Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Índice da Obra Atual Seguinte: Cartas 4 a 6

(p. 1)

THE

KEYS OF THE CREEDS

_________________________

LETTER I

THE SHADOW OF DEATH

DEAREST AND BEST FRIEND, – Even were my mind disposed otherwise than it is, your touching appeal would deprive me of the power to choose. I cannot, alas! come you as you kindly suggest; for infirmity, marching far in advance of age, has seized upon me, and with such fell and menacing grasp that my doctors hold out but faint hope of escape by the expatriation to which they doom me.

Do not, however, think that I am excusing myself from complying with your request. On the contrary; next to the delight I should have derived from renewal of the converse which has been the chief solace of my lonely life, will be the pleasure I shall take in seeking to exorcise the demon that

(p. 2)

oppresses you, and making you a partaker in the peace I myself have at length found.

I should be disposed to reproach you for deferring your communication until now, and choosing to suffer in silence rather than tell me what you know would distress me, but that I am conscious of having been so much absorbed in things affecting myself as to justify in a measure your suspicion that human intercourse had become indifferent to me. The charge would be true only to a certain extent in respect of things in general, but wholly untrue where you are in question. For, as you well know, you have ever been a prime element in my life, whether as an object of worship, hope, and longing, when in my young and ardent days I offered you, as my dearest and best, a sacrifice to the inexorable Divinity of Ecclesiasticism, and heedless of your sufferings and my own, took the vows which severed us, and kept them – until too late! Small atonement will it be then if by aught I can say now I succeed in restoring to you some of the peace you, so well deserve. And who has the right to command me if you have not?

But there are other reasons in presence of which your hesitation cannot fail to vanish. The development of my mind in regard to the very questions on which you are so sorely exercised, has reached a stage at which utterance of some sort is no longer optional but compulsory. Long ere you broke the too long

(p. 3)

silence my resolution was taken; and you have but modified and determined the form of its expression. Ordered as a last chance for health, if not for life, to a Southern clime, I had already selected and partially packed the materials necessary to enable me to compose the book which has been striving to take shape in my mind. Not that I intended to publish it, at least within any time given or contemplated. But I wished to have it in my power to put into the hands of any one sufficiently earnest to care to know, and sufficiently intelligent to be able to comprehend, my view of the real nature of the world-old contest between the Spiritual and the Secular, between the: Church and the World, between Religion and Science, between the Soul and the Flesh, – a contest that bids fair soon to surpass all its previous dimensions; and to show also how it is possible, without committing oneself to popular interpretations, not merely to minister faithfully in the Church, but to be a conscientious and even enthusiastic upholder of it.

Well, I propose then to write my book to you in a series of letters from my place of exile. And that you may not be incredulous as to the perfect freedom of my treatment, I will remind you that as a secular priest I have never been subject to the restraint and supervision imposed upon those who are members of any religious Order. Locomotion and converse are thus for me alike untrammelled by superior authority.

(p. 4)

And even were they not, I have in me sufficient of the rebel to assert my independence, although no such overwhelming motive existed as that with which you have supplied me.

Your case is in some respects a rare one. In youth it is not unusual for certain temperaments to feel such intense longing to know the secrets of the universe as to be impelled to hasten the termination of life in order to penetrate, unrestrained by the limitations of sense, the world that lies beyond. I well remember having the same feeling myself when, an ardent neophyte, I watched beside the conch of a dead friend who in life had been my fellow-explorer in the realms of mental speculation. Forgetting almost the claims of affection on my grief, and interpreting the deep calm and content written on the still face as a proof that now at length he read the meaning of the problem of God and the Universe, and had satisfaction therein, with envious curiosity I cried, ‘Oh, that I knew what thou knowest now! gladly would I take thy place!’ But you hare passed that period of insubordination, and reached one at which disappointment has generally become a habit, and resignation a virtue not so hard of exercise.

Believe me, then, that in acceding to your most legitimate demand upon my friendship, I experience nothing of the reluctance or wrench you anticipate,

(p. 5)

but throw myself wholly and readily into the service, grateful at once for the opportunity so timely accorded me, and for the confidence reposed in me. And that your tender heart may not be apprehensive on the score of having unduly tasked my failing powers, I assure you that the prospect of an occupation so congenial to me, both in its own nature and in its association with you, has already done much to excite the action which my doctors declare to be the main thing necessary for my recovery.

Reserving myself until I shall have reached my destination, I will only say further in this letter, that the manner in which you express your solicitude helps to shape the form of my answer. Is the problem of the world’s creeds, you ask, in truth soluble only by death, as the poet implies when he speaks of

The Shadow cloaked from head to foot,

Who keeps the keys of all the Creeds:

and the feeling you describe as so intolerable as to prompt you almost irresistibly to suicide, is that of desire to find those keys.

