Читать книгу The School of Charity - Evelyn Underhill - Страница 11

God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God abideth in him . . . we love because he first loved.—St. John.

We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavouring to know God, for beholding His greatness, we realize our littleness. His purity shows our foulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble.—St. Teresa.

Everyone who is engaged on a great undertaking, depending on many factors for its success, knows how important it is to have a periodical stocktaking. Whether we are responsible for a business, an institution, a voyage, or an exploration—even for the well-being of a household—it is sometimes essential to call a halt; examine our stores and our equipment, be sure that all necessaries are there and in good order, and that we understand the way in which they should be used. It is no good to have tins without tin openers, bottles of which the contents have evaporated, labels written in an unknown language, or mysterious packages of which we do not know the use. Now the living-out of the spiritual life, the inner life of the Christian—the secret correspondence of his soul with God—is from one point of view a great business. It was well called “the business of all businesses” by St. Bernard; for it is no mere addition to Christianity, but its very essence, the source of its vitality and power. From another point of view it is a great journey; a bit-by-bit progress, over roads that are often difficult and in weather that is sometimes pretty bad, from “this world to that which is to come.” Whichever way we look at it, an intelligent and respectful attitude to our equipment—seeing that it is all there, accessible and in good condition, and making sure that we know the real use of each item—is essential to success. It is only too easy to be deluded by the modern craving for pace and immediate results, and press on without pausing to examine the quality and character of our supplies, or being sure that we know where we are going and possess the necessary maps. But this means all the disabling miseries of the unmarked route and unbalanced diet; and at last, perhaps, complete loss of bearings and consequent starvation of the soul.

Karl Barth has told us, that on becoming a Calvinist minister, he paused to examine his own spiritual stock in trade; and found to his horror that it was useless to him. He seemed to have nothing to feed on, nothing to depend on, nothing to give. It looked imposing ; but much of the food was stale and unnourishing, some of the tins seemed empty, and some were so tightly sealed that he could not reach their contents. He was the child and servant of that Infinite God, whose every word nourishes the souls of men. But he was receiving nothing from Him: the real contents of the stores that had been issued to him were inaccessible. In apparent plenty, he was spiritually starved. In lesser ways that dreadful situation can easily become our own, if we merely take our religious equipment for granted; do not make sure that it contains food on which we can feed, tins we can open, and that we know what the labels really mean. For the spiritual life of man cannot be maintained on a diet of suggestive phrases and ideas. Only when we have found within the familiar externals of our religion, those vivid realities which these externals enclose and keep safe, are we using our equipment properly and getting the food we need. We must open the tins, if we are to discover inside them the mysterious nourishment of the soul. Nor have we any right to ask for fresh enlightenment, or a new issue of provisions, until we have fully explored the resources we already possess.

This process is equally necessary for those who are repelled by the externals of religion, and those who are attracted by them. Both need to recognize the difference between the container and the content. Many people spend the whole of their devotional lives sitting by the wayside admiring the pictures on the tins ; more are alienated from religion by mistaking this procedure for faith. Karl Barth went away into solitude to open some of his least promising packages; and found with amazement within them the inexhaustible nourishment of eternal life.

Lent is a good moment for such spiritual stocktaking; a pause, a retreat from life’s busy surface to its solemn deeps. There we can consider our possessions; and discriminate between the necessary stores which have been issued to us, and must be treasured and kept in good order, and the odds and ends which we have accumulated for ourselves. Most of us are inclined to pay considerable attention to the spiritual odds and ends: the air-cushions, tabloids, and vacuum flasks, and various labour-saving devices which we call by such attractive names as our own peace, our own approach, our own experience, and so forth. But we leave the superb and massive standard equipment which is issued to each baptized Christian to look after itself. There are few who cannot benefit by a bit by bit examination of that equipment, a humble return to first principles; for there we find the map and road-book of that spiritual world which is our true environment, all the needed information about the laws which control it, and all essentials for feeding that inner life of which we talk so much and understand so very little.

The Christian creed is a hand-list of the soul’s essential requirements: the iron ration of truths, the knowledge of mighty realities, which rightly used is sufficient to feed and safeguard our supernatural life throughout its course. When Christians say the Creed, they say in effect, “This is what we believe to be the truth about existence; about God and the things of God, and so by implication about our own mysterious lives.” For the whole of life, visible and invisible, is governed by these statements; which come to us from beyond our normal radius, entering the human scene in their penetrating truth and majestic beauty, to show us how to live.

