Linda Hogan and Barbara FitzGerald edit this collection of essays to celebrate the contribution of Enda McDonagh to the field of theological ethics.
236 pp, Columba Press, 2003. To purchase this book online, go to www.columba.ie.
CONTENTS
Introduction (Linda Hogan)
1. The light of heaven (Seamus Heaney)
2. Mysticism and modernism (Gabriel Daly OSA)
3. The social role of the theologian (James P. Mackey)
4. Conversation in context (Nicholas Lash)
5. Jesus, prayer and politics (Sean Freyne)
6. Sustaining connection (Geraldine Smyth OP)
7. The church, society and family in Ireland (Garret FitzGeral)
8. Theology, war and pacifism (Patrick Hannon)
9. Reflection on the ‘Appeal to abolish war’ (Stanley Hauerwas)
10. Considering some constituents of conflict resolution (Terence McCaughey)
11. Church politics and HIV prevention (Jon D. Fuller SJ and James F. Keenan SJ)
12. Linking ethical and globalisation (Mary Robinson)
13. It’s great to be alive (Kevin T. Kelly)
14. An appreciation (Imogen Stuart)
15. Enda McDonagh’s moral theology (Charles E. Curran)
Select Bibliography
The contributors
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Review |
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CHAPTER 1: Mysticism and modernism
The Belgian symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck claimed that a work of art or literature becomes obsolescent only in proportion to its anti-mysticism. It is the sort of remark that teases the mind. Maeterlinck is using the word ‘mysticism’ in an aesthetic context, which is a useful reminder of its manifold ambiguities. That mysticism can be given an aesthetic reference may irritate those for whom it represents the highest reaches of an austere spiritual life which is remote from the lives of ordinary people. Yet the fact that many of the mystics were poets raises a fascinating question about the connection between mysticism and art.
Of course there are dangers in giving mysticism an aesthetic reference. For one thing, it can make art critics intellectually lazy when they are trying to handle religion in a secularised age. Music critics, for example, often describe César Franck and Anton Bruckner as mystical composers. Although I think the description is perfectly defensible, I cannot help thinking that it is often employed simply because Bruckner and Franck were distinguished organists. The fact that the instrument one plays happens to be normally located half-way up a cathedral wall is not really a good enough reason for calling one a mystic.
Secular writers sometimes use the term ‘mysticism’ as a synonym for ‘religion’. It sounds more sophisticated. Theologians have good reason to protest against such slack usage, not simply because of its imprecision, but for the more important reason that much religion is anti-mystical, not merely in Maeterlinck’s sense but also in a stricter theological sense.
There is no single agreed definition of mysticism; but then there is no single agreed definition of religion either. Just as religion can be regarded as thoroughly undesirable by theologians like Karl Barth, there are also respectable bona fide reasons for distrusting and disliking the term mysticism. The not uncommon Protestant suspicion of mysticism may see it as a form of Greek or Gnostic religion which seeks to avoid the scandalous particularity of Christian faith. Everything of course turns on what one means by mysticism.
My principal concern here is to argue that mysticism needs to be treated dialectically, by which I mean that it has to be interpreted reciprocally in relation to other features of faith and life. I shall draw heavily on the work of Friedrich von Hügel, who took the view that mysticism is one, but only one, very important element in Christian life. Von Hügel had an inclusive view of mysticism and believed that it has a role to play in every Christian life.
The term ‘mysticism’ had its origin in early seventeenth century France. (1) There were of course many mystics in the preceding centuries, but their peculiar status in the Christian church was not dwelt upon nor was it analysed under the precise term ‘mysticism’. Seventeenth century France was a theatre of religious debate: Jansenism, Gallicanism and Quietism were significant from a literary and political as well as religious standpoint. Quietism was a deliberate turn to mysticism away from the rigidities of some counter-reformation theology and spirituality.
