Freiherr von Friedrich Hügel

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Teresa’s account: “An Angel of God appeared to me to be thrusting at times a long spear into my heart and to pierce my very entrails”; “the pain was so great that it made me moan”; “it really seems to the soul as if an arrow were thrust through the heart or through itself; the suffering is not one of sense, neither is the wound physical” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ For Christianity is the doctrine of the deep guilt of the human race ... and of the heart’s thirst after redemption from it, a redemption which can be acquired only through the abnegation of self,—that is, through a complete conversion of human nature. ”

“ And if her second peculiarity, the concentration of the fight upon an unusually isolated and intense false self, had introduced an element of at least relative Rigorism and contraction into her spirituality, this third peculiarity brings a compensating movement of quasi-Pantheism, of immense expansion. Here the crushed plant expands in boundless air, light and warmth; the parched seaweed floats and unfolds itself in an immense ocean of pure waters—the soul, as it were, breathes and bathes in God’s peace and love. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ There is no shadow of theoretical or ultimate contradiction here: to love one’s country deeply, yet not to be a Chauvinist; to love one’s wife tenderly, yet not to be uxorious; to care profoundly for one’s children, yet to train, rebuke, and ever brace them, when necessary, up to suffering and even death itself: these things so little exclude each the other, that each attachment can only rightly grow in and through the corresponding detachment. ”

“ It is impossible not to feel that the manifold great ocean-waters of life, that the diversely blowing winds of God’s Spirit are here, somehow, expected to flow and breathe in a little shortcut, single channel, through a tiny pipe ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Yet it is in Catherine’s own culminating intuition,—of the soul’s free choice of Purgatory, as a joyful relief from the piercing pain of what otherwise would last for ever,—the vividly perceived contrast between God’s purity and her soul’s impurity, that we get, in the closest combination, indeed mutual causation, this double sense of Man’s nearness to and distance from, of his likeness and unlikeness to God. ”

“ For in life at large, and in human life and history in particular, it would be sheer perversity to deny that there is much immediate, delightful, noble Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; and these also have a right to the soul’s careful, ruminating attention. And it is the Mystical element that furnishes this rumination.—Again, “it is part of the essential character of human consciousness, as a Synthesis and an organizing Unity, that, as long as the life of that consciousness lasts at all, not only contrast and tension, but also concentration and equilibrium must manifest themselves. ”

“ In the first, easier, more popular conception, He is practically thought of as the First of Creatures, competing with the rest for Man’s love, and is here placed alongside of them. Hence the inference that whatever love they win from us by reason of their inherent goodness, is taken from Him: He is not loved perfectly, till He is loved alone. But in the second, more difficult and rarer conception, God is placed, not alongside of creatures but behind them, as the light which shines through a crystal and lends it whatever lustre it may have. ”

“ And he thus, in his most deliberate and systematic mood, shows very clearly how deeply he has realized the dignity of the human body, as the instrument both for the development of the soul itself and for the work of that soul in and upon the visible world. ”

“ Again, it is the growing experience of the difficulties and complexities of Psychology, History, Epistemology, and of the apparent unescapableness and yet pain of man’s mere [339] anthropomorphisms, that makes the persistence of his search for, and sense of, Objective Truth and Reality, and the keenness of his suffering when he appears to himself as imprisoned in mere subjectivity, deeply impressive. For the more man feels, and suffers from feeling himself purely subjective, the more is it clear that he is not merely subjective: he could never be conscious of the fact, if he were. ”

“ And the greatness here consists in the keen and massive sense of three profound truths. He never forgets that Mathematico-Physical Science is rigidly determinist, and that it stands for a certain important truth and penetrates to a certain depth of reality. He never ceases to feel how impure, selfish, petty is the natural man, and how pure, disinterested, noble, can and should be the spiritual personality. And he never lets go the sense that, somehow, that science must be able to help towards this purification. ”

“ No wonder then that Quietism, finding this element of quiet incubation much ignored and starved in the lives of most religious souls, flew to the other extreme, of making this inarticulateness and wise indirectness of striving into the one test and measure of the perfection of all the constituents of the religious life, instead of insisting upon various degrees and combination of full and direct consciousness and articulation, and of much dimness and indirect alertness, as each requiring the other, and as both required by the complete and normal life of the soul. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ And that whole Universe, in so far as it is material, cannot be compared, either in kind or in dignity, to Mind: only the indications there, parallel in this to our experiences within our own mind, of a Mind and Spirit infinitely greater and nobler than, yet with a certain affinity to, our own,—only these constitute that outer world as great as this our inner world. ”

“ Now Faith and Hope attain indeed to God, yet as the source from which there accrue to us the knowledge of the Truth and the acquisition of the Good; whilst Love attains to God Himself, with a view to abide in Him, and not that some advantage may accrue to us from Him.” And perhaps still more clearly: “ When a man loves something so as to covet it, he apprehends it as something pertaining to his own well-being. The lover here stands towards the object beloved, as towards something which is his property.” ”