WE have, I hope, disentangled the special function of the intellect in Religion; it is to explore Reality and make its home in it. The object of this book is to suggest the way for those whose intellects have not till now done any serious exploring - and note that serious exploring is not a quick job: the matters treated in this book cannot just be glanced over; they must be worked through.
The first thing necessary is to consider the intellect's equipment for an expedition so arduous. An intellect, of course, everybody HAS: intellect is not the property only of exceptionally gifted people, it is a piece of standard human equipment like a nose. But the plain truth about most of us is that we have let our intellects sink into a condition in which they have neither the muscles nor the energy nor the right habits for the job, nor any effective inclination towards it. We must see how they may be made fit.
The first difficulty in the way of the intellect's functioning well is that it hates to function at all, at any rate beyond the point where functioning begins to require effort. The result is that when any matter arises which is properly the job of the intellect, then either nothing gets done at all, or else the imagination leaps in and does it instead. There is nothing to be done with the intellect until imagination has been put firmly in its place. And this is extraordinarily difficult. One of the results of the Fall of Man is that imagination has got completely out of hand; and even one who does not believe in that "considerable catastrophe ", as Hilaire Belloc calls it, must at least admit that imagination plays a part in the mind's affairs totally out of proportion to its merits, so much out of proportion indeed as to suggest some longstanding derangement in man's nature.
Consider what imagination is. It is the power we have of making mental pictures of the material universe. What our senses have experienced? the sights the eye has seen, the sounds the ear has heard, what we have smelt, touched, tasted? can be reproduced by the imagination either as they originally came through our senses, or in any variety of new combinations. A moment's reflection upon what life would be like if we lacked this power will show how valuable a part the imagination has to play; but it is a subordinate parts and entirely limited to the world of matter. What the senses cannot experience, the imagination cannot make pictures of.
But in the state in which we now are, this picture-making power seems able to out-shout almost every other power we have. It is a commonplace that it can storm the will. The will may have decided firmly for sobriety or chastity: the imagination conjures up the picture of a glass of beer or a girl and the will finds its decision wavering and breaking. But our concern is not with the ill effect of imagination upon the will, but upon the intellect. There is practical value in dwelling a moment on this unpleasing business.
I pass over the damage imagination does to our thinking by way of distraction, because the experience is too poignantly familiar to need emphasis. Time and again we set out upon a train of abstract thought and come to ourselves at the end of an hour with the sickening realization that for the last fifty-nine minutes we have been watching imagination's pictures flash across the mind and the abstract thinking is still to do. Yet bad as this is, it is not the worst of the ways in which imagination hinders the functioning of intellect, because we are aware of our unhappy tendency and when the urgency is great enough can take steps to control it. But it has two other ways of interference, very dangerous because we do not suspect their danger or even their existence, and very important in our inquiry because they operate most powerfully in the field of religion.
The first of these is that the imagination acts as a censor upon what the intellect shall accept. Tell a man, for instance, that his soul has no shape or size or colour or weight, and the chances are that he will retort that such a thing is inconceivable. If we reply that it is not inconceivable but only unimaginable, he will consider that we have conceded his case - and will proceed to use the word unimaginable with the same happy finality as the word inconceivable. For indeed in the usage of our day, the two words have become interchangeable. That they are thus interchangeable is a measure of the decay of thinking, and to sort them out and see them as distinct is an essential first step in the mind's movement towards health.
To distinguish them we must distinguish spirit from matter, and this distinction is worth a little space here because it will be vital at every point of our inquiry. We shall return to it many times. This is only a beginning. Of spirit we have already spoken as lacking the properties of matter. But it would be a poor definition of anything to say of it simply that it is not something else. If all one can say of a thing is that it is not some other thing, then in the absence of that other thing one would not be able to say anything of it at all. But spirit would still be something even if matter did not exist, and we cannot feel that we have made much advance in our knowledge of spirit until we can speak of it thus in its own proper nature.
