IV. Final Summary and Return to the Starting-point of the Whole Inquiry: the Necessity, and yet the Almost Inevitable Mutual Hostility, of the Three Great Forces of the Soul and of the Three Correspon

Our introductory position as to the three great forces of the soul, with the corresponding three great elements of religion, appears, then, to have stood the test of our detailed investigation. For each of these forces and corresponding elements has turned out to be necessary to religion, and yet to become destructive of itself and of religion in general where this soul-force and religious element is allowed gravely to cripple, or all but to exclude, the other forces and elements, and their vigorous and normal action and influence.

1. Each of these three forces and elements is indeed necessary, but ruinously destructive where it more or less ousts the other two.

(1) The psychic force or faculty by which we remember and picture things and scenes; the law of our being which requires that sense-impressions should stimulate our thinking and feeling into action, and that symbols, woven by the picturing faculty out of these impressions, should then express these our thoughts and feelings; and the need we have, for the due awakening, discipline and supplementation of every kind and degree of experience and action, that social tradition, social environment, social succession should ever be before and around and after our single lives: correspond to and demand the Institutional and Historical Element of Religion. This element is as strictly necessary as are that force and that law.

Yet if this force and need of the soul, and this religious element are allowed to emasculate the other two primary soul-forces and needs and the religious elements corresponding to them, it will inevitably degenerate into more or less of a Superstition,—an oppressive materialization and dangerous would-be absolute fixation of even quite secondary and temporary expressions and analyses of religion; a ruinous belief in the direct transferableness of religious conviction; and a predominance of political, legal, physically coercive concepts and practices with regard to those most interior, strong yet delicate, readily thwarted or weakened, springs of all moral and religious character,—spiritual sincerity and spontaneity and the liberty of the children of God. We thus get too great a preponderance of the “Objective,” of Law and Thing, as against Conviction and Person; of Priest as against Prophet; of the movement from without inwards, as against the movements from within outwards.

The Spanish Inquisition we found to be probably the most striking example and warning here. Yet the Eastern Christian Churches have doubtless exhibited these symptoms, if less acutely, yet more extensively and persistently. And the Protestant Reformation-Movement, (even in the later lives of its protagonists, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin), much of orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism, and some forms and phases of Anglican Highchurchism and of Scotch Presbyterianism, show various degrees and forms of a similar one-sidedness. In Judaism the excesses in the Priestly type of Old Testament religion, especially as traceable after the Exile, and their partial continuation in Rabbinism, furnish other, instructive instances of such more or less partial growth,—the Pharisees and the Jerusalem Sanhedrin being here the fullest representatives of the spirit in question. The classical Heathen Roman religion was, throughout, too Naturalistic for its, all but exclusive, externalism and legalism to be felt as seriously oppressive of any other, considerable element of that religion. And much the same could doubtless be said of Indian Brahmanism to this day. But in orthodox Mohammedanism we get the truly classical instance of such a predominance, in all its imposing strength and terrible, because all but irremediable, weakness—with its utterly unanalytic, unspeculative, unmystical, thing-like, rock-solid faith; its detailed rigidity and exhaustive fixity; its stringent unity of organization and military spirit of entirely blind obedience; its direct, quite unambiguous intolerance, and ever ready appeal to the sword, as the normal and chief instrument for the propagation of the spirit; and its entirely inadequate apprehension of man’s need of purification and regeneration in all his untutored loves, fears, hopes and hates.

(2) Then there is the soul-force by which we analyze and synthesize, and the law of our being which requires us to weigh, compare, combine, transfer, or ignore the details and the evidential worth of what has been brought home to us through the stimulation of our senses, by our picturing faculty and memory, and by means of our Social, Historical, and Institutional environment, and which orders us to harmonize all these findings into as much as may be of an intelligible whole of religion, and to integrate this religious whole within some kind of, at least rough, general conception as to our entire life’s experience. And this force and law are answered by the Critical-Historical and Synthetic-Philosophical element of religion. We thus get Positive and Dogmatic Theology. And this element is as humanly inevitable and religiously necessary as is that soul-force and law.