In the mean time I would conjure you to bear in mind this consideration. Even were it certain that Death is the custodian sole of the mysteries in question, it does not follow that under any circumstances – there, in the world to which Death would introduce you, more than in this one – the secret would be imparted to you. The poet speaks of the ‘Shadow’

(p. 6)

only as keeping the keys, in no wise of parting with them. Consider, moreover, that in drawing a contrast between the two sides of the grave so immeasurably to the disadvantage of this one, you are following a philosophy more in accordance with the theology you have been accustomed to deprecate, than with the scepticism you are wont to avow. For it is, as you know, the theological usage to exalt the life hereafter as a condition of all perfection in being and knowing, and to repudiate this one as a mistake and a failure. While scepticism, preferring science or knowledge to the faith inculcated by theology, and not ashamed when ignorant to confess ignorance, holds that strong as may be our conviction that we survive and retain our identity after death, we have no certitude of the fact. So that if death be indeed the end of all things for the individual, to court death for the sake of obtaining information on that or any other point, would be to perpetrate a bull of the most ghastly kind.

You will be surprised to find me speaking thus of a tendency which my life has been spent in combating. But the truth is that, though as Anglican parson and Catholic priest it has been my function to advocate the claims of faith, as a man I am not the less alive to those of the intellect; and, indeed, as I go on, you will find that it was on grounds rational rather than religious that I adhered to the practice

(p. 7)

and profession of my creed, so long after the dissipation of the early illusions under whose influence that creed received my implicit adherence.

In plain language, I conscientiously remained an officiating priest of the Catholic Church, even while convinced that the authority and doctrines of the Church are founded altogether in what would commonly be regarded as an illusion. And in the letters which will follow this one, I propose to show you the sense in which, and the reasons why, I and every thinker who deserves the name, are compelled so to regard them; to put you in possession, in fact, of the Keys of the Creeds, and so enable you to judge for yourself how far you are likely to further your search by taking the poet’s hint; and whether, if it were so, the result would be worth the cost.

Tell me in your next if my plan has your approval.

(p. 8)

LETTER II

THE SOUL

MY FIRST concern on reaching this sunny shore, dear friend, was for your letter. Having read it, I hardly know in which respect the profuseness of your expressions strikes me as most excessive, whether in that of your gratitude or that of your surprise. As for the former, believe me that l am but too glad to have my long budding resolve forced into flower and fruit, and to find its ripening sun in one whose affection, in spite of the blight and disappointment that fell upon it when I felt compelled to take the step that placed an impassable barrier between us, has been so deep and constant as yours.

As for the latter, surely you were not ignorant that the Church has ever claimed to be the sole depository of the knowledge you seek; and why wonder, then, that I should deem myself competent to impart it to you?

Your surprise, however, has another source. You had no notion that I had ceased to be the true believer you once knew me. Ah, if you only knew

(p. 9)

how many fill the priestly office without having even my justification, but simply as a mode of occupation and means of livelihood, your wonder would be that the incredulity of ecclesiastics does not force itself on the notice of the laity to the imminent peril of the Church’s existence.

Yet to say that we do not believe, would be to mislead you by saying but half the truth. To all the fundamental doctrines of Christianity specified by you, and the long list of others which grow naturally out of them, I can truly say I believe. It is the sense in which I believe them that will constitute the essence of my letters to you.

It is true that belief of the kind to which I refer would for the world in general be but another name for unbelief. But the world in general has an exceedingly limited capacity of comprehension. And it is its own misfortune if it places a gross materialising interpretation upon truths which are not amenable to the faculties wherewith it is wont to judge them. Anyhow, let it receive the faith in what sense it may, the world is the better for having it, at least until some substitute be found which has never yet been discovered.

It is because you yourself, while possessing the faculties necessary for a proper appreciation of the meaning of Christian dogma, have never yet found the effective angle at which to bring those faculties

(p. 10)

to bear upon it, that you have been reduced to your recent pass. This is due to the fact that you have been reared a Protestant, and have never quitted the Protestant groove. Catholicism prohibits inquiry, but allows full play to the emotions. Protestantism on the other hand, quenches the emotions, but allows inquiry, though only to a very limited extent, inasmuch as it dictates both the method and the conclusions. That is, while Catholicism closes one eye, that of the intellect, and allows full scope to the other, representing the feelings, Protestantism wholly closes the latter, and permits the former to be but half open; and is thus fatal to both the religious and intellectual perceptions of its professors.