SPIRIT, we say, IS THE BEING THAT KNOWS & LOVES; and this is a positive statement of its activity, what it does. But we can say something also of its nature, what it is. Briefly, spirit is the being which has its own nature so firmly in its grasp that it can never become some other thing. Any material thing is in the constant peril of becoming something else: wood is burnt and becomes ash, oxygen meets hydrogen and becomes water, hay is eaten and becomes cow. In short any material thing is what it is at any given moment, but precariously. A spiritual thing is what it is, but tenaciously. My body, being material, might be eaten by a cannibal, and some of my body would be absorbed to become his body. But my soul can never thus be made into something else. The reason is bound up with a truth we have already mentioned? that material things have constituent parts, and spiritual things have not. What has parts can be taken apart. Because material things have parts, molecules and such, these parts can be separated from one another and made to enter into new alliances with other parts similarly separated from the company they had, until that moment, been keeping. But a spirit has no parts: therefore it cannot be taken apart. It can exist only as a whole. God might annihilate it, but while it exists, it can only be what it is: it can never be anything else. Worms will one day eat my body: but not my mind. Even the worm that dieth not finds lie mind too tough to consume.
What has parts, then, can cease to be what it is and become something else: that is one limitation from which spirit is free. But there is another. What has parts can occupy space - space indeed may be thought of as the arrangement matter makes to spread its parts in. It is from the occupation of space that those properties flow which affect the senses. That is why matter does affect them. That is why spirit does not.
We may now return to the distinction between UNIMAGINABLE and INCONCEIVABLE. To say that something is unimaginable is merely to say that the imagination cannot make a picture of it. But pictures are only of the material world, and to that imagination is limited. Naturally it cannot form pictures of spiritual realities, angels, or human souls, or love or justice. Imagination cannot form mental pictures of these, because none of our senses could experience them. To complain that a spiritual thing is unimaginable would be like complaining that the air is invisible. The air is beyond the reach of one particular sense, namely sight, because it lacks colour. Spirit is beyond the reach of all the senses (and so of imagination) because it lacks all material qualities. With the eyes of your body you cannot see justice. You can see a just man or an unjust man, but justice itself you cannot see with your eyes. Nor can you hear it or smell it or run it across your palate or bark your shins on it.
Thus the reality of any spiritual statement must be tested by the INTELLECT, not by the imagination. The intellect's word of rejection is "INCONCEIVABLE". This means that the statement proffered to the intellect contains a contradiction within itself, so that no concept can be formed embodying the statement. A four-sided triangle, for instance, is in this sense inconceivable. It is a contradiction in terms, because a triangle is a three-sided figure; and a four-sided three-sided figure cannot be conceived and cannot be. The less instructed atheist will ask whether God can make a weight so heavy that He cannot lift it, in the happy belief that, whichever answer we give, we shall admit that there is something God cannot do. But the question is literally meaningless: a weight that an omnipotent Being cannot lift is as complete a contradiction in terms as a four-sided triangle. In either case the words are English, but do not mean anything because they cancel each other out. There is no point in piling together a lot of words, regardless of their meaning, and then asking triumphantly: "Can God make that?" God can do anything, but a contradiction in terms is not a thing at all. It is nothing. God Himself could not make a four-sided triangle or a weight that Almighty power could not lift. They are inconceivable, they are nothing; and nothing - to give a slightly different emphasis to Scripture - is impossible to God.
Thus the first test of any statement concerning spiritual reality is not can imagination form a mental picture of it, but does it stand up to the examination of the intellect, do the terms of it contradict each other, is it conceivable or inconceivable? Imagination can say nothing about it either way. It cannot reject it. It cannot accept it, either.
It must leave it alone, and that is precisely one of the things that imagination hates to do.
Which leads us to the other of the two ways in which imagination hinders intellect without our perceiving it. In the ordinary way, if concepts are beyond its reach, imagination acts as censor and simply throws them out: while the intellect, grown flabby with disuse, tiredly concurs in a rejection so beneficent because it saves so much trouble. But this happy arrangement receives a check if one happens to be a Catholic. For the Faith binds us to accept many truths altogether beyond imagination's reach, and will not allow imagination to reject them. Here imagination does its subtlest piece of sabotage. It cannot forbid intellect to accept them: so it offers to help intellect to accept them. It comes along with all sorts of mental pictures, comparisons from the material world. Thus for the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity imagination offers the picture of a shamrock, or a triangle, or three drops of water poured together to form one drop.
