Freiherr von Friedrich Hügel

“ And then there have been great souls, whom I cannot well name here, but whom I would nevertheless refer to in reverent gratitude; souls that have taught me that deepest of facts and of lessons,—the persistence, across the centuries, within the wide range of the visible and indeed also of the invisible Church, of that vivid sense of the finite and the Infinite, of that spacious joy and expansive freedom in self-donation to God, the prevenient, all-encompassing Spirit, of that massively spontaneous, elemental religion, of which Catherine is so noble an example. ”

“ For here, once more, there is one apprehension, force, life,—This-world Morality,—which requires penetration and development, in nowise destruction, by another, a deeper power, That-world Ethics and Religion. Let the one weaken or blunt the edge and impact of the other, and it has, at the same time, weakened itself. For here again we have, not a Thing which simply exists, by persistence in its dull unpenetratingness and dead impenetrability, but a Life, growing by the incorporation and organization, within its ampler range, of lesser lives, each with its own legitimate autonomy. ”

“ And when the discovery of this constant contribution of the mind to its own affirmations of reality is first made, it can hardly fail, for the time being, to occasion misgivings and anxieties of a more or less sceptical kind. Is not the whole of what I have hitherto taken to be a solid world of sense outside me, and the whole of the world of necessary truth and of obligatory goodness within me,—is it not, perhaps, all a merely individual creation of my single mind—a mind cut off from all effective intercourse with reality,—my neighbour’s mind included? ”

“ And all this imprisonment is felt as equivalent to being outside of the soul’s true home. “I seem to myself to be in this world like those who are out of their home, and who have left all their friends and relations, and who find themselves in a foreign land; and who, having accomplished the business on which they came, stand ready to depart and to return home,—home, where they ever are with heart and mind, having indeed so ardent a love of their country (patria) , that one day spent in getting there would appear to them to last a year.” ”

“ The happiest and most fruitful moments for our aesthetic sense, those in which our mind expands most and grows most, hence is most active in aesthetic “action” (though not “activity”) are those in which we are unforcedly and massively absorbed in drinking in, with a quiet intentness, the contrasts and harmonies, the grand unity in variety, the very presence and spirit of an alpine upland, or of a river’s flowing, or of the ocean’s outspread, or of the Parthenon sculptures or of Rafael’s madonnas. ”

“ Where is there room here, we feel even angrily, for all these distinctions, all this balancing of divers faculties and parts? Is not all this but so much Aestheticism, some kind of subtle Naturalism, a presumptuous attempting to build up bit by bit in practice, and to analyze part from part in theory, what can only come straight from God Himself, and, coming from Him the One, cannot but bear the impress of His own indistinguishable Unity? And can there be anything more unforcedly, unanalyzably simple than all actual religion,—and this in exact proportion to its greatness? ”

“ Nothing, then, would be more shortsighted than to try and keep the soul from a deep, ample, recollective movement, from feeding upon and relishing, from as it were stretching itself out and bathing in, spiritual air and sunshine, in a rapt admiration, in a deep experience of the greatness, the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of the World, of Life, of God. ”

“ Here, in Plotinus’s scheme, Man begins indeed with sense-impressions and imaginative picturings, with discursive reasoning and intuitive reason, with feelings, volitions, and energizings of every kind. But the more he moves up, the more of all this he leaves utterly behind; till, in ecstasy, all will, love, thought, consciousness, cease altogether. For man has thus been getting nearer and nearer, and more and more like, the One; and this One is just nothing besides sheer, pure Oneness,—it is neither Will, nor Love, nor Thought, nor Self-consciousness, in any degree or sense of these words. ”

“ And Grace and Love, and Love and Christ, and Christ and Spirit, and hence Grace and Love and Christ and Spirit are, at bottom, one, and this One is God. Hence God, loving Himself in and through us, is alone our full true self. Here, in this constant stretching out and forward of her whole being into and towards the ocean of light and love, of God the All in All, it is not hard to recognize a soul which finds happiness only when looking out and away from self, and turning, in more or less ecstatic contemplation and action, towards that Infinite Country, that great Over-Againstness, God. ”

“ I take her impulse of deep longing to die in one of those trances, to have arisen, not simply from joy at the thought of dying, but from joy at the prospect of dying of joy,—of dying with the joy fixed in [193] that moment in the soul for ever. For heaven itself appears here not as a synonym for God, but as a creature, as the summing up of infinite and endless consolation of all right kinds, spiritual and psycho-physical. ”

“ For the greatest constituents of the Christian spirit are undoubtedly there: free self-sacrifice, impelled by love of God, of Christ, and of all men, and by hatred of self.—Yet, because they here suppress other, equally necessary, constituents, and are out of their proper context and bereft of their proper checks, they but render possible and actual a deed of piteous self-delusion. How terrible is false simplification, the short cut taken by pure logic, operating without a sufficient induction from facts, and within an ardent, self-immolating temperament! ”

“ In so far as there is any movement before the plunge, it is an inward, introspective one; the soul as a whole is, for that previous moment, not conceived as in motion, but a movement of her self-observing part or power takes place within her from the surface to the centre; and only then, after her rapid journey from this her surface-being to those her fundamental ineradicable requirements, and after the consequent intolerably painful contrast and conflict within herself, does she cast herself, with swift wholeheartedness, with all she is and has, into the purifying place and state. ”

