me and drink."
Notes:
Click on the orange portion of a note to return to the text proper.
1. Bergson, L'Evolution creatrice, p 138
2. Ibid., p 111
3. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p 87
4. 1 John iii 2 (RV)
5. Eucken, op cit., p. 4
6. Ibid, p. 4
7. Aug., Conf., Bk. I, cap.6
8. Boehme The Threefold Life of Man, cap. 5, #30
9. William Law, The Spirit of Prayer
10. Eucken, Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens, p. 121
11. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p 159
12. Bergson, op cit, p. 138, 139
13. Bergson, Le Rire, p.155
14. Plotinus, Ennead, V. 11
15. Bergson, Le Rire, p. 158
16. Meister Eckhart, in Wackernagel, Altdeutsches Lesebuck, p. 891
17. Aurora, Eng trans. (1784 ed), p 237
18. Aug., Conf., Bk VII.cap.20.
19. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Vol II. p. 58.
20. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 8
21. B. Angelae de Folignio, Visionem et Instructionum Liber, cap 22.
22. Aug., Conf., Bk I cap 1
23. Boehme, The Threefold Life of Man, cap. 5 #90
instinct — check the contemporary meaning of this word, and how that understanding might relate to modern usage.
soul — check carefully the functions attributed here to the soul in relation to such concepts as mind, emotions, psyche, personality, character, self, ego, etc, and to usage of the term by Underhill and others quoted by her. What would be an equivalent term today?
faculty — check the contemporary meaning of this word, and how that understanding might relate to modern usage.