Now there is in fact a definite role for such analogies as these in religion. God's dealings with men may often be seen more clearly by some comparison drawn from the material universe because both men and the material universe are creatures of the same God, and there are all kinds of family resemblances between the various works of the one master. Our Lord's parables are a marvellous application of this principle. But useful as such comparisons may be as illustrations of God's dealings with men, they shed no light whatever upon the innermost being of God in Himself. The shamrock simile tells us absolutely nothing about the Blessed Trinity, nor does the triangle, nor the drops of water. The excuse for them is that they help us to see the doctrine. But they do not. They only help us to swallow the doctrine. They prevent the doctrine from being a difficulty; but they do it by substituting something else for the doctrine, something which is not a difficulty, certainly, but not the doctrine either. What is the gain of this, I do not know. Certainly it prevents the truth about God from being a danger to our faith; but in the same act, it prevents the truth about God from being a light to our minds. The same objective might have been attained a great deal more neatly by not mentioning the doctrine at all.
If we are to get anywhere in that grasp of reality, which is the purpose of this book, the intellect must learn to do its own job. It will be rigorous and exacting work for the intellect, but there is no advance in theology without it, nor indeed any real mental maturity (and mental maturity is worth having: what more suitable companion could there be for that commoner phenomenon, bodily maturity?). Thinking is very hard and imagining is very easy and we are very lazy. We have fallen into the habit of using imagination as a crutch, and our intellects have almost lost the habit of walking. They must learn to walk, and this must mean great pain for muscles so long unused. It is worth all the pain: not only for the intellect but for the imagination too. Once the intellect is doing its own work properly, it can use the imagination most fruitfully; and the imagination will find new joy in the service of a vital intellect.
So far we have been considering the limitation of the mind's power that results from bad habits. But there is a vastly more important limitation, which arises from the nature of the mind itself. Bad habits or good habits, our minds remain finite, and so can never wholly contain the Infinite. This is the fact about us, which accounts for the existence of what we call Mysteries in religion. At first thought this might seem a reason for abandoning the whole venture: if Reality is so utterly beyond us, why not leave it alone and make the best terms we can with our ineluctable darkness? But a Mystery is not something that we can know nothing about: it is only something that the mind cannot WHOLLY know. It is not to be thought of as a high wall that we can neither see over nor get around: it is to be thought of rather as a gallery into which we can progress deeper and deeper, though we can never reach the end? yet every step of our progress is immeasurably satisfying. A Mystery in short is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an inexhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be water for the mind's thirst.
As we examine the Mysteries of religion, we discover that the practical result of this effort of the finite to know the Infinite - which is also a determination of the Infinite to be known by the finite - is that any given Mystery resolves itself (for our minds, of course, not in its own reality) into two truths which we cannot see how to reconcile. Sometimes by the revelation of God, sometimes by the hard effort of man's own mind, we see that each of two things must be so, yet we cannot see why one does not exclude the other. Thus in the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity, we cannot see how God can be Three if He is infinitely One; in the Doctrine of the Incarnation, we cannot see how Christ can be wholly God and at the same time wholly man; in the mystery of our own will, we do not see how its freedom can be reconciled with God's omniscience; and so with all the other Mysteries of religion. Left to ourselves, we should almost certainly say that there is a conflict, and therefore that both cannot be true; and even if under pressure we reluctantly admit that we cannot absolutely prove that there is contradiction, or exclude the possibility that there might be reconciliation at some point beyond our gaze, yet the point of reconciliation is beyond our gaze; and what lies within our gaze seems for ever irreconcilable.
Normally the mind would reject any doctrine proposed for its belief with this unbridgeable gulf in it. But when God reveals such doctrines, the Christian will not reject them: yet he still has to decide what to do about them in his own mind. One possibility for him is to make a large act of Faith, accept them, and think no more about them. Thus he is not troubled by any apparent contradiction, nor illumined by the doctrine's truth. It simply lies in the mind, and he is no worse for it and no better for it. He has a shadowy feeling that if he looked at the doctrine very closely, it might be something of a trial to his faith. But he does not look at it very closely. He does not really look at it at all. This degree of intellectual unconcern makes for a quiet life, but not for any growth in the knowledge of God.