To take as an instance the Anglican divine whom you truly rank as surpassing in theological insight all others of his communion in these days, the late Frederick Denison Maurice. Well; pure, intense, spiritual-minded, and laborious as he was, he failed, as you admit, to grasp a single abstruse truth with such distinctness as to enable him to make it clear to you or to anyone. The reason is that, being Protestant, and severed from the Church, he sought in vain for the keys which alone can unlock the mysteries he sought to explore, and which the Church alone possesses. One might as well seek to traverse the ocean in a fog without a compass.

(p. 11)

And it is by following the Protestant usage of discarding three-fourths of the mind’s faculties, and seeming to judge all things by the remaining fourth, that he and you have been stranded in difficulty and darkness. In religion, as in art, reason plays but a subordinate part compared with that of the imagination. Hence a Protestant régime, however favourable to physical analysis or science, is fatal to religion and art, which appertain to the emotional rather than to the intellectual side of our nature.

You must not, however, accept the term imagination in its usual restricted sense. Neither must you suppose that because a thing exists only in the imagination it has no actual existence. It is in virtue of our being compounded of two elements, the real and the ideal, that man is an intelligent being. The former includes all that side of him which is cognisable by sense; the latter that which he knows only through the spirit. The real, which is of the earth, earthly, we share with the animals. The ideal, which is of heaven, exalts us out of their sphere into heaven. By the faculties appertaining to the real we way know the organisation of our bodies and the physical world. By those of the ideal we know God, we overcome the world, we attain immortality.

It is humanity only in its limitations, its strivings, its failures, its sufferings, its dying, that we

(p. 12)

recognise in the real. In the ideal we see it no longer ‘vile’ and a ‘body of death,’ but divested of limitations, translated into the infinite, triumphant over sin, misery, death, risen from the grave, ascended into heaven, seated on the right hand of God.

The process of idealisation consists in imagining an object as transcending its limitations, existing in a perfection not actually attainable by it, and filling infinity with its expanded characteristics. All that is necessary to truthfulness of idealisation is the preservation of character and proportion.

The faculty by which we perform the act of idealisation is known as the Soul. Call to mind the colloquial method of describing a person who cares for nothing but what is appreciable by sense: a voluptuary who exists only for fleshly delights, an artist to whom the real suggests nothing beyond the real, a beautiful face expressive of nothing but its own beauty of form and colouring, – we speak of these as being without soul. The higher imagination is wanting, and we despise them accordingly; thus giving proof positive that for us the ideal is more than the real. By the soul we are conscious of our, limitations. By it, therefore, we are conscious of the infinite. To possess soul is to have a perception of a greater and better than we are or can be. Without it we should be as the animals who, having

(p. 13)

no conception of a better towards which they can strive, remain for ever at the same stage of being, unchanged save by outward accidents of their condition. Man alone is able to look and strive upwards through the power he possesses of looking beyond his real, that is, through the soul.

To speak of man’s faculty of idealisation, then, is to speak of his soul. By means of this he transcends the finite and approaches the infinite. Thus it is with the soul that he conceives the personified infinite we call God.

This sense of the infinite, or soul, includes the sense of perfection, or conscience. The soul enables us to recognise, the conscience impels us to follow, perfection. It is a mistake to restrict the domain of conscience to religion or morals. There is no direction in which the impulse towards perfection does not find ample room for its exercise. The possession of the power of discerning ideal perfection in one or more directions, and of reproducing it in the real, constitutes genius. The extent to which genius is productive depends mainly upon its combination with energy and faith, or confidence in one’s ideal and oneself. ‘Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might,’ is the application of the rule of conscience to every department of life, industrial, artistic, literary, social, political, religions. For in each there is a standard of perfection capable of

(p. 14)

being discerned and approached; and he alone is a conscientious worker who strives to the utmost to discern and approach it. To renounce the struggle after perfection, and at the bidding of the temporary and expedient to be content with a low and degrading success, is to seek the real at the expense of the ideal, to serve mammon instead of God, to gain the world and lose the soul.

It is with the application of conscience to theology, or the science of God, that our concern in these letters will mainly lie.

(p. 15)

LETTER III

GOD

THE idea of God has a twofold origin; the craving of the intellect for a cause, and of the soul for perfection. Confident that nothing he sees is self-existent, man necessarily postulates something that is self-existent, and as necessarily proceeds to invest that something with a nature and attributes. Necessarily conceiving of it as superior to himself and all he sees around him, he finds no point at which to pause in the process of construction short of the infinite. Aware of no faculties but those which he finds himself capable of exercising or appreciating, he takes it for granted that whatever he deems best exists also in his Deity; only, without limitations. Embarking in metaphysical speculation, he argues that as he himself constitutes the best thing existing in the finite, and God the best in the infinite, he must be the special though finite manifestation of the infinite God. That is, he must be made in God’s image, and endowed with the various qualities, physical, mental, and spiritual, of his Maker.