Protestant pietism was establishing itself at much the same time and for much the same reason as Quietism. Schleiermacher’s theology stems in part from pietism. The condemnation of Quietism ensured that there would be no Catholic Schleiermacher. The Modernists were to try to fill this gap at the turn of the nineteenth century. Quietism was a revolt against the self-conscious introspective methods of prayer which graded spiritual progress in terms of perfection and which placed mysticism in the refined upper reaches of union with God. This in effect removed mysticism from normal church life. You were not supposed to have spiritual aspirations above your station. Anti-quietism also tended to regard prayer not as an end in itself but as ‘an instrument for acquiring the virtues’. (2)
Church authority has never really known how to handle mystics, who give the appearance of cutting out too many of the middle-men by going straight to the top, as it were, and who have traditionally been a source of anxiety to those responsible for the maintenance of orthodoxy and church order. Quietism had its origins in the teaching of the seventeenth century Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos. It aimed at a totally selfless love of God, such that one was not concerned with one’s own salvation. It rejected prayer of petition and structured meditation. In its extreme form Quietism seemed to exclude the need for moral effort, since total submission to the will of God was deemed to achieve everything necessary for salvation.
Quietism spread from Spain to France, where it had a following among the devout especially at court and where it was sponsored by the formidable and eccentric Madame Guyon. She defended herself against the attack made on her autobiography by Bossuet with the remark: ‘Since what I have written has not gone through my head, it should not be judged by the head.’ (Knox, Enthusiasm, 332). By this alarming remark she simply meant that discursive thinking was an activity which obstructed the action of God. She won the support of François de la Mothe Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai. By the same token she incurred the enmity of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux. Bossuet saw mysticism as ‘essentially a lamentable extravagance, a kind of spiritual failing tempting the odder saints’. (3) Fénelon, on the other hand, was a mystic and a friend of mystics (in seventeenth century France mystics were practically unionised). He and Bossuet engaged in a literary war which enriched French literature without achieving much else. The war was ostensibly over Quietism but actually over the entire mystical tradition in the church. Bossuet, the practised politician, got Rome to censure Fénelon. The censure, when it came in 1699, was mild enough in personal terms, but its effect on the church’s mystical tradition was devastating. Like most ecclesiastical condemnations it resembled an act of carpet-bombing which obliterates an entire neighbourhood in order to remove one suspect agent hiding in an attic.
The condemnation of Quietism and of Fénelon produced a widespread suspicion of mysticism and of the prayer of simple regard. This ‘rout of the mystics’, as Henri Bremond, the great friend of the Modernists, called it, created a spiritual vacuum which was eventually filled by apparitions and all sorts of external and sentimental devotions, often of highly questionable theological content and usually of appalling aesthetic taste in the repository art to which it gave rise. Bremond emphasised the connection between mystical interiority and a cultivated imagination. With the other modernists he protested against the divorce between reason and feeling which had resulted from the condemnation of Quietism. The destruction of true interiority favoured a desiccated scholastic theology on the one side and a sentimental and often superstitious devotionalism on the other. The Modernists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often used the term ‘mysticism’ as a serviceable antonym for scholasticism, with what they saw as its aridities and its rejection of experience as a significant religious phenomenon.
Henri Bremond and Alexander Dru have argued that the condemnation of Quietism and of Fénelon at the end of the seventeenth century resulted in the destruction of the mystical element in the Roman Catholic Church. ‘Extrinsicism’ (Maurice BlondeI’s word for reliance on externals such as miracles and preoccupation with authority), was having a twofold effect: It was making it impossible for the church to face the intellectual challenges of modernity, and it was destroying the interior heritage of the church’s true spiritual tradition. Much of what passed for Catholic tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was in reality a recent creation brought about by an alliance between Roman authority and mandatory scholasticism, private devotion, puritanical morality, radical clericalism and an anti-mysticism which went back to the condemnation of Quietism and which owed more to Jansenism than to an authentic long-standing tradition. What Bremond called the ‘rout of the mystics’ was closely linked to what Paul Claudel called ‘the tragedy of a starved imagination’. (4) As Claudel acutely observed, the crisis was not primarily one of intellect. Quite the contrary in fact. Intellect played a major role in neo-scholasticism, but its function was speculative and detached from experience. Modernism was in part a reaction against this situation.
