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Introduction
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A transforming energy animates those forms of Christianity which are effective in locally establishing the hope of their creed, and culturally shaping the disposition required for the acceptance of human liberty. We begin to see this with the early rise of Christianity in Rome, ending the bloody Coliseum games; we see this later on in South America where the widespread conversion of the Aztecs brought the all too common practice of human sacrifice to a halt; and we see this with the advent of the great United States Constitutional experiment declared in 1776: numerous instances could be added to these more immediate examples.
It is a sad fact of history, on the other hand, that, at various times, injustices and atrocities were committed in the name of Christianity on all the fronts just mentioned. The essential point of relevance, however, is how those wrongs were anathema to the Christian spirit which acted so heroically for the cause of human dignity. For this spirit is at the heart of an experiential Gospel--an existential Gospel, it is the very lifeblood of the Perennial Christian, and it�s full meaning (which will underlie and intertwine as the two major themes of this work) is the true expression of the two great Commandments: To love God with all of your heart, soul and mind and your neighbor as yourself.
The full Existential Gospel acknowledges degrees of personal contact with the living God through love-knowledge, it gives primacy to the I-Thou relationship with no less directness and intensity than Martin Buber�s philosophy, and it sees the end and goal of Earthly life as the way of Mary: contemplative prayer--union with God. It only then adds to this life the way of Martha: the means of action--the love of neighbor.
In Oriental practice primacy was traditionally given to religious experience, to an inner, meditative focus and tranquil self denial. In the tradition taken into the West stress was given, rather, to the naturally virtuous and active life. Both routes can justify themselves with an increasing personal peace. But it is only the close union of the two which guarantees a fullness of life, on the natural level, for the person as well as society, and only a Personal God can grant this fullness through the unifying virtue of Hope, and the transcendent promise of Eternal Joy. Belief in a Personal God of this type necessarily raises the definition of a full life beyond a natural level, for hope in the attainment of Eternal Joy is conditioned upon humility, purity, and love, which go far beyond the requirements of the natural law. For anyone making a serious attempt at virtue, even at just the natural level�let alone the virtues just mentioned on the supernatural level�the impossibility of doing so perfectly becomes increasingly discouraging.
The unifying strength of the Gospel is therefore found in the promise that man�s relationship with God has somehow been restored through the God-Man, Jesus Christ. Yet all too often this news remains a dim and far off hope with no relation to the present.
Experiential participation in the Fullness of Being, a Joyous Bliss, and a Loving-Awareness is seen not for the here and now, but for some virtually unimaginable future existence after death. But this is not the way of traditional Christianity, which, though it did rightly envision man�s final end in the Beatific Vision only after death, still positively found stages of participation along the journey, culminating in a union of Earthly beatitude. In an age of rotting dreams, crumbling hope, powerless wills and confused doctrine, Christian unity is an urgent necessity. But there can be no real, lasting unity without the restoration of this forgotten focus, the explication of The Existential Gospel.
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Relational Contemplation
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Despair, fear, guilt, reward, thankfulness, relief, power (over sin), the fitness of doctrine in relation to reality�these are just a handful of motives by which people have come to receive Christ in faith. In every case an emotion follows as a reaction to a personal encounter�that is, the experience comes with the force, the conviction, that there now exists an open relationship between the subject and the Son of God. In some cases the emotional means through which the encounter has taken place is set up as the universal means by which every man should likewise come to it. Thus arise the inevitable schisms between grace and free-will, between total depravity and the inner-light, between faith and love, between the Christian and the heretic, between the Protestant and Protestant, and the Protestant and Catholic.
Some eventually forget their experience, or look back ashamedly and feel taken; in some it causes a permanent reformation in the will along with the sustained emotional note which accompanied it; then for others it remains a momentous event which is either fondly looked back upon now, then forgotten in daily life, or which actually becomes the nostalgic point from which a life of determined obedience, amidst emotional abandonment, proceeds. For most Christians it is probably a combination of the last two, a series of rededications, of attempts, which taper off only to be ignited again. In any case we have a range of experiences, among which there remains the common theme of relationship, and the one person who is the object of this relationship is the historical Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate.