If the mind does do something with the mysterious truths God has revealed, it usually deals with the two elements whose reconciliation it cannot see in one of three ways. The first way is to select one of the component truths, make that the vital one, and simply accept the other half, but without adverting to it very much. Thus, for example, in the doctrine of the Trinity one might devote the whole force of the mind to the Three Persons, and leave the question of how Three Persons can be one God in the back of the mind; or one might concentrate upon the oneness of God and leave the threefold personality largely as a form of words whose meaning we shall discover in the next life. The trouble about this very natural expedient is that the mind gets no light from the element in the doctrine not adverted to, and the light it gets from the element of its choice is not as bright as it might be for want of the other: for although, as the mind tries to master a doctrine, it distinguishes the doctrine into two elements, in the living reality they are not two elements but one.
Yet even at that, this first way is immeasurably better than the second - which consists in accepting both elements, but shading them down to look like each other, thus getting no light from either. As applied to the Incarnation, this involves accepting both the divinity and the humanity of our Lord, but making the divinity too human and the humanity too divine.
The third way is to accept both elements, and accept them both at white heat without bothering too much about whether one can see the reconciliation. The mind loses no integrity by this, since it is already certain on other grounds of the truth of each element separately. Therefore, in accepting and devoting itself with all its power to each, it is acting rightly. And the result justifies the method. For although we still cannot actually see the reconciliation, yet some mysterious reconciliation is in fact effected within us. We begin, as I have said, with a steady concentration upon each of the two elements, and a moment comes when we realize that we are living mentally in the presence not of two truths but of one. We still could not say how both can be true at once, yet we truly experience them so.
There is a profound reason for this. It is involved in the kind of beings that we are. It is part of a larger truth about our whole experience of life. All life is a tension of apparent opposites. Life abides and life advances by a sort of counter-pull - what I have called a tension - between forces that seem to be the negation of each other. Thus, our life is conditioned by death: the animal dies and man eats it and lives; man dies to himself in order to live to God, and living to God finds himself too. Again our freedom is made perfect by obedience; thus a man is free to live if he obeys the laws of nutrition, is free to build himself a home, to sail the oceans of the world, to fly in the air, if he obeys the laws that govern his universe. One might go on endlessly listing such things. And no one of them is accidental or incidental. Our life is truly seen as a tension of opposites because we ourselves are a tension of opposites. We ourselves, like all created things, exist because omnipotence made something of nothing. We are best expressed as nothingness worked upon by omnipotence, the two most ultimate of all opposites. Because that is what we are, that is how we act. Operatio sequitur esse, say the philosophers. As we are, so we act, so we experience, so we know. There is this vast and fruitful combination of opposites within our very being, at the very heart of what we are, and you can trace it in everything we do. It means that there is an essential mysteriousness about us. Our minds cannot wholly grasp omnipotence, it has too much meaning for us; they cannot firmly grasp nothingness, it has not enough meaning for the mind to take hold of. Yet in these two terms we are stated.
That is why we tend to see the truths about God in the way I have described,
as the union of two apparent opposites.
We cannot see the reconciliation because we cannot see the union of the two
opposites within ourselves.
But although we cannot see it,
we do experience it.
We experience it in the plain fact that we actually are,
and are aware of ourselves as,
one being.
But as I have said, there runs an element of duality through all our action.
As soon as we say anything, we have to balance it by something almost diametrically
opposite.
And somehow it works.
Consider one example.
There is a rule of life, attributed to St. Augustine and to almost all the
reasonably articulate saints since his day, and in any event verified in the
experience of everyone who has made even the most meagre attempt to live the
Christian life.
In its traditional form it runs:
"Pray as if everything depended on God;
work as if everything depended upon you."