The first challenge to externalism and the anti-mystical spirit came in 1893 with Maurice Blondel’s L’Action, in which he laid down the principles of his ‘method of immanence’ and which undertook to examine the entire dynamic of human willing. It posed the question: Has life a meaning or not? This question became the core of Blondel’ s transcendental method.
Three years later Blondel wrote a long essay on apologetics which attacked the ‘extrinsicism’ of the neo-scholastic approach to Christianity. Extrinsicism in effect meant the total rejection of inner experience as a constitutive factor of Christian thought. The condemnation of modernism between 1907 and 1910 led to the expulsion of the very word ‘experience’ from the Roman Catholic theological vocabulary. Experience was deemed to be dangerously subjective: dogma was the only guarantee of orthodox truth. Blondel was never explicitly condemned, but because he was not a neo-thomist he found himself on the intellectual periphery of church life. He had, however, opened up a vein which was shortly to be mined by Friedrich von Hügel, who was already well disposed to appreciate its mystical possibilities.
Baron Friedrich von Hügel was born in Italy of an Austrian Catholic diplomat father and a Scottish Presbyterian mother from a military family. He had a cosmopolitan upbringing. His education was private and he was self-taught in the subjects in which he became an acknowledged expert. He was a keen student of science, philosophy, biblical criticism, history, and theology. (Charles Gore, bishop of Oxford, called von Hügel ‘the most learned man living’.) He spoke and wrote the major languages of Europe – in an equally dense and obscure way, it must be said – and he corresponded with most of the major religious scholars, Protestant and Catholic, of his time. He practised a totally unself-conscious theological ecumenism that was unusual for the time.
He was drawn into the Modernist movement as much by temperament as by circumstances. In fact he became its communications centre. He brought new books to people’s attention. He was known to his friends with affection and sometimes humour simply as ‘the Baron’. He had a marvellous capacity for combining critical, even radical, scholarship with a seemingly simple faith; but he failed to realise that others did not always have a similar capacity. He nearly destroyed his daughter Gertrude’s faith by discussing radical biblical and historical criticism with her, not realising the damaging effect he was having on her faith. Fortunately his new friend, Father George Tyrrell SJ, was able to play a major part in rescuing Gertrude from what nearly became a nervous breakdown. Tyrrell wrote to the Baron:
Things that your formed mind can easily swallow, without any prejudice to simple faith, may really cause much uneasiness in a mind less prepared. We must give minds time to grow and feed them suitably to their age. Had I known twenty years ago things that I know now I could not have borne with them. If you want your daughter’s company you must shorten your steps and walk slowly, else she will lose her breath in her desire to keep up with you. (5)
Tyrrell knew from painful personal experience the effect that critical scholarship can have on a faith which comes upon it unprepared. Von Hügel kept him plied with all the latest works of German theological and biblical scholarship. Tyrrell has left us a moving description of the effect on him of some of the books that von Hügel was plying him with. In a letter to Bremond he describes saying midnight Mass for a community of nuns ‘for whom it was all so real’, while he found himself ‘loathing the thin and windy manna of criticism and truth’. (6) Tyrrell was unable and unwilling to separate his theology from his prayer. He could see the humorous side of von Hügel’s ability to combine his radical studies with a remarkably uncomplicated faith. ‘The Baron has just gone,’ Tyrrell wrote to his friend Canon Lilley, ‘Wonderful man! Nothing is true; but the sum total of nothings is sublime!’ (7) Von Hügel, on the other hand, had a technique in prayer which enabled him to escape from the vexations of critical scholarship and to take refuge in the stillness of contemplation.
