The Characters of Spiritual Life : Part 3

The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today
by Evelyn Underhill

(Page 3 of 15)

Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: "If," he says, "this Absolute Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our life's experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it associations too human and too limited adequately to express this profound God-consciousness."

Such a personal God-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn. We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their philosophy: for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so to speak its own guarantees. Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an "intellectual fountain," hears the Divine Voice crying:

"I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me."

Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say:

"O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!"

Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Divine Wisdom as the Father and ever-present Companion of the soul, and Kabir, for whom God is the Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim:

"From the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and thee: and how shall such love be extinguished?"

Christianity, through its concepts of the Divine Fatherhood and of the Eternal Christ, has given to this sense of personal communion its fullest and most beautiful expression:

"Amore, chi t'ama non sta ozioso,
tanto li par dolce de te gustare,
ma tutta ora vive desideroso
como te possa stretto piú amare;
ché tanto sta per te lo cor gioioso,
chi nol sentisse, nol porría parlare
quanto é dolce a gustare lo tuo sapore."

On the immense question of what it is that lies behind this sense of direct intercourse, this passionate friendship with the Invisible, I cannot enter. But it has been one of the strongest and most fruitful influences in religious history, and gives in particular its special colour to the most perfect developments of Christian mysticism.

Last - and here is the aspect of religious experience which is specially to concern us - Spirit is felt as an inflowing power, a veritable accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group, impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living-out of its existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, and lifting it to fresh levels of life. This sense of enhanced life is a mark of all religions of the Spirit. "He giveth power to the faint," says the Second Isaiah, "and to them that hath no might he increaseth strength ... they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." "I live - yet not I," "I can do all things," says St. Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this Divine strength invading and controlling him: and assures his neophytes that they too have received "the Spirit of power." "My life," says St. Augustine, "shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee." "Having found God," says a modern Indian saint, "the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained fresh strength." All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and endurance.

So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us. These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving objectives to intellect feeling and will. They must all be taken into account in any attempt to estimate the full character of the spiritual life, and this life can hardly achieve perfection unless all three be present in some measure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Christine says, that when the voice of God called her it was at one and the same time a Light, a Drawing, and a Power, and her Indian contemporary the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that "Seekers after God must realize Brahma in these three places. They must see Him within, see Him without, and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself." And it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them, an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power, of beauty which are contained in them.

New York, E.P. Dutton & Company
Copyright, 1922 BY E.P. Dutton & Company