Here, in action, is that wholehearted acceptance of two opposites which somehow
fuses into one continuing act of successful living.
top
That there should be Mystery in our knowledge of God, and that this should show itself to us as truths about God, each of which we know to be true while yet we cannot see how to reconcile them, is plain common sense. And indeed most people would admit as much if they happen to believe in God at all. But here we come upon a curious phenomenon. Many Christians who are theoretically aware of all this are yet completely shattered in their faith the first time their attention is drawn to one of these apparent contradictions. Someone asks them some such question as "If God knew last Tuesday what you are going to do next Tuesday, what becomes of your free will?" We shall be glancing at this question later, but for the moment my concern is only with the curious effect upon the assailed Christian. He knows that there are truths about God that he cannot reconcile; he knows that if he could totally comprehend God, then God would have to be no larger than his own mind, and so not large at all; he knows that the very fact that there is a God requires that there should be elements we cannot reconcile; yet the moment he meets two such elements he is driven to wonder whether there can be a God after all.
But, this logical monstrosity apart, there is something marvellously inviting to the mind in an infinite being of whom we can know something, but whom we cannot wholly know; In the knowledge of whom we can grow, yet the truth of whose being we can never exhaust: we shall never have to throw God away like a solved crossword puzzle. And all this is contained in the concept of Mystery.
Thus a Mystery is not to be thought of as simply darkness: it is a tiny circle of light surrounded by darkness. It is for us so to use our own powers and God's grace that the circle of light will grow. It means using the mind upon what reality may be made to tell us about God, and upon what God, through His Church, has told us about Himself; it means praying for more knowledge, and using the knowledge one gains to enrich one's prayer. Thus the circle of light grows; but it is always ringed round with darkness: for however our capacity may increase, it remains finite, and God remains infinite. Indeed the more the light grows, the more we realize what His Infinity means, what His Immensity is. The theologian sees far more problems about the Blessed Trinity than the ordinary Catholic. But this is an ordinary accompaniment of knowledge. The man who knows nothing about a subject has no difficulties either, sees no problems, can ask no questions. Even to be able to ask questions is a kind of knowledge. The theologian can ask far profounder questions because he knows more about God; by that same knowledge he knows that there are depths that he will never know. But to see why one cannot know more is itself a real seeing; there is a way of seeing the darkness which is a kind of light.
The circle of light grows as the mind acts upon God and is acted upon by God.
The mind sees certain problems, and advances in their solution.
Quite literally, it questions God, asks how and why,
not as heckling God, challenging Him to defend the truth of His own being,
but as begging Him for more light.
Nor must it be thought that growth in the knowledge of God is a continual wrestling
with problems in an effort to push back the darkness.
Pushing back the darkness does of course increase the extent of our light.
But there is a question not only of the extent of light but of intensity.
And that grows in us by our sheer enjoyment of the light we have.
It would be a pity if we were so obsessed with the darkness as to be unable
to enjoy the light,
so troubled by what we do not know or cannot know that there is no joy to us
in what we know.
The way of life for the mind is to live in the light and revel in the light,
and grow in the light in all tranquillity.
top
In all tranquillity, I say,
but with immeasurable labour.
That is another of those opposites whose tension makes our life.
There is, as I have said earlier, real pain for the mind as it brings its almost
atrophied muscles into action without the comforting crutch of imagination.
This gets a little easier as the habit grows.
Slowly the mind grows out of its reliance upon the images that had stultified
it.
But this cleansing of the intellect is not a thing that can ever be done once
and for all in this life.
Imagination is forever creeping up on us, betraying us without our knowing
it.
God gave the Israelites a commandment against the use of graven images.
Truly I believe that mental images can be even worse for religion than graven.
Certainly the habit clings.
Scripture regularly compares idolatry with fornication.
The Israelites went whoring after images.
The mind can do that too and most of our minds have been doing it.
Even after they have been converted to better ways,
they still long for their old sins,
very much as Saint Augustine did.
Certainly the battle gets easier as one goes on.
The intellect begins to develop its muscles, and begins even to enjoy using
them.
But imagination is always lurking in the background: the intellect is still,
unknown to itself, affected in its own proper processes by images it had rejected
and even forgotten.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
That applies to all freedom, including the freedom of the intellect to do its
own laborious housework.
top