The longer we go on with life, the more mysterious, the more baffling it seems to most of us: and the more deeply we feel the need of being taught how to live. We go muddling on, secretly conscious that we are making a mess of it. Guides come forward to tell us this or that, yet always with an avoidance of the full mystery of our situation, seldom with any real sense of the richness of the material of life: and they all fail to be of much use to us when we come to the bad bits. The surface-indications often mislead us. The tangle of new roads, bordered by important-looking factories and unhappy little trees, the arterial highways leading nowhere, the conflicting demands and directions which reach us from every side, only make our confusions worse. And at last we realize that only the Author of human life can teach us how to live human life, because He alone sees it in its eternal significance: and He does this by a disclosure that at first may seem strange and puzzling, but grows in beauty and meaning as we gaze at it, and which feeds, enlightens and supports us when we dare to take up the life that it reveals.

“Lord,” said St. Thomas Aquinas, “set my life in order; making me to know what I ought to do and do it in the way that I should.” The civilized world seems now to have reached the point at which only this prayer can save it; and the answer is already given us in the Christian creed. We talk much of reconstruction; but no one has yet dared to take the Christian’s profound beliefs about Reality as the basis of a reconditioned world. We treat them as dwellers in the plain treat the mountains. We lift up our eyes to their solemn beauty with respect; but refuse to acknowledge that plain and mountain are part of the same world. Yet the Creed is no mere academic document, no mere list of “dogmas.” It is an account of that which is; and every word it contains has a meaning at once universal, practical, and spiritual within the particular experience of each soul. It irradiates and harmonizes every level of our life, not one alone. All great spiritual literature does this to some extent; but the Creed, the condensed hand-list of those deep truths from which spiritual literature is built up, does it supremely.

Dante warned the readers of the Divine Comedy that everything in it had a fourfold meaning, and would never be understood by those who were satisfied by the surface-sense alone. This, which is indeed true of the Comedy, is far more true of the great statements of the Christian religion. They are true at every level; but only disclose their full splendour and attraction when we dare to reach out, beyond their surface beauty and their moral teaching, to God, their meaning and their end, and let their fourfold wisdom and tremendous demands penetrate and light up the deepest level of our souls.

The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost. Till we accept this truth, religion is full of puzzles for us, and its practices often unmeaning: for we do not know what it is all about. So there are few things more bracing and enlightening than a deliberate resort to these superb statements about God, the world and the soul; testing by them our attitude to those realities, and the quality and vigour of our interior life with God. For every one of them has a direct bearing on that interior life. Lex credendi, lex orandi. Our prayer and belief should fit like hand and glove; they are the inside and outside of one single correspondence with God. Since the life of prayer consists in an ever-deepening communion with a Reality beyond ourselves, which is truly there, and touches, calls, attracts us, what we believe about that Reality will rule our relation to it. We do not approach a friend and a machine in the same way. We make the first and greatest of our mistakes in religion when we begin with ourselves, our petty feelings and needs, ideas and capacities. The Creed sweeps us up past all this to God, the objective Fact, and His mysterious self-giving to us. It sets first Eternity and then History before us, as the things that truly matter in religion; and shows us a humble and adoring delight in God as the first duty of the believing soul. So there can hardly be a better inward discipline than the deliberate testing of our vague, dilute, self-occupied spirituality by this superb vision of Reality.

These great objective truths are not very fashionable among modern Christians; yet how greatly we need them, if we are to escape pettiness, individualism and emotional bias. For that mysterious inner life which glows at the heart of Christianity, which we recognize with delight whenever we meet it, and which is the source of Christian power in the world, is fed through two channels. Along one channel a certain limited knowledge of God and the things of God enters the mind; and asks of us that honest and humble thought about the mysteries of faith which is the raw material of meditation. Along the other channel God Himself comes secretly to the heart, and wakes up that desire and that sense of need which are the cause of prayer. The awestruck vision of faith and the confident movement of love are both needed, if the life of devotion is to be rich, brave and humble; equally removed from mere feeling and mere thought. Christian prayer to God must harmonize with Christian belief about God: and quickly loses humility and sanity if it gets away from that great law. We pray first because we believe something; perhaps at that stage a very crude or vague something. And with the deepening of prayer, its patient cultivation, there comes—perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly—the enrichment and enlargement of belief, as we enter into a first-hand communion with the Reality who is the object of our faith.

For God, not man, is the first term of religion: and our first step in religion is the acknowledgment that HE IS. All else is the unfolding of those truths about His life and our life, which this fact of facts involves. I believe in One God. We begin there ; not with our own needs, desires, feelings, or obligations. Were all these abolished, His independent splendour would remain, as the Truth which gives its meaning to the world. So we begin by stating with humble delight our belief and trust in the most concrete, most rich of all realities—God. Yet even the power to do this reflects back again to Him, and witnesses to His self-giving to the soul. For Christianity is not a pious reverie, a moral system or a fantasy life; it is a revelation, adapted to our capacity, of the Realities which control life. Those Realities must largely remain unknown to us; limited little creatures that we are. God, as Brother Giles said, is a great mountain of corn from which man, like a sparrow, takes a grain of wheat: yet even that grain of wheat, which is as much as we can carry away, contains all the essentials of our life. We are to carry it carefully and eat it gratefully: remembering with awe the majesty of the mountain from which it comes.