Is it not this, that minds belong, roughly speaking, to two classes which may be called the mystical and positive, and the scholastical and theoretical? The first of these would see all truth as a centre of intense light losing itself gradually in utter darkness; this centre would gradually extend, but the borders would ever remain fringes. They could never become clear-cut lines. Such a mind, when weary of border-work, would sink back upon its centre, its home of peace and light, and thence it would gain fresh conviction and courage to again face the twilight and the dark. Force it to commit itself absolutely to any border distinction, or force it to shift its home or to restrain its roamings, and you have done your best to endanger its faith and to ruin its happiness. (8)
Not everyone would agree with, or be able to practise, this technique, yet it goes far towards combining what von Hügel described as the intellectual and mystical elements of religion. It suggests a practical application of negative or apophatic theology. No doubt Bossuet would have accused the Baron of Quietism, but it gives us a valuable clue to von Hügel’s approach to mysticism. He gave spiritual guidance to several people, including his niece, Gwendolen, to whom he wrote, ‘Religion is dim – in the religious temper there should be a great simplicity, and a certain contentment in dimness. It is a great gift of God to have this temper.’ (9) One might call this ‘prayer in soft focus’. It has aesthetic as well as theological implications. One thinks, for example, of the poet John Keats’ idea of ‘negative capability’, a state of consciousness where one ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.
This notion of ‘dimness’, or ‘vividness’, or ‘richness’ is central in von Hügel’s approach to mysticism. It is in the still centre of one’s being that one experiences the sheer objective givenness of God. This approach reflects Pascal’s God of Abraham, Isaac and Jesus Christ as contrasted with the God of the scholars. It can look like fideism or anti-intellectualism until one recalls that for von Hügel it is only one element in an overall Christian faith and life and it needs to be checked against two other elements which co-exist with it.
Von Hügel is indebted to two thinkers for the basis of the distinction he draws between the mystical and the intellectual in Christian experience. To the philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, he owed the distinction between ‘dim experience’ and ‘reflex knowledge’. (10) To John Henry Newman he owed the description of Christianity as initially an impression made on the imagination, which, when studied and discussed, yields doctrine. He also owed to Newman the famous distinction made in The Grammar of Assent between the real and the notional. The real is what von Hügel would call the mystical; and the notional he would call the intellectual. For neither Newman nor von Hügel is it ever a matter of choosing between the notional and the real, or between the mystical and the intellectual: both are necessary.
Many commentators believe that the presentation of mysticism as one element in Christian life is von Hügel’s lasting contribution to the study of mysticism. It is contained mainly in his 1908 book, The Mystical Element of Religion: as Studied in St Catherine of Genoa and her Friends. (11) Here and elsewhere in his writings von Hügel makes very clear his rejection of ‘exclusive mysticism’, namely, the idea of mysticism as belonging exclusively to the upper reaches of the human ascent to God. There is, he says, no specifically distinct, purely mystical mode of apprehending reality. The mystic needs the concreteness of everyday life with its contingency and finitude. It is precisely our human sense of contingency and finitude (he calls it ‘the sting of contingency’) which triggers off mystical awareness. The mystical is, or ought to be, a dimension in the life of every religious person. Von Hügel once took Tyrrell to task for speaking of time as a preface or prelude to eternity. Eternity for von Hügel is present in time: ‘… eternity can and must begin here, if it is to continue, consummated, hereafter’. (Petre, Von Hügel and Tyrrell, 63.) For him religion is mystical by definition and must be complemented by other elements. J.J. Kelly puts it succinctly: for von Hügel ‘Mysticism … is only true when it is not everything in anyone but something in everyone.’ (l2) Von Hügel’s mysticism is incarnational. Contemplation is not an escape from the scandalous particularity of Christian faith. He is therefore strong in his opposition to any kind of gnostic or neo-platonist elitism.