In general there are many religions that have personal devotions, but only Christianity, among all the major religions, has the originality of devotion to a human person also believed to be (in some way that ordinary men are not) God�s Son. It says that without God�s action toward us, in the fullness of time, we could in no meaningful way be in communion with Him. Yet much has been made about the core doctrine in which this believed possibility was affected�I speak of course about the doctrine of the Atonement�particularly, for example, by Aldous Huxley who in his essay Symbol and Immediate Experience brings, we must admit, a reasonable charge. He notes that early in the history of Christianity the atonement was thought of as a covenant-sacrifice, or as a ransom freeing a slave, then it became known as expiation for original sin. Later, he records, the Greek fathers thought of His life, not his death, as the primary �saving quality,� while the Latin fathers found redemption from guilt. Then there was the question of payment: to Satan or God? The answers differed. Later still the Reformation saw Calvin stress retributive justice, then afterwards it took a more ethical and spiritual formation in Protestantism. With this complicated history in mind Huxley rhetorically asks, �Can the many fantastic and mutually incompatible theories of expiation and atonement�be regarded as indispensable elements in a �sane theology?�� The answer is an emphatic yes. For as we�ve noted the inconsistencies appear not in the object experienced, but in the experience itself, and if we continue the point in each case the result of the experience is, at a ground level, a personal one. Therefore C.S. Lewis, recalling a similar reaction as that of Huxley, can go on to conclude "What I came to see later was that neither this theory or any other is Christianity. The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God... Theories as to how it did this are [�a secondary�] matter."
Indeed, as a former Protestant I can say that the liberating and revolutionary appeal of Evangelical Christianity is it�s primary emphasis on a personal relationship with the Ancient God of Israel, the Alpha and Omega, the �I am,� through the historical anomaly of the person of Jesus Christ. Yet there were other enigmatic characters who followed. Traditional forms of Christianity call these unusual people Saints, and they are themselves devotees and lovers of our Lord, many with extraordinary claims that they�ve been spiritually touched in the depths of their souls by this same Lord of history and God of eternity. Their actions are otherworldly, their fruit is unmistakable, and their doctrines are completely orthodox: the rub is that they�re associated with the word �mystic.� In our contemporary minds the word has certain associations, it calls to mind anything from fortune tellers, crystal balls and tarot cards to beings and items of superstition and fantasy. Such things, however, belong to the phenomena of the psyche and imagination. A true mystic in the traditional sense is merely someone who�s experienced, not on a sensual level but on some higher intellectual or spiritual level, what �our hearts are restless for.� St. Augustine most eloquently expresses such an experience:
�You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have
tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your
peace.�
The importance of these experiences is that they accompany a disposition, or habit of the will to follow the commands of Christ: these touches of blissfulness are by-products of a reality present and working in the soul, brought forth into the soul through the dark cloud of faith and kept within by the perseverance of love. Father Dubay points out that Scripture makes promises to us to be enjoyed not only after death, but even here and now. Ephesians chapter 3 says we may be filled with all the fullness of God (presumably a fullness relative to our limited earthly capacity). 1 Peter 1:8 speaks of an indescribable joy and glory, and John of a delight that is complete, a joy that is full. Yet most of us remain on the ground level at which we entered a relationship with Christ, trying to muscle our way through life with no real hope of attaining any sort of heavenly peace, ecstasy or will power which transcends our every day experience. Consequently we often, through despair, seek this experience through other means, either through more destructive means like drugs, alcohol, sexual pleasures etc., or through less immediately destructive means like the pursuit of material wealth at virtually all other costs, or losing oneself in the distractions of worldly entertainment. Such means of escape only intensify our selfish needs and secure our isolation from the spiritual promises active and living in the Saints.
But I think this despair, so characteristic even of many Christians--who deny it by their mouths yet affirm it with their actions--does not have to be our lot. For we meet another Scriptural insight mentioned by Father Dubay in 2 Cor 3:18, the image of moving from glory to glory. I was profoundly struck by a comment once made by my local priest, Father Behrend. He said that the personal relationship which Protestants always talk about is only the bottom rung on a seven step ladder of man�s relationship to God, the very top culminating in mystical union. I think he had in mind St Teresa�s Seven Mansions, and I would even go so far as to say the relationship talked about by Protestants includes the first three mansions. Regardless of the placement, it suffices to point out what an amazing connection exists between the various stages�mystical levels--of personal intimacy with our God and the idea of moving from glory to glory.
Yet, at the present time this idea isn�t exactly spreading around the Catholic Church like wildfire�nor has it for a while. It is here we meet an interesting dilemma. The type of Christianity which presents the gospel in the most straight forward of personal terms confines itself to stages of relationship it should pass beyond. The other type which reaches this relationship in less explicitly personal terms passes on a tradition of amazing personal depth to which no one within it�s fold seems to pay any attention.