Yet here again, if this force, law, and element are allowed superciliously to ignore, or violently to explain away, the other kinds of approaches and contributions to religious truth and experience, special to the other two soul-forces and religious elements, we shall get another destructive one-sidedness, a Rationalistic Fanaticism, only too often followed by a lengthy Agnosticism and Indifference. Whilst the Rationalist Fanaticism lasts, everything will doubtless appear clear and simple to the soul, but then this “everything” will but represent the merest skimmings upon the face of the mighty deep of living, complete religion,—a petty, artificial arrangement by the human mind of the little which, there and then, it can easily harmonize into a whole, or even simply a direct hypostatizing of the mind’s own bare categories.

The worship of the Goddess of Reason at Notre-Dame of Paris we found to be here, perhaps, the most striking instance. Yet Rationalist excesses, varying from a cold Deism down to an ever short-lived formal Atheism, and the lassitude of a worldly-wise Indifferentism, are traceable within all the great religions. Thus a large proportion of the educated members of the ancient Graeco-Roman world were, from the Sophists and the Second Punic War onward, stricken with such a blight. The Sadducees are typical of this tendency among the Jews for some two centuries. The tough persistence of a mostly obscure current of destructive free-thought throughout Western Europe in the Middle Ages shows well the difficulty and importance of a mental and spiritual victory over these forces of radical negation, and of not simply driving them beneath the surface of society. And the ready lapse of the most daring and intense of the Medieval, Jewish and Christian, Scholastics into a thoroughly Pantheistic Panlogism, points to the prevalence, among these circles, of a certain tyranny of the abstractive and logical faculty over the other powers and intimations of the soul.—Unitarianism again is, in its origins and older form, notwithstanding its even excessive anti-Pantheism, strongly Scholastic in its whole temper and method, and this without the important correctives and supplementations brought to that method by the largely Mystical and Immanental Angel of the Schools. The greater part of the “Aufklärung”-Movement was vitiated by an often even severer, impoverishment of the whole conception of religion. And, in our day, the Liberal movements within the various Christian bodies, and again among Brahmanic religionists in India, rarely escape altogether from ignoring or explaining away the dark and toilsome aspects of life, and the inevitable excess of all deep reality, and indeed of our very experience of it, above our clear, methodical, intellectual analysis and synthesis of it. Too often and for too long all such groups have inclined to assimilate all Experience to clear Knowledge, all clear Knowledge to Physico-Mathematical Science, all Religion to Ethics, and all Ethics to a simple belief in the ultimacy of Determinist, Atomistic Science. The situation is decidedly improving now; History and Culture are being found to have other, more ultimate categories, than are those of Mathematics and Physics, and to bring us a larger amount of reality, and Ethics and Religion are discovered to be as truly distinct as they are closely allied and necessary, each to the deepest development of the other.

(3) The faculty and action of the soul, finally, by which we have an however dim yet direct and (in its general effects) immensely potent, sense and feeling, an immediate experience of Objective Reality, of the Infinite and Abiding, of a Spirit not all unlike yet distinct from our own, Which penetrates and works within these our finite spirits and in the world at large, especially in human history; and by which we will, and give a definite result and expression to, our various memories, thinkings, feelings, and intuitions, as waked up by their various special stimulants and by the influence of each upon all the others: is met by the Mystical and the directly Operative element of Religion. And here again we have a force and law of the human spirit, and a corresponding element of religion, which can indeed be starved or driven into a most dangerous isolation and revolt, but which are simply indestructible.

The Apocalyptic Orgies of the Münster Anabaptists we found to be perhaps the most striking illustration of the dire mischief that can spring from this third group of elemental soul-forces, when they ignore or dominate the other two. Yet some such Emotional Fanaticism can be traced, in various degrees and forms, throughout all such religious groups, schools, and individuals as seriously attempt to practise Pure Mysticism,—that is, religious Intuition and Emotion unchecked by the other two soul-forces and religious elements, or by the alternation of external action and careful contact with human Society and its needs and helps, Art and Science, and the rest.

Thus we find that, after the immense, luxuriant prevalence of an intensely intuitive, emotional, tumultuously various apprehension and manifestation of religion during the first two generations of Christians, and even after the deep, wise supplementation and spiritualization of this element by St. Paul, who in his own person so strikingly combined the Institutional, Rational and Intuitive-Emotional forces and elements, this whole force and element rapidly all but disappeared for long from Western Christian orthodoxy. And Montanism in still early times, and, during the very height of the Middle Ages, the Waldensian and Albigensian movements—all predominantly intuitive, enthusiastic, individualist—appear as so many revolutionary explosions, threatening the whole fabric of Christendom with dissolution. The “Eternal Gospel” movement of Abbot Joachim, on the other hand, gives us the intuitional-emotive element in a more purified, institutionally and rationally supplemented form.