He sets the scene of the book in an opening chapter on the three chief historical forces of Western civilisation: Hellenism, Christianity and science. All three have contributed something necessary to human life. Von Hügel sees Greek philosophy and art as abstract, unified, and harmonious. Christianity is moral and religious and far more concrete than Hellenism. It is anchored in a person and it avoids the two extremes of pessimism and optimism that one finds in Hellenism.
Finally science appears as the scourge of both Hellenism and Christianity. ‘They evidently cannot ignore it; it apparently can ignore them.’ (von Hügel, Mystical Element, I, 39) Science challenges metaphysics and religion with evidence and fact. It appears to take over and blot out metaphysics and religion. In mathematics it is more abstract than Hellenism and in its rigorous empiricism it is more concrete than Christianity.
Science introduces ‘the great concept of Law, of an iron Necessity running through and expressing itself in all things, one great Determinism …’ (ibid, 40). We have to remember that von Hügel’s paradigm of science was Newtonian and positivist. This does not invalidate his contention that science, if properly attended to, can have a purifying influence on religion. Today he might agree that it also has a stimulating and beneficial effect on, for example, the theology of creation. His recognition of the autonomy of both science and religion is of continuing validity and importance, though he does not work out a theology of creation and nature. Religion, he remarks, has no place, and should seek no place, in this world of science. On the contrary it should welcome science as a purifying element in religious life, an element which works against any gnostic temptation to escape from concrete reality into an ever more immaterial world. Von Hügel’s conclusion about all three forces is that they need each other. Philosophy, religion and science are all necessary to a rounded and complete human existence.
All this prepares the way for his famous triad, namely, the three elements of religion: the institutional, the intellectual and the mystical. He opens his argument with a piece of fairly homespun educational psychology which distinguishes three stages in religious development: the child, the youth, and the adult.
The child lives in a world which it perceives as being simply there. The child accepts what it finds and what it is taught as simply true. At this stage, says von Hügel, ‘the external, authoritative, historical, traditional, institutional side and function of religion are everywhere evident’. ‘Religion is here … a fact and thing.’ (ibid, 51) Curiosity awakens. There are questions to be asked and certainties to be challenged. Facts clamour for reasons to support them. Reason and argument become important. ‘Religion here becomes thought, system, a philosophy’, (ibid, 52). At this stage the emotional, volitional, ethical and spiritual powers develop and encounter the third side of religion – the experimental and mystical. ‘Here religion is rather felt than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather than analysed, is action and power, rather than either external fact or intellectual verification.’ (ibid, 53)
Von Hügel emphasises that the three stages are never totally exclusive of the other two: there are traces of each in the other. Moreover, although they occur successively in the individual, one does not simply replace the other. Ideally they interact and correct each other. Thus ideally the institutional develops and matures under the influence of the intellectual and the mystical, and the same is true of the other two. Von Hügel’s basic thesis is that each stage has both positive and negative features.
The positive characteristics of the institutional stage are those of strength and solidity. We might call them the conservative principle. The institutional supplies a structure for living. It constitutes the tradition within which we live. It tells the story of why we believe what we do believe. It gives us the means and the setting for worship. It emphasises the importance of authority. Sense and memory control its operations. In biblical terms it is Petrine.
The negative features of the institutional element are that it can become narrow, dry, and unrelated to the rest of life. Art and science will tend to be excluded. Religion will be assimilated to politics and economics and will be simply one thing alongside other things in life. Superstition and preoccupation with externals may dominate. Coercion may be resorted to. We thus get too great a preponderance of the ‘Objective’, of law and thing, as against conviction and person; of priest as against prophet; of the movement from without inwards, as against the movements from within outwards. (von Hügel, Mystical Element, II, 388)
The intellectual element enters when the believer, like the adolescent or young adult, feels the urge to question and challenge what he or she has hitherto accepted as simply given. The transition is both necessary and dangerous. It is necessary because without it the adult enters on life with the uncritical religion of the child. Uncritical religion leaves tradition un-interiorised and the speculative mind unfed. The intellectual element attempts to unify, analyse, and systematise the data of experience. In biblical terms it is the Pauline phase.