(p. 16)

Having come to the conclusion that man, though derived from God and resembling him, is yet not God, but has a separate existence and personality, the earliest metaphysicians did not trouble themselves about the problem which has occupied their successors through all following ages, whether absolute Being, such as a self-existent Creator must be, can be represented in the relative and finite, and become an object of cognition at all, and brought within the grasp of the subject man. Neither did they entertain doubts as to the possibility of reasoning from the relative to the absolute, or from the subject to the object, and identifying that which depends on our consciousness with that on which we depend. Nor did they stumble at the proposition that a conception of an infinite and absolute being by a finite and relative one, involves a contradiction on the ground that such conception must itself be limited and imperfect, and therefore altogether inadequate and fallacious.

No; they set before them one distinct and intelligible idea, and though scattered over all regions and among all races, they never let it go; but however meagre their opportunities and dim their lights, however barbaric their surroundings and evil their times, that idea was ever steadily embodied and reflected in their theology. And however widely they differed in detail, the principle that governed

(p. 17)

them was always one and the same, for it was the Catholic principle that God, translating himself into the finite, had made man in his own image; so that man had no option but to make God in his image by retranslating himself into the infinite, and imagining himself as divested of limitations.

All theology, therefore, is based on the assumption that, man being God in petto, God is man in extenso. But such translation of God into man, you will perceive, constitutes an incarnation. And thus, having by the aid of the imagination leaped the chasm in reason left by metaphysics, and as it were taken the kingdom of heaven by violence, theology found itself fairly launched on its momentous career.

You will observe that I refrain from using the term Revelation in regard to any knowledge that man has of God, thus far. And I shall abstain from using it, at least in any sense resembling the popular one. My reason is that I wish to show you the extent to which the human mind is capable of evolving by itself a theology in accordance with Catholic dogma. I expect to avoid some embarrassment by adopting this course. For if we were to start by regarding the fundamental principle of theology just stated as a ‘revealed’ one, we should have to allow that every nation, tribe, or sect, which sets up a god made more or less in the likeness of man, whether physically or morally, may, however low its conception

(p. 18)

and gross its idolatry, claim to be acting under the divine authority of a ‘revelation.’ That Catholicism should recognise a principle human in origin and universal in application, proves at least that there is thus far no fundamental antagonism between it and the human consciousness.

Well, it is to your portion of that consciousness, and not to revelation as commonly understood, that I shall appeal in elucidation of the mysteries which perplex and distress you. The kingdom of God is within us, and it is within ourselves that the desired keys are to be found. For it is there that the spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit to the eternal facts of which the creeds are the expression. And what is true of the consciousness at one time, is true of it always.

But though we have not to travel beyond ourselves for our proofs and illustrations, the journey we have commenced bids fair to be a somewhat long and intricate one. Our path, however, is too ancient and well beaten to be rugged or obscure. If you observe the direction of the footsteps which have worn it, you will see that they are exactly opposite to ours. For what is requisite in our case is, not that we travel by another path than they who have claimed to be guided by revelation, but that we start from the opposite end of the same path. This in itself will save us much trouble. For the well-defined

(p. 19)

track will keep us from wandering into jungles of speculation, from plunging into sloughs of despondency, or fainting on hills of difficulty. While, to make it impossible that we should ever be at a loss for a turn, there is always a signpost at hand, with an inscription easy to read, and not difficult to understand, – an inscription I have already indicated to you, for it is no other than this: –

‘God made man in His own image.’

This, simple as it may appear, was the compass wherewith in those divine old days the wayfarers of humanity sought the goal of their aspirations. Our search, as I have said, lies in precisely the opposite direction. But the needle that indicates the Pole Star, points also to the Southern Cross. Lately leaving his Maker’s hands, and coming into an existence where he himself was the least familiar object, man might well think of himself as preserving the recollection of God; so that it only remained for him to learn man. We of these later days, absorbed in the observation of man, have well-nigh forgotten God. You see now why I have brought you into this old pathway, and why we start from this end of it. If man be made in God’s image, by idealising and magnifying man we shall discover what God is. Not to learn man from God, then, as did our forefathers, but to learn God from man, is the task before us.

Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Índice da Obra Atual Seguinte: Cartas 4 a 6