“ At such moments we altogether cease to be directly conscious of ourselves, of time or of the body’s whereabouts; and when we return to our ordinary psychical and mental condition, we do so with an undeniable sense of added strength and youthfulness,—somewhat as though our face, old and haggard, were, after gazing in utter self-oblivion upon some resplendent youthfulness, to feel, beyond all doubt, all its many wrinkles to have gone. ”

“ She loves God’s Light and Love so much, that she is indefatigable in seeking, and constantly happy in finding, and incapable of not loving, even the merest glimpses of it, everywhere. And yet, precisely on that same account, everywhere the central passion of her soul is given to fostering the further growth of this Light and Love, to already loving it even more as it will or may be than as it already is, and thus deeply loving it already, in order that it may be still more lovable by and by. ”

“ It is evident that Catherine, if she can fairly be taxed with what, if pressed, would, in her doctrine rather than in her life, be an excessive Individualism, is, in her general teaching and practice, admirably free from Psychological Atomism; indeed did any soul ever understand better the profound reality of habits, general dispositions, tones of mind and feeling and will, as distinct from the single acts that gradually build them up and that, in return, are encircled and coloured by them all? ”

“ Who has declared that he who hateth not his own father and mother for His sake is not worthy of Him; Who has asked, “What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?” and Who has pronounced a special woe upon the rich, and a special blessing upon the poor in spirit? Does not our view, on the contrary, bid a man attend to his hands and eyes, rather than to their possible or even actual offending, euphemistically described here as “friction”; bid him love his father and mother, even though this introduce a conflict into his affections ”

“ Dionysius here everywhere follows Proclus. Yet the noblest Neo-Platonist sayings are again furnished by Plotinus: “We are not cut off or severed from the Light, but we breathe and consist in It, since It ever enlightens and bears us, as long as It is what It is.” In the moments of Union, “we are able to see both Him and ourself,—ourself in dazzling splendour, full of spiritual light, or rather one with the pure Light Itself ... our life’s flame is then enkindled.” “There the soul rests, after it has fled up, away from evil, to the place which is free from evils ... and the true life is there.” ”

“ Whole Sciences, indeed the Scientific, above all the Historic spirit itself, have arisen or have come to maturity since her day. Hence the realities of her life, as of every religious life, remain fresh indeed with the deathless vitality of love and grace, and but very partially explicable still; and yet the highest intellectual honour of each successive period should be found in an ever-renewed attempt at an ever less inadequate apprehension and utilization of these highest and deepest manifestations of Authority, Reason, and Experience,—of the Divine in our poor human life. ”

“ Indeed, in reality, the Ideal State is now built up, step by step, for the ‘one ultimate’ purpose of preparing an abode for these Contemplatives, of training them in their vocation, the highest extant, and of providing a means for the insertion of Dialectic, as a special form of life and the highest aim of human endeavour, into the general organism of the earthly, civilized life. ‘The so-called virtues’ all here sink into the shade before the highest force of the soul, the mystic Contemplation of the Eternal.... ”

“ On the one hand, there are those that seem to spring from dimly lit or dark feeling, to arise,—as it were, hydra-like, to sting and madden, or mist-like, to benumb all life, and turn it into mere drift and dreaming,—from out of the obscure, undrained, swampy places of human ignorance and passion. ”

“ And if we take the resurrection as effected, we promptly feel how mixed and clumsy, how inadequate, how less, and not more, than the best and noblest elements of our experience and aspirations even here and now, is such a, still essentially temporal and spacial, mode of existence.
I take it that, against all this, we can but continue to maintain two points. The soul’s life after bodily death is not a matter of experience or of logical demonstration, but a postulate of faith and a consequence from our realization of the human spirit’s worth ”

“ And, on another occasion, she says to her disciples: “If, of that which this heart of mine is feeling, one drop were to fall into hell, hell itself would become all life eternal”; and she accepts with jubilation this interpretation of her words, on the part of one of them (no doubt Vernazza) : “Hell exists in every place where there is rebellion against Love, God; but Life Eternal, in every place where there is union with that same Love, God.” [265]
And she now cannot but pray to possess all this love,—love being now pictured as a food, as a light, or as water, bringing life to the soul. ”

“ For in “Charity” we get a directly dynamic, expansive conception and experience: man’s spirit is, at first, potential rather than actual, and has to be conquered and brought, as it were, to such and such a size and close-knitness of organization, by much fight with, and by the slow transformation of, the animal and selfish nature. Thus Pure Love, Charity, Agape, has to fight it out, inch by inch, with another, still positive force, impure love, concupiscence, Eros, in all the latter’s multiform disguises. ”

“ The ultimate and determining reason was no doubt her deep spiritual experience and conviction (as vivid as ever was the psychic tendency which gave it form and additional emotional edge and momentum) that she must continuously first quench and drown her feverish immediacy, her clamorous, claimful false self, and must lose herself, as a merely natural Individual, in the river and ocean of the Thing, of Law, of that apparently ruthless Determinism which fronts life everywhere, before she could find herself again as a Person, in union with and in presence of an infinite Spirit and Personality. ”