There are drawbacks as well as gains here too. The danger is that one can get lodged in this adolescent phase and remain a ‘rationalistic fanatic’ (ibid, 389), often vulnerable to agnosticism and indifference. The Baron’s judgement on David Hume is interesting in this respect: ‘He is the sort, of person young people are taken in by … he knows everything. He got to the bottom of everything by the time he was sixteen: he sees everything through clear glass windows.’
Von Hügel, who admired Immanuel Kant for his ethical teaching, regarded him as one of the worst enemies of mysticism. (One could hardly think of a more misguided approach than that implied by the title of Kant’s book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.) As von Hügel saw it, this condemns religion to perpetual adolescence. The ‘critical-speculative’ element of religion is absolutely necessary; but it is also destructive, if left unchecked by the institutional and the mystical. He regarded the scholasticism of his own age as finally philistine.
The mystical element enters the scene as the mark of maturity and balance. This is the immediate and direct element of religion. It brings the intuitive, emotional, experiential, and volitional to complement and correct the institutional and the intellectual, both of which tend to resist the mystical. The institutional will find it to be subversive; the intellectual will think it sentimental and unstable. In biblical terms it is Johannine.
It is plain that von Hügel placed a very high estimate on the mystical element and lamented its absence in the church of his time. He is, however, quite clear-sighted about its dangers if unchecked by the other two. The mystic will be ‘tempted to sweep aside both the external, as so much oppressive ballast; and the intellectual, as so much hair-splitting or rationalism. And if it succeeds … fanaticism is in full sight.’ (von Hügel, Mystical Element, I, 55) To cultivate the mystical at the expense of the other two elements is to fall into ‘shifting subjectivity’ which becomes a victim to the ‘tyranny of mood and fancy’ and finally descends into ’emotional fanaticism’ (von Hügel, Mystical Element, II, 391.)
So then, in the balanced religious person the three elements exist in fruitful tension (or ‘friction’, as von Hügel liked to put it). This tension or friction is purifying: for the Christian it constitutes the cross and reflects the suffering of Christ. The mystic cannot with spiritual impunity opt out of the world of politics – a point which is clearer to us today in the light of liberation theologies than it was in von Hügel’s time. This is neatly summed up in Charles Davis’ remark that ‘mysticism without politics is false consciousness’. (13) Nor can the mystic rightfully evade his or her intellectual responsibilities. Von Hügel would have disagreed sharply with Dom David Knowles’ remark, that a mystic ‘who indulges in theological speculation is no mystic’ . (14)
This point has some importance today when some at least of the contemporary interest in spirituality may be a flight from the intellectual asceticism of critical theology. Such a flight might be described as the quietism of today, with this difference: that today the retreat is less from ethical involvement than from intellectual responsibility. Instead of the physical asceticism often associated with the lives of the saints, von Hügel would recommend the asceticism, the ‘costingness’, as he liked to say, effacing the challenges which modernity places before faith. Keeping the three elements in a balanced relationship with each other is a difficult task: von Hügel had no hesitation in relating it to the theology of the cross. Tyrrell, whom von Hügel described as a mystic, practised it more intensely than the Baron did.
Von Hügel does not define mysticism but allows an understanding of it to emerge from his impressionistic treatment of it. The nearest he comes to a definition is in his article on St John’s gospel for the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (XV, 455) Mysticism is ‘the intuitive [impressionistic] and emotional apprehension of the most specifically religious of all truths, viz., the already full operative existence of eternal beauty, truth, goodness, of infinite Personality and Spirit, independently of our action.’ In short, it is the all-embracing awareness of a being who is transcendent yet immanent and who is already present. The first appropriate response to this presence is adoration.