The first thing this vast sense of God does for us, is to deliver us from the imbecilities of religious self-love and self-assurance; and sink our little souls in the great life of the race, in and upon which this One God in His mysterious independence is always working, whether we notice it or not. When that sense of His unique reality gets dim and stodgy, we must go back and begin there once more; saying with the Psalmist, “All my fresh springs are in thee.” Man, said Christ, is nourished by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Not the words we expect, or persuade ourselves that we have heard; but those unexpected words He really utters, sometimes by the mouths of the most unsuitable people, sometimes through apparently unspiritual events, sometimes secretly within the soul. Therefore seeking God, and listening to God, is an important part of the business of human life: and this is the essence of prayer. We do something immense, almost unbelievable, when we enter that world of prayer, for then we deliberately move out towards that transcendent Being whom Christianity declares to be the one Reality: a Reality revealed to us in three ways as a Creative Love, a Rescuing Love, and an Indwelling, all-pervading Love, and in each of those three ways claiming and responding to our absolute trust. Prayer is the give-and take between the little souls of men and that three-fold Reality.

So we begin the overhaul of our spiritual equipment not by thinking about our own needs and shortcomings, but by looking up and out at this One Reality, this Unchanging God, and so gaining a standard of comparison, a “control.” That remarkable naturalist and philosopher, Dr. Beebe, whose patient study of living things seems to have brought him so near to the sources of life, says in his latest book Nonsuch, “As a panacea for a host of human ills, worries and fears, I should like to advocate a law that every toothbrush should have a small telescope in its handle, and the two used equally.” As far as the life of religion is concerned, if we always used the telescope before we used the toothbrush—looked first at the sky of stars, the great ranges of the beauty and majesty of God, and only then at our own small souls and their condition, needs, and sins—the essential work of the toothbrush would be much better done; and without that self-conscious conviction of its overwhelming importance, and the special peculiarities and requirements of our own set of teeth, which the angels must surely find amusing. “Where I left myself I found God; where I found myself, I lost God,” says Meister Eckhart. Our eyes are not in focus for His Reality, until they are out of focus for our own petty concerns.

What then is the nature of that Eternal God, the Substance of all that is, so far as we are able to apprehend Him? What is the quality of that mysterious starlight the telescope helps us to discern? We are Christians; and so we accept, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the Christian account of His character. God is Love, or rather Charity; generous, out-flowing, self-giving love, Agape. When all the qualities which human thought attributes to Reality are set aside, this remains. Charity is the colour of the Divine personality, the spectrum of Holiness. We believe that the tendency to give, to share, to cherish, is the mainspring of the universe, ultimate cause of all that is, and reveals the Nature of God: and therefore that when we are most generous we are most living and most real. “Who dwelleth in Charity dwelleth in God, and God in him”; our true life develops within a spiritual world which lives and glows in virtue of His Eternal Charity. To enter the Divine order then, achieve the full life for which we are made, means entering an existence which only has meaning as the channel and expression of an infinite, self-spending love. This is not piety. It is not altruism. It is the clue to our human situation.

The Creed, our list of the spiritual truths to which our inner life must be conformed, is all about a God who is Charity, a Charity that is God. It tells us that what we call creation is the never-ceasing action of a self-spending personal love; and all the experiences and acts of religion are simply our small experience of, and response to, the pressure and the call of that same creative Love which rules the stars. “Behold, Lord, from whence such love proceedeth!” exclaims Thomas à Kempis. It proceeds from the very heart of the universe. For Christians this is the ultimate fact, which must govern the whole conduct of life. We are each created, sought, possessed and maintained by a living Reality that is Charity; truly known by us in and through His free, generous self-giving, and in no other way. The life which we are called upon to manifest in space and time is a living spark of this generous Love. That means that the true demand of religion will never be a demand for correct behaviour or correct belief; but for generosity, as the controlling factor in every relation between man and God and man and man. To look at ourselves and our lives after looking at this great truth is surely enough to bring self-satisfied piety down with a run.

When we look out towards this Love that moves the stars and stirs in the child’s heart, and claims our total allegiance and remember that this alone is Reality and we are only real so far as we conform to its demands, we see our human situation from a fresh angle; and perceive that it is both more humble and dependent, and more splendid, than we had dreamed. We are surrounded and penetrated by great spiritual forces, of which we hardly know anything. Yet the outward events of our life cannot be understood, except in their relation to that unseen and intensely living world, the Infinite Charity which penetrates and supports us, the God whom we resist and yet for whom we thirst; who is ever at work, transforming the self-centred desire of the natural creature into the wide-spreading, outpouring love of the citizen of Heaven.