Again we find that, for a while, in reaction from an all but hopelessly corrupt civilization, the Fathers of the Desert attained in many cases, by means of an all but Exclusive Mysticism, to a type of sanctity and to the inculcation of a lesson which the Church has gratefully recognized. We have to admit that many of the Italian, French and Spanish Quietists of the Seventeenth Century were no doubt excessively, or even quite unjustly, suspected or pursued, as far at least as their own personal motives and the effect of their doctrines upon their own characters were concerned; and that the general reaction against even the proved, grave excesses of some of these men and women, went often dangerously far in the contrary direction. Indeed even the fierce fanaticism of the Dutch-Westphalian Apocalyptic Intuitionists can but excuse, not justify, the policy of quite indiscriminately ruthless extermination pursued by Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, and by their official churches after their deaths, towards any and all Illuminism, however ethically pure and socially operative. The “Society of Friends” which, measured by the smallness of its numbers, has given to the world an astonishingly large band of devoted lovers of humankind, is a living witness to the possibility of such an Illuminism.

And we can note how the sane and solid, deep and delicate constituents, which had existed, mixed up with all kinds of fantastic, often hysterical and anti-moral exaltations, within most of those all but purely Intuitionist circles, gradually found their escape away into all sorts of unlikely quarters, helping to give much of their interiority and religious warmth, not only to various, now fairly sober-minded, Nonconformist Protestant bodies on the Continent, in England and America, but also to the more religious-tempered and more spiritually perceptive among modern philosophers—such as Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Fechner.

Within the Jewish world, we get much of this element at its noblest and at its worst, in the true and false Prophets respectively; then among the Essenes, for the times between the Maccabean resistance and the revolt of Bar Cochba; and later on in the Kabbala. The Mohammedans still furnish the example of the Sufi-movement. The Classical Heathen world produced the Neo-Platonist and the Mithraic movements; and we can still study, as a living thing, the Buddhist Mysticism of Thibet.

We have then, here too, something thoroughly elemental, which requires both persistent operative recognition and a continuous and profound purification and supplementation by becoming incorporated within a large living system of all the fundamental forces of the soul, each operating and operated upon according to the intrinsic nature and legitimate range of each.

2. Each element double; endless combinations and conflicts.

We have also found that these three forces and elements are each double, and that collisions, but also most fruitful interactions, can and do obtain between even these yoke-fellows: between Institutionalise and History,—the Present and the Past, a direct Sense-Impression and Picture and a Memory; between Criticism and Construction,—Analysis and acuteness of mind, and Synthesis and richness and balance of imagination, head, heart, and will; and between Mysticism and Action, as respectively Intuitive and quiescent and Volitional and effortful.

And both the three forces and elements as a whole, and the single members of each pair, can and do appear in every possible variety of combination with, and of opposition against, the others, although there is a special affinity between the Critical-Speculative and the Intuitive-Volitional pairs (in combination against the Sense-and-Memory pair); between the Sense-and-Memory pair and the single member of Action; and between the single members of Speculation and of Intuition. Yet, ultimately, not any one pair or member can bear its fullest fruit, without the aid of all the others; and there is not one that, in actual human nature, does not tend to emasculate, or to oust as much as possible from the soul, the other pairs or single members.

3. Our entire religious activity but one element of our complete spirit-life.

And we have noted further, how even the fullest development in any one soul of all these three couples of specifically religious activities—even supposing that they could be developed to their fullest, without any participation in and conflict with other degrees and kinds of life and reality—do not, by any means, exhaust the range of even the simplest soul’s actual energizings.

(1) For over and beyond the specifically religious life—though this, where genuine, is ever the deepest, the central life—every soul lives, and has to live, various other lives. And indeed—and this is the point which specially concerns religion—the soul cannot attain to its fullest possible spiritual development, without the vigorous specific action and differentiation of forces and functions of a not directly religious character, which will have to energize, each according to its own intrinsic nature, within the ever ampler, and ever more closely-knit, organization of the complete life of the soul.