It is highly significant that George Steiner entitled his celebrated book Real Presences, for in it he stands up to the nihilism and intellectual terrorism of Derrida and the post-modernists with their insistence on the perpetual deferring of meaning and their refusal to allow that words refer to any reality outside of other words. Steiner in true Pascalian fashion sees the matter in terms of a wager. He describes his book as ‘a wager on transcendence’. ‘It argues that there is in the art-act and its reception, that there is in the experience of meaningful form, a presumption of presence’. (15) Steiner establishes a strong link between mysticism and art.
Maturity of mind and of sensibility in the face of the aesthetic demands ‘negative capability’ (Keats). It allows us to inhabit the tentative. (Steiner, Real Presences, 176, emphasis added)
‘The questions: “What is poetry, music, art?”, “How can they not be?”, “How do they act upon us and how do we interpret their action?”, [these] are, ultimately, theological questions.’ (ibid, 227) ‘What I affirm is the intuition that where God’s presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where his absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable.’ (ibid, 229)
Steiner’s contention that the deeper questions about art are ultimately theological was implicitly recognised by some of the Modernists. The pivotal notion is presence. Their understanding of presence is bound up with their understanding of mysticism. It is therefore significant that Bernard McGinn, one of the foremost contemporary scholars of mysticism, regards a heightened consciousness of God’s presence as more constitutive of mystical experience than is preoccupation with higher and closer degrees of union with God. He also prefers the term ‘consciousness’ to the term ‘experience’. (McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, xviii-xix). The paradigm of union lends itself to ‘exclusive mysticism’; whereas the paradigm of presence favours ‘inclusive mysticism’, in which mysticism is seen as one element in normal Christian faith and life.
It was from the poet Coventry Patmore that George Tyrrell derived the idea and image of divine presence in created things. In Patmore’s way of seeing things, Tyrrell wrote, ‘… God is placed, not alongside of creatures, but behind them, as the light which shines through a crystal and lends it whatever it has of lustre’. ‘God is not loved apart from creatures, or beside them; but through them and in them.’16
Tyrrell is happy to go along with this interpretation of divine presence as long as it is not seen as the only mode of approach between God and human beings. But von Hügel was impressed by it and utilised it in the first of two papers on ‘Experience and Transcendence’. The Baron was no poet, but in this instance he created an image which many people find remains in their imagination. He is wrestling with the problem of sensing the presence of the Infinite. As a way of representing this presence he asks us to imagine ‘a broad-stretching, mist-covered lake, only on occasion of the leaping of some fish upon its surface, and of the momentary splash accompanying the momentary glimpse of the shining silver’. (17) The important thing to note here is that von Hügel is not simply saying that we logically infer the existence of the lake from the flash and splash of the fish. His approach is much more direct and concrete: the flash and splash establish the presence of the lake, and he would call the impression of that presence ‘vivid’, ‘rich’, or ‘dim’. It has no clarity or definition. This is why von Hügel associates the mystical element with intuition: it has the quality of vision, however dim and impressionistic. The focus is soft, but the presence is eminently real, in Steiner’s sense. One reason why the image of the lake tends to remain in the imagination is that it is not simply an effective analogy, it could actually be a literal occasion for sensing the presence of God. Peter Berger has called such occasions ‘signals of transcendence’, because they seem to point beyond themselves. They may be mediated by nature, art or human love. If they derive from nature, they serve not merely as paths to heightened awareness of God but as reminders of our ecological responsibility to care for the environment. If Christian faith is to link into today’s ecologically inspired sense of nature, it will have to seek a mystical approach which avoids pantheistic sentimentality while recognising the divine presence as the light which shines through all things, but is seen for what it is perhaps only occasionally in moments of heightened consciousness. Of course there is an abiding danger of aestheticism, and even of sentimentality and Kitsch. But if the mysticism is incarnational and rooted in tradition, the dark presence of innocent suffering will purify it. As the mystics have always known, presence implies the possibility of absence; and all the great mystics have spoken and written about what John of the Cross described as the ‘Dark Night’.
