Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 90

Now these periods of interior, experimental, mystical vicissitude and growth have also their corresponding variations of religious analysis and speculation, and of external actions and events; and these variations are not only the concomitants and expressions of the inner growth, but are also, in part, the subject-matter and occasion for the next stage of mystical experience. And since Catherine’s special characteristic consists precisely in the richness and variety of her life at any one moment, and in the successive, ever-accelerated enrichment which it achieves almost up to the end, any obliteration of this successive growth, or any one-sided attention to any one aspect of her life during any one of its chief periods, will readily take all life-likeness out of her portrait.

Yet to achieve anything like this comprehension is most difficult, if only because it has to be attempted with the aid of materials which, where their registration is contemporary with the events chronicled, belong, all but the legal documents, to the last fifteen years of her life; and because, even within this last period, they are rarely furnished with any reference to their exact place within that period. There is throughout the book a most natural and instructive, indeed in its way most legitimate and even necessary, insistence upon the apparently complete independence and aloofness, the transcendence of her inner life. And this insistence goes so far that a self-sufficing Eternity, a completely unchanging Here and Now, floating outside and above even the necessary and normal affections, actions, and relations of human life and fellowship, seems, especially from after her conversion till up to the beginning of her physical incapacitation,[56] to have taken the place of the characteristically human struggle in and through time and space, with and through our fellow-creatures. As in Leibniz we get a divinely pre-established harmony between the dispositions and the acts of the body and those of the soul, which appear indeed as though indestructibly interrelated, but which, in reality, operate throughout without one instant’s direct interaction: so here, the external is not indeed represented as neglected by her, nor as anything but in complete harmony with her inner life, and as indeed inspired by God, yet her own mind and soul are but reluctantly permitted to appear as expressing themselves in it, as requiring and affected by it. She appears as having got outside of, and away from, all the visible and purely human, rather than deeper into and behind it; to have achieved the ignoring of it rather than its conversion and transfiguration and its appointment to its own intrinsic place and function in the full economy of the soul’s new life.

And yet all this is, even in the minds of the authors, but one aspect of this complex life, and one which, taken alone, would at once do injustice to its other aspect, the grand depth and range of its immanental quality. And even in as much as the transcendental aspect is really attributable to the predominant trend of Catherine’s own character and teaching, it in no way invalidates the fact of the actual astonishing many-sidedness and balance of her life, especially before her last few years, but will be found to proceed essentially from her rare mode of achieving this many-sidedness and balance, or, more strictly still, from her own feeling as to this mode, and her analysis and theory of it. We have no direct concern with this her reflection at present: what she actually did and directly was, is all we would wish to try and sketch just now.