Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 83

One of the various writers who have successively, and in great part differently, moralized upon the chief events of her life, dwells on this great moment as achieving in her soul all the usually lengthy and successive effects of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive progression, and as, in that one instant, bringing her soul to that highest state of transformation, in which the will is wholly united to God.[50] But having regard to the fact, patent on every page of her biography and “Works,” that, for the remaining thirty-seven years of her life, her interior history represents one continuous widening and deepening and moving onwards of efforts, trials and pains, of achievements and ideals—a fact actually schematized by another writer (who, as I shall show, is the penultimate Redactor of the Life) not two pages lower down—it is clear that we must be careful to conceive this perfection as relative to her previous state or even to the final goodness of many saintly souls. We must, in a word, try to realize vividly, and constantly to recall, certain complex truths, without which the very greatness of the experience here considered will but help to check or deflect our apprehension of the spiritual life.

For one thing, the deeper and the more unique the soul’s experience, and the richer such experience is, the more entirely does all that the soul is, and ever was, wake up and fuse itself in one indivisible act, in which much of the old is newly seen to be dross and is so far forth excluded; and in which the old that is retained reappears in a fresh context, a context which itself affects and is itself affected by all the other old and new ideas and feelings. It thus clearly bears the stamp upon it of the profound difference between Time, conceived as a succession of moments of identical quantity and quality, each in juxtaposition and exterior to the other, mathematical time, such as our clocks register on the dials,—a conception really derived from space-perception and exterior, measurable things—and Duration, with its variously rapid succession of heterogeneous qualities, each affecting and colouring, each affected and coloured by, all the others, and all producing together a living harmony and organic unity, all which constitutes the essentially unpicturable experience of the living person. Such a moment is thus incapable of adequate analysis, in exact proportion as it is fully expressive of the depths of the personality and of its experience: for each element here, whilst, in its living context, an energy and a quality which at each moment modifies and is modified by all the other elements, becomes, in an intellectual analysis, when each is separated from the others, a mere dead thing and a quantity.

And secondly, such an experience is throughout as truly a work of pure grace, a gift, as it is a work of pure energy, an act. And here again, the grace and the energy, the gift and the act are not juxtaposed, but throughout they stimulate and interpenetrate each other, with the most entirely unanalyzable, unpicturable completeness. It is indeed in exact proportion to the fulness of this interstimulation and penetration, to the organic oneness of the act, that such an act is this one particular soul’s very own act and yet the living God’s own fullest gift. Grace does not lie without, but within; it does not check or limit, but constitutes the will’s autonomy.

And thirdly, it is an experience which leaves the soul different forever from what it was before; which purifies her perfectly, in and for that moment, from all her stains of actual sin committed up to that moment; and which materially strengthens her inclinations towards good and weakens her tendencies towards evil. But the soul herself lives on; and she lives but in and through successive acts of all kinds. Hence it is not an act,—there is none such, here below at least,—which takes or can take the place of fresh acts to be produced again and again throughout her life, The soul has not, in any sense or any degree, been approximated to that utterly paradoxical thing, a saintly automaton. She is not raised above the limitations and imperfections, the obscurities and conflicts, the failings and sins of humanity. She could fall away and commit grave sin; she actually does commit minor sins of frailty and surprise. Her interior efforts and experiences are now but on a larger, deeper scale, and on a higher plane, and take place from a new vantage-ground, a position which has, however, itself to be continually actively defended and reinforced. Temptation, trial, sorrow, pain; hope, fear, self-hatred, love and joy, with ever-renewed and increased aspiration and effort, all variously change and deepen their combinations and qualities, outlook and ideals. But they do not for one moment cease. All things but grow in depth and significance, in variety within unity, in interiority and interpenetration.

And finally, although conversions of the apparent suddenness and profound depth and perseverance of the one here studied, are rightly taken to be very special and rare graces of God, yet it would be but misinterpreting and depreciating their true significance to make their suddenness the direct proof and measure of their own supernaturalness or the standard by which to appraise the altitude of the goodness of other lives. God is as truly the source of gradual purification as of sudden conversion, and as truly the strength which guards and moves us straight on, as that which regains and calls us back. Hence such acts as Catherine’s should not be entirely separated off from those acts of love, contrition and self-dedication which occur, as so many free graces of God in and with the free acts of man, more or less frequently in the secret lives of human beings throughout the world.