for the third, for action and experimental, affective spirituality.
And yet none of these Orders but has had its individuals, and even whole secondary periods, schools, and traditions, markedly typical of some current other than that specially characteristic of the Order as a whole. There are the great Critics and Historians of the Jesuit Order: the Spanish Maldonatus, the New Testament Scholar, admirable for his time, and helpful and unexhausted still; the French Denys Petau, the great historian of Christian Doctrine and of its development; the Flemish Bollandists, with their unbroken tradition of thorough critical method and incorruptible accuracy and impartiality. There are the great Jesuit Mystics: the Spanish Venerable Balthazar Alvarez, declared by St. Teresa to be the holiest mystical soul she had ever known; and the Frenchmen, Louis Lallemant and Jean Joseph Surin. There are those most attractive figures, combining the Scholar and the Mystic: Blessed Edmund Campion, the Oxford Scholar and Elizabethan Martyr; and Jean Nicolas Grou, the French translator of Plato, who died in exile in England in 1800. The Dominicans have, from the first, been really representative of external authority as well of the speculative rational bent; and the mystical side has never been wanting to them, so amongst the early German Dominicans, Tauler and Suso, and many a Dominican female Saint. The Benedictines from the first produced great rulers; such striking types of external authority as the Pope-Saints, Gregory the Great and Gregory VII (Hildebrand), and the great Benedictine Abbots and Bishops throughout the Middle Ages are rightly felt to represent one whole side of this great Order. And again such great mystical figures as St. Hildegard of Bingen and the two Saints Gertrude are fully at home in that hospitable Family. And the Franciscans have, in the Conventuals, developed representatives of the external authority type; and in such great philosopher-theologians as Duns Scotus and Occam, a combination which has more of the intellectual, both speculative and critical, than of the simply ascetical or even mystical type.
And if we look for individual contrasts, we can often find them in close temporal and local juxtaposition, as in France, in the time of Louis XIV, in the persons of Bossuet, Richard Simon, and Fénelon, so strikingly typical of the special strengths and limitations of the institutional, rational, experimental types respectively. And yet the most largely varied influence will necessarily proceed from characters which combine not only two of the types, as in our times Frederick Faber combined the external and experimental; but which hold them all three, as with John Henry Newman in England or Antonio Rosmini in Italy.
V. Causes operative in all Religion towards Minimizing or Suppressing one or other Element, or towards denying the need of any Multiplicity.
Let us end this chapter with some consideration of the causes and reasons that are ever tending to produce and to excuse the quiet elimination or forcible suppression of one or other of the elements that constitute the full organism of religion, and even to minimize or to deny altogether the necessity of any such multiplicity.
1. The religious temper longs for simplification.
To take the last point first. How obvious and irresistible seems always, to the specifically religious temper, the appeal to boundless simplification. “Can there be anything more sublimely, utterly simple than religion?” we all say and feel. In these regions, if anywhere, we long and thirst to see and feel all things in one, to become ourselves one, to find the One Thing necessary, the One God, and to be one with Him for ever. Where is there room here, we feel even angrily, for all these distinctions, all this balancing of divers faculties and parts? Is not all this but so much Aestheticism, some kind of subtle Naturalism, a presumptuous attempting to build up bit by bit in practice, and to analyze part from part in theory, what can only come straight from God Himself, and, coming from Him the One, cannot but bear the impress of His own indistinguishable Unity? And can there be anything more unforcedly, unanalyzably simple than all actual religion,—and this in exact proportion to its greatness? Look at St. Francis of Assisi, or St. John Baptist; look above all at the Christ, supremely, uniquely great, just because of His sublime simplicity! Look at, feel, the presence and character of those countless souls that bear, unknown even to themselves, some portion of this His impress within themselves, forming thus a kind of indefinitely rich extension of His reign, of the kingdom of His childlikeness. Away then with everything that at all threatens to break up a corresponding simplicity in ourselves! Poverty of spirit, emptiness of heart, a constant turning away from all distraction, from all multiplicity both of thought and of feeling, of action and of being; this, surely, is the one and only necessity for the soul, at least in proportion to the height of her spiritual call.
2. Yet every truly living Unity is constituted in Multiplicity.
Now in all this there is a most subtle mixture of truth and of error. It is profoundly true that all that is at all, still more all personality, and hence above all God, the Spirit of spirits is, just in that proportion, profoundly mysteriously One, with a Unity which all our best thinking can only distantly and analogously represent. And all religion will ever, in proportion as it is vigorous and pure, thirst after an ever-increasing Unification, will long to be one and to give itself to the One,—to follow naked the naked Jesus. Yet all the history of human thought and all the actual experience of each one of us prove that this Unity can be apprehended and developed, by and within our poor human selves, only in proportion as we carefully persist in stopping at the point where it can most thoroughly organize and harmonize the largest possible multiplicity of various facts and forces.
No doubt the living soul is not a whole made up of separate parts; still less is God made up of parts. Yet we cannot apprehend this Unity of God except in multiplicity of some sort; nor can we ourselves become rightly one, except through being in a true sense many, and very many, as well. Indeed the Christian Faith insists that there is something most real actually corresponding to this our conception of multiplicity even and especially in God Himself. For it as emphatically bids us think of Him as in one sense a Trinity as in another a Unity. And it is one of the oldest and most universal of Christian approaches to this mystery, to conceive it under the analogy of the three powers of the soul. God the Father and Creator is conceived as corresponding to the sense-perception and Imagination, to Memory-power; God the Son and Redeemer, as the Logos, to our reason; and God the Holy Spirit, as corresponding to the effective-volitional force within us; and then we are bidden to remember that, as in ourselves these three powers are all united in One personality, so in God the three Persons are united in One substance and nature. Even the supremely and ineffably simple Godhead is not, then, a mere, undifferentiated One.
And if we take the case of Our Lord, even when He is apprehended in the most abstract of orthodox ways: we get either the duality of natures, God and Man; or a trinity of offices, the Kingly, the Prophetic, and the Priestly,—these latter again corresponding roughly to the External, the Intellectual, and the Mystical element of the human soul. And even if we restrict ourselves to His Humanity, and as pictured in any one Gospel, nay in the earliest, simplest, and shortest, St. Mark, we shall still come continually upon a rich multiplicity, variety, and play of different exterior and interior apprehensions and activities, emotions and sufferings, all profoundly permeated by one great end and aim, yet each differing from the other, and contributing a different share to the one great result. The astonishment at the disciples’ slowness of comprehension, the flash of anger at Peter, the sad reproachfulness towards Judas, the love of the children, the sympathy with women, the pity towards the fallen, the indignation against the Pharisees, the rejoicing in the Father’s revelation, the agony in the Garden, the desolation on the Cross, are all different emotions. The perception of the beauty of the flowers of the field, of the habits of plants and of birds, of the varieties of the day’s early and late cloud and sunshine, of the effects of storm and rain; and again of the psychology of various classes of character, age, temperament, and avocation; and indeed of so much more, are all different observations. The lonely recollection in the desert, the nights spent in prayer upon the mountains, the preaching from boats and on the lake-side, the long foot-journeyings, the many flights, the reading and expounding in the Synagogues, the curing the sick and restoring them to their right mind, the driving the sellers from the Temple-court, and so much else, are all different activities.
And if we take what is or should be