(2) And within this complete life, the three pairs of religious forces and elements each possess their own special affinities and antipathies for certain of the forces and elements which constitute the other, less central organizations of man’s marvellously rich activity. The Historical-Institutional element of Religion has necessarily a special affinity for, and borrows much of its form from, social, legal, political history and institutions of a general kind. The Critical-Speculative element of religion is necessarily cognate to, and in a state of interchange with, the general historical criticism and philosophical insight attained during the ages and amongst the races in which any particular religion is intellectually systematized. And the Mystical-Operative element is necessarily influenced by, and largely utilizes the general emotive and volitional gifts and habits, peculiar to the various ages and peoples within which this double religious element is in operation.

(3) It is thus abundantly clear how greatly a work so manifold in its means, and so harmonious in its end, requires, if it is to come to a considerable degree of realization, that single souls, and single classes and types of souls, should have around them a large and varied Historical and Institutional, a Social life both of a specifically religious and of a general kind, and that, within this large ambit of the actualized religion of others and of the still largely potential religion of their own souls, they shall develop and be helped to realize their own deepest spiritual capacities and attrait. They will have to develop these special capabilities to the utmost degree compatible with some practice of the other chief elements of religion, with a continuous respect for and belief in the necessity of the other types of soul, and with a profound belief in, and love of, the full, organized community of all devoted souls, which builds up, and is built up by, all this variety in unity. The Kingdom of God, the Church, will thus be more and more found and made to be the means of an ever more distinct articulation, within an ever more fruitful interaction, of the various attraits, gifts, vocations, and types of souls which constitute its society. And these souls in return will, precisely by this their articulation within this ampler system, bring to this society an ever richer content of variety in harmony, of action and warfare within an ever deeper fruitfulness and peace.

4. Two conditions of the fruitfulness of the entire process.

Yet even the simplest effort, within this innumerable sequence and simultaneity of activities, will lack the fullest truth and religious depth and fruitfulness, unless two experiences, convictions and motives are in operation throughout the whole, and penetrate its every part, as salt and yeast, atmosphere and light penetrate, and purify and preserve our physical food and bodily senses.

The vivid, continuous sense that God, the Spirit upholding our poor little spirits, is the true originator and the true end of the whole movement, in all it may have of spiritual beauty, truth, goodness and vitality; that all the various levels and kinds of reality and action are, in whatever they have of worth, already immanently fitted to stimulate, supplement and purify each other by Him Who, an Infinite Spiritual Interiority Himself, gives thus to each one of us indefinite opportunities for actualizing our own degree and kind of spiritual possibility and ideal; and that He it is Who, however dimly yet directly, touches our souls and awakens them, in and through all those minor stimulations and apprehensions, to that noblest, incurable discontent with our own petty self and to that sense of and thirst for the Infinite and Abiding, which articulates man’s deepest requirement and characteristic: this is the first experience and conviction, without which all life, and life’s centre, religion, are flat and dreary, vain and philistine.

And the second conviction is the continuous sense of the ever necessary, ever fruitful, ever bliss-producing Cross of Christ—the great law and fact that only through self-renunciation and suffering can the soul win its true self, its abiding joy in union with the Source of Life, with God Who has left to us, human souls, the choice between two things alone: the noble pangs of spiritual child-birth, of painful-joyous expansion and growth; and the shameful ache of spiritual death, of dreary contraction and decay.

Now it is especially these two, ever primary and supreme, ever deepest and simplest yet most easily forgotten, bracing yet costing, supremely virile truths and experiences—facts which increasingly can and ever should waken up, and themselves be vivified by, all the other activities and gifts of God which we have studied—these two eyes of religion and twin pulse-beats of its very heart, that have been realized, with magnificent persistence and intensity, by the greatest of the Inclusive Mystics.

And amongst these Mystics, Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna, the Saint of Genoa, has appeared to us as one who, in spite of not a little obscurity and uncertainty and vagueness in the historical evidences for her life and teaching, of not a few limitations of natural character and of opportunity, and of several peculiarities which, wonderful to her entourage, can but perplex or repel us now, shines forth, in precisely these two central matters, with a penetrating attractiveness, rarely matched, hardly surpassed, by Saints and Heroes of far more varied, humorous, readily understandable, massive gifts and actions. And these very limits and defects of her natural character and opportunities, of her contemporary disciples and later panegyrists, and of our means for studying and ascertaining the facts and precise value of the life she lived, and of the legend which it occasioned, may, we can hope, but help to give a richer articulation and wider applicability to our study of the character and necessity, the limits, dangers and helpfulness of the Mystic Element of Religion.