Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion (Vol. 1&2) - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 56

We have seen how all religiousness is ever called into life by some already existing religion. And this religion will consist in the continuous commemoration of some great religious facts of the past. It will teach and represent some divine revelation as having been made, in and through such and such a particular person, in such and such a particular place, at such and such a particular time; and such a revelation will claim acceptance and submission as divine and redemptive in and through the very form and manner in which it was originally made. The very peculiarity, which will render the teaching distinctively religious, will hence be a certain real, or at least an at first apparent, externality to the mind and life of the recipient, and a sense of even painful obligation answered by a willing endorsement. All higher religion ever is thus personal and revelational; and all such personal and revelational religion was necessarily first manifested in unique conditions of space and time; and yet it claims, in as much as divine, to embrace all the endless conditions of other spaces and other times.

And this combination of a clearly contingent constituent and of an imperiously absolute claim is not less, but more visible, as we rise in the scale of religions. The figure of Our Lord is far more clear and definite and richly individual than are the figures of the Buddha or of Mahomet. And at the same time Christianity has ever claimed for Him far more than Buddhism or Mahometanism have claimed for their respective, somewhat shadowy founders. For the Buddha was conceived as but one amongst a whole series of similar revealers that were to come; and Mahomet was but the final prophet of the one God. But Christ is offered to us as the unique Saviour, as the unique revelation of God Himself. You are thus to take Him or leave Him. To distinguish and interpret, analyze or theorize Him, to accept Him provisionally or on conditions,—nothing of all this is distinctively religious. For, here as everywhere else, the distinctive religious act is, as such, an unconditional surrender. Nowhere in life can we both give and keep at the same time; and least of all here, at life’s deepest sources.

With this acceptance then, in exact proportion as it is religious, a double exclusiveness will apparently be set up. I have here found my true life:—I will turn away then from all else, and will either directly fight, or will at least starve and stunt, all other competing interests and activities—I will have here a (so to speak) spacial, a simultaneous exclusiveness. Religion will thus be conceived as a thing amongst other things, or as a force struggling amongst other forces; we have given our undivided heart to it,—hence the other things must go, as so many actual supernumeraries and possible supplanters. Science and Literature, Art and Politics must all be starved or cramped. Religion can safely reign, apparently, in a desert alone.

But again, Religion will be conceived, at the same time, as a thing fixed in itself, as given once for all, and to be defended against all change and interpretation, against all novelty and discrimination. We get thus a second, a (so to speak) temporal, successive exclusiveness. Religion will here be conceived as a thing to be kept literally and materially identical with itself and hence as requiring to be defended against any kind of modification. Conceive it as a paste, and all yeast must be kept out; or as wine, and fermentation must be carefully excluded. And indeed Religion here would thus become a stone, even though a stone fallen from heaven, like one of those meteorites worshipped in Pagan antiquity. And the two exclusivenesses, joined together, would give us a religion reduced to such a stone worshipped in a desert.

Now the point to notice here is, that all this seems not to be an abuse, but to spring from the very essence of religion,—from two of its specific inalienable characteristics—those of externality and authority. And although the extreme just described has never been completely realized in history, yet we can see various approximations to it in Mahometan Egypt, in Puritan Scotland, in Piagnone Florence, in Spain of the Inquisition. Religion would thus appear fated, by its very nature, to starve out all else, and its own self into the bargain.

What will be the answer to, the escape from, all this, provided by religion itself? The answer and escape will be provided by the intrinsic nature of the human soul, and of the religious appeal made to it. For if this appeal must be conceived by the soul, in exact proportion to the religiousness of both, as incomprehensible by it, as exceeding its present, and even its potential, powers of comprehension; if again this appeal must demand a sacrifice of various inclinations felt at the time to be wrong or inferior; if it must come home to the soul with a sense of constraining obligation, as an act of submission and of sacrifice which it ought and must make: yet it will as necessarily be conceived, at the same time, and again in exact proportion to the religiousness both of the soul and of the appeal, as the expression of Mind, of Spirit, and the impression of another mind and spirit; as the manifestation of an infinite Personality, responded and assented to by a personality, finite indeed yet capable of indefinite growth. And hence the fixity of the revelation and of the soul’s assent to it, will be as the fixity of a fountain-head, or as the fixity of river-banks; or again as the fixity of a plant’s growth, or of the gradual leavening of bread, or as that of the successive evolution and identity of the human body. The fixity, in a word, will be conceived and found to be a fixity of orientation, a definiteness of affinities and of assimilative capacity.

Only full trust, only unconditional surrender suffice for religion. But then religion excites and commands this in a person towards a Person; a surrender to be achieved not in some thing, but in some one,—a some one who is at all, only in as much as he is living, loving, growing; and to be performed, not towards some thing, but towards Some One, Whose right, indeed Whose very power to claim me, consists precisely in that He is Himself absolutely, infinitely and actually, what I am but derivatively, finitely and potentially.

Thus the very same act and reasons which completely bind me, do so only to true growth and to indefinite expansion. I shall, it is true, ever go back and cling to the definite spacial and temporal manifestations of this infinite Spirit’s personality, but I shall, by this same act, proclaim His eternal presentness and inexhaustible self-interpreting illumination. By the same act by which I believe in the revelation of the workshop of Nazareth, of the Lake of Galilee, of Gethsemane and Calvary, I believe that this revelation is inexhaustible, and that its gradual analysis and theory, and above all its successive practical application, experimentation, acceptance or rejection, and unfolding, confer and call forth poignant dramatic freshness and inexhaustible uniqueness upon and within every human life, unto the end of time.

All this takes place through the present, the hic et nunc, co-operation of the living God and the living soul. And this ever-to-be reconquered, ever-costing and chequered, ever-“deepenable” interpretation, is as truly fresh as if it were a fresh revelation. For all that comes from the living God, and is worked out by living souls, is ever living and enlivening: there is no such thing as mere repetition, or differentiation by mere number, place, and time, in this Kingdom of Life, either as to God’s action or the soul’s. Infinite Spirit Himself, He creates an indefinite number of, at first largely but potential, persons, no one of which is identical with any other, and provokes and supports an indefinite number of ever different successive acts on the part of each and all of them, that so, through the sum-total of such sources and streams of difference, the nearest creaturely approach may be achieved to the ocean of His own infinite richness.