The problem has a diagnosis--one fleshed out, incidentally, by the aforementioned Aldous Huxley who was amazingly accurate on this account: �In traditional Christianity�it was axiomatic that contemplation is the end and purpose of action.� He later quotes St. Thomas, �Action�should be something added to the life of prayer, not something taken away from it.� Father Dubay has a complimentary insight, �Despite the fact that Jesus Himself declared in the Mary-Martha episode that drinking undividedly of the Lord is the �one thing�, the overriding necessity in any human life and of greater importance than activity�[d]espite the fact that the apostles themselves considered their duty to be prayer first of all, and then proclaiming the word (Acts 6: 3-4), seminaries rarely�direct serious course attention to equipping the students to lead the faithful to drink deeply, to taste and see how good the Lord is�Vatican II laid it down that for all men and women �action is subordinate to contemplation�� Everywhere I meet sincere people who are hungering for something deeper than what they hear in the Sunday homily�men and women tell me that they never hear of contemplation.�
There are constantly movements which seek to get back to the pure gospel and re-discover it�s power. All such efforts that I�ve seen are doomed to neglect the most historically obvious diagnosis of why we truly left it, and thus neglect the remedy: a countering of the effect which has confused ends and means. Since prayer has taken a peripheral role we�ve consequently lost it�s inner depth�and the contemplative dimension remains inaccessible.
�Where our fathers, peering into the future, saw gleams of gold, we see only the mist, white, featureless, cold and never moving.� --Lewis
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The Faculty of Faith
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For centuries Philosophers have been alienating the common man by proposing nonsense which bears no relation to the facts by which he actually lives. Yet the facts by which he does live, and the means by which he knows these facts, are unto themselves their own philosophy. Thus the common man takes it for granted that our senses provide us with knowledge that is, in principle, reliable (we only know the instances we�re deceived by sense perception by further recourse to verification by our senses). Thus the communication of his knowledge through the common nouns of language�like dog and man�assume in his mind knowledge of universals. Thus, in addition, he also has the basic intuition that things exist outside of his mind, that the material world is a world of changing things, and that both his mind and the outer world are governed by the principle of contradiction. One could say these assumptions are perennial facts so that any philosophy which is built upon and preserves them has every right to be christened The Perennial Philosophy. Indeed, since such a philosophy exists which includes contributions from men like Aristotle, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, and Mortimer Adler (to name but a handful), and since it has shaped the thought of the West especially concerning the nature and equality of man, then using it to illumine our understanding of Christian contemplation and man�s relationship to God seems to be much more than a coincidental or convenient fit (we will see later that it is, in fact, a logical necessity).
For now we�ll confine ourselves to a brief understanding of a three-fold division in epistemology (theory of knowledge). First we�ll start with an observation:
�There cannot be any doubt�that the ordinary man makes a distinction between things and their modifications. We have only to examine what we are acustomed to say about the changing size of a tree or the changing colour of its leaves to see that this is the case. Nor can there be any doubt that the ordinary man would regard this linguistic distinction as objectively justified. And it is this spontaneous conviction of the ordinary man which lies at the basis of the substance-accident metaphysic. For the philosopher like Aquinas who accepts this metaphysic, ordinary language reflects the common experience of men, and in common experience a distinction between substance and accident is implicitly recognized. What the philosopher does is not to invent a gratuitous theory or even to make a discovery of which the ordinary man has no inkling, but rather to express explicitly and in abstract terms a distinction which is implicitly recognized by the ordinary man in concrete instances. A substance is that of which we say primarily that it exists and which is not predicated of something else in the way in which we predicate pallor of John or redness of a rose, while an accident is that which exists only as a modification of a substance or a thing and which is predicated of a substance.� --Copleston
We�ve all heard the stories about visiting beggars who were actually angels, or in early pagan times, gods. In a modified illustration that I used to explain to my eight year old daughter the distinction between sense and intellectual knowledge, I made the beggar a horse with an angel nature. All of it�s appearances (accidents)--the way it looks, sounds, smells, etc., are known by our senses. What it is (the substance��horse�) is known by our intellect. However, if someone she trusted were to tell her the horse was not really a horse, but an angel in disguise, then she would know this on faith, for our intellects form concepts like horse based on sense appearances, not on direct knowledge of an inner nature.