Louis Dupré, the distinguished philosopher of religion, establishes a possible link between the mystical tradition and today’s alienated secular world. ‘He argues that the mystical sense of the Divine absence, such as the desert of Eckhart, provides a point of contact between classical Christian mysticism and the wasteland of modern atheism’. (McGinn, Foundations, 325) Perhaps it is the mystical element of religion which has most to say to an age which, without necessarily being atheistic, has nevertheless lost confidence in the inherited structures of religious tradition. Perhaps this is a dark night through which the Christian Church needs to pass if it is to renew itself in preparation for the future. This is particularly true of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Enda McDonagh, in a thoughtful and deeply felt article in The Furrow, entitled ‘The Winter Name of Church’, reflects on the need for the Catholic Church in Ireland to enter willingly and in a penitential spirit into the institutional dark night brought upon it by clerical paedophilia. This dark night would extend far beyond the scandal of child sex abuse and would become a wholesale enquiry into how the institutional church has failed, and is failing, the people of God. Interestingly Dr McDonagh places emphasis on the need for a thinking church.
It’s the need for thought that is worrying. Irish Church energy is more available for any other activity. Without a serious commitment to scholarship and hard-headed intellectual analysis and debate, the church will remain captive to superficial diagnosis of its crisis and to shallow, quick-fix solutions… In any event a much more open and vigorous intellectual and theological life is a top priority for the church in Ireland. (18)
Discovering its mystical inheritance may be the church’s best way of resisting the siren calls for strong leadership and for a return to authority-based simplicities which, as von Hügel pointed out, are a mark of immature childhood. If an attempt is made to jump from the institutional to the ‘spiritual’, bypassing the intellectual we end up with what Enda McDonagh has described as ‘shallow, quick-fix solutions’. Von Hügel knew what he was doing when he identified the three moments as institutional, intellectual and mystical and recognised them as synchronic rather than purely diachronic. Each is a strong word calling for robust analysis. The term, ‘mystical’, however, when one is prepared to analyse it patiently and dialectically, is a notable improvement on ‘spiritual’ especially when the latter is employed as a fideistic alternative to ‘theological’.
1. B. Me Ginn, The Foundations of Mysticism, London: SCM Press, 1991, 266-7.
2 R.A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950, 248.
3. G.R.R. Treasure, Seventeenth Century France, London: Rivingtons, 1966, 453.
4. Alexander Dru in A.Drew and I. Trethowan, eds., Maurice Blondel: The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, London: Harvill Press, 1964, 21.
5. M.D/ Petre, Von Hügel and Tyrrell: The Story of a Friendship, London, 1937, 17.
6. Cited in D. Schultenover, George Tyrrell: In Search of Catholicism, Shepherdstown, 1981, 272.
7. A. R. Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 117.
8. M. Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition, London, 1934, 301.
9. Letters from Baron Friedrich van Hügel to a Niece. Edited with an introducHügeltion by Gwendolen Greene, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1928, xvi.
10. F. von Hügel, ‘Experience and Transcendence’, Dublin Review, 138, 1906, 358.
11. Two volumes. Second edition, London 1926.
12. J. J. Kelly, Baron Friedrich van Hügel Philosophy of Religion, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1983, 172.
13. C. Davis, Theology and Political Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 60.
14. D. Knowles, What Is Mysticism? London: Burns & Oates, 1967, 74.
15. G. Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? London: Faber, 1989, 214, emphasis added.
16. G. Tyrrell, The Faith of the Millions, Second series, London: Longman, Green, 1901, 52.
17. J. W. Beatie, ‘Von Hügel’s ‘Sense of the Infinite” The Heythrop Journal, xvi, 2, April, 1975, 169.
18. E. McDonagh, ‘The Winter Name of Church’, The Furrow, January 1995, 12.
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