The Analysis of Mind : Part 4

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

(Page 6 of 15)

When therefore qualities which were once useful on their own level are outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's spiritualization, then - whatever they may be - they belong to the body of death, not to the body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump - none other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing." Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul. Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature - the old Adam, in fact - leaps up into consciousness and glories in its strength.

He obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena. St. Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up. Games and sport of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved: failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this fact: for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea, would in London provoke the immediate attention of the police.

Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back to past levels of conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which to look at the idea of Salvation? We know that all religions of the spirit have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation: on the conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued, if he is to achieve a satisfactory life. What is it, then, from which he must be saved?

I think that the answer must be, from conflict: the conflict between the pull-back of his racial origin and the pull-forward of his spiritual destiny, the antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerging soul, each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality. We may as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts and resistances: that the trite verse about "fightings and fears within, without" does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive mind with its ineffective struggles, its inveterate egotism, its inconsistent impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason need some reinforcement, some helping power, if they are to conquer and control his archaic impulsive life. And this salvation, this extrication from the wrongful and atavistic claims of primitive impulse in its many strange forms, is a prime business of religion; sometimes achieved in the sudden convulsion we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower process of education.

The wrong way to do it is seen in the methods of the Puritan and the extreme ascetic, where all animal impulse is regarded as "sin" and repressed: a proceeding which involves the risk of grave physical and mental disorder, and produces even at the best a bloodless pietism. The right way to do it was described once for all by Jacob Boehme, when he said that it was the business of a spiritual man to "harness his fiery energies to the service of the light - " that is to say, change the direction of our passionate cravings for satisfaction, harmonize and devote them to spiritual ends. This is true regeneration: this is the salvation offered to man, the healing of his psychic conflict by the unification of his instinctive and his ideal life. The voice which St. Mechthild heard, saying "Come and be reconciled," expresses the deepest need of civilized but unspiritualized humanity.

This need for the conversion or remaking of the instinctive life, rather than the achievement of mere beliefs, has always been appreciated by real spiritual teachers; who are usually some generations in advance of the psychologists. Here they agree in finding the "root of evil," the heart of the "old man" and best promise of the "new." Here is the raw material both of vice and of virtue - namely, a mass of desires and cravings which are in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but natural and self-regarding. "In will, imagination and desire," says William Law, "consists the life or fiery driving of every intelligent creature." The Divine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi "Set love in order, thou that lovest Me!" declared the one law of mental growth. To use for a moment the language of mystical theology, conversion, or repentance, the first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and which is the essence of character building. It is from this hard, conscious and deliberate work of adapting our psychic energy to new and higher correspondences, this costly moral effort and true self-conquest, that the spiritual life in man draws its earnestness, reality and worth.

"Oh, Academicus," says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would endorse, "forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives within us. For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have in truth none at all. For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed, and amended, as a wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again as occasion shall offer." Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to save his fellow-men. This transformation or sublimation is not the work of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been directed into a fresh channel of use.

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