Very well, we have direct knowledge of appearances called sense knowledge, and intellectual knowledge which knows (infers) what is behind appearances (horse). In this case, however, we have an additional type of knowledge which came to us from a different route, it�s a knowledge based on faith and trust, and it�s only as good as the messenger who would himself have to either trust in a similar messenger, or have (as someone down the line eventually would) a third and direct mode of knowledge. Contemplative knowledge is analogous to this latter type of knowledge in both ways. In most cases it enters, or is nurtured, through faith based on the communication of the Gospel (Christ put us right with God) from Scripture. Scripture, then, is the messenger. In this case, however, the messenger not only communicates an inference, but, if accepted, is also the vehicle through which an infused reality is imparted into the depths of our being; the same reality or direct insight at the back of Scripture. This is why faith is a dark or cloudy knowledge, and why it grows through various stages only by love. In that sense it confirms itself, and in that sense we see it confirmed in the lives of the saints: the only true Christians.
Faith, therefore, is trust (in the messengers of Scripture and the Saints) that a new reality has been added to our being, that a draw-bridge has been let down, a door opened; but it�s also active through love--through obedience to Christ--it�s a reality, according to the great mystics, which evidences itself in a number of ways. First, and most important, by the imperceptible strengthening of our wills which grows over time. Second, at times, by a joyous delight, felt as God�s burning touch, which has no other object than a good--the Good�transcending finite objects, towards which our souls otherwise turn in mere hope. And last, it sometimes comes with knowledge--be it images, visions, or thoughts. Faith, in this existential sense, is meant to pass beyond the emotions and other motives which accompanied it�s initial assent; it is meant to move beyond St. Teresa�s first three mansions, on through the fourth where it�s commonly turned back; turned back only to begin again in the continuous cycle of rededications talked about earlier.
I can think of no better way to describe faith in it�s second sense than in the manner of Huxley, �In the words of the Anglican Prayer Book, our eternal life, now and hereafter, �stands in the knowledge of God�; and this knowledge is not discursive, but �of the heart,� a super-rational intuition, direct, synthetic and timeless�� As C.S. Lewis put it, it�s "the wordless and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic."
Normally our intellects, our spiritual �part,� if you will, fashion concepts by which we understand reality. Concepts thus become the eyes of our minds. Yet we cannot see very far through them. When they align with other concepts we sometimes see farther, as if looking through magnified lenses. The eyes through which we see all else, through which we see into these lenses, are the very few self-evident principles of knowledge, the primary one being the principle of contradiction. Such direct, self-evident intuition is properly called the exercise of intellect, of intellectual intuition, while movement, the moving from premise to conclusion through the eyes of self-evidence, is properly called the exercise of reason.
We are enjoying intellectus when we �just see� a self-evident truth; we are exercising ratio when we proceed step by step to prove a truth that is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply �seen� would be the life of an intelligentia, an angel. A life of unmitigated ratio where nothing was simply �seen� and all had to be proved, would presumably be impossible; for nothing can be proved if nothing is self-evident. Man�s mental life is spent laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentia which constitutes intellectus.� --Lewis
Non-conceptual knowledge, "the wordless and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic," takes place when the eyes of our minds are no longer the concepts produced by our intellects, but the very object itself: God. Such a knowledge is intuition through God Himself. This is why faith is supra-intellectual; the object, God, will one day be, Himself, our permanent knowledge, replacing concepts. Until that time the intellect of the active Christian touches God through faith, and this relation grows deeper as the mystical stages progress.
I noted earlier that the level of relationship at which both gun-ho Protestants and fired-up Catholics are largely complacent is only the first three stages of St. Teresa�s seven mansions. This division corresponds closely to that Joseph Conti makes based on his knowledge of mystical theology. These three stages he would call the Active Night of the Senses (which, incidentally, he more aptly labels the Reformation stage), and their characteristics, in addition to the various �motives� I mentioned earlier (hope born of despair, fear, guilt, reward, thankfulness, relief, mastery over self, beauty) include delightful longings and blissful �consolations� by which God woos us into the next stage, beyond gifts of �interior sensations� to a further buttressing of the will: the Passive Night of the Senses. This second phase, this dry desert experience, leads on to phase three, the Illuminative Way. Throughout these phases the faithful believer still finds sporadic delights, finds an increasing faith (underlying surface feelings of abandonment due to the temporary cessation of �consolations� in the Night of the Senses), and, most importantly, a strengthening will.**(Note)
Somewhere along the Illuminative Way St. Teresa says the experience of Ecstasy may begin. Ecstasy is the closest thing to the Beatific Vision where we�ll see God face to face, where we�ll know Him by His own knowledge. Yet in Ecstasy we still leave ourselves, we still know Him by Him, whereas in the last phase, the Unitive State, God is steadily perceived �by contact, not by vision.�
�The spiritual feelings we produce arise from �our nature�, whereas the others (involved