Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 67

The disadvantage arising from such a method of procedure is obvious: no one life, even were it the richest and most completely knowable, can exhaust, can indeed do more than simply suggest, the true questions, let alone the adequate answers. But such a biographical study can hope to arouse attention and interest in the living facts of religion, in a manner in which no simple theory or generalization can do; and it can stand out, in the midst of any such attempt at explanation, as an emphatic reminder, to both writer and reader, of the inexhaustible richness and mystery, of the awe-inspiring and yet stimulating surplusage which is ever furnished by reality over and above all our best endeavours at commensurate presentation or analysis.

And quite special disadvantages attach to the study of this particular Saint. Her character, for one thing, is distinctly wanting in humour, in that shrewd mother-wit which is so marked a feature in some of the great Spanish Mystics, in St. Teresa especially, but which is not quite absent even in the less varied and very austere St. John of the Cross. There is, on the contrary, a certain monotony, a somewhat wearying vehemence, about our Genoese. Her experience, again, is without the dramatic vicissitudes of the reform of an Order or the foundation of Monasteries, as with St. Teresa; or of contact and even conflict with the temporal and spiritual officiality of her time, as with St. Catherine of Siena. Nor is her life lit up by the beautiful warmth of happy, requited domestic affection, nor is it varied and extended by the rich possession of children of her own. And again her life is obscured and complicated, at least for our comprehension of it, by a nervous ill-health which it is impossible for us to care about, in itself. And, finally, special difficulties attach to the understanding of her. Unlike St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and many other Saints, she did not herself write one line of her so-called “Writings”; and yet it is these, mostly very abstruse and at times all but insuperably difficult, “Writings,” records which did not attain their present form and bulk till a good forty years after her death, that contain the most original part of her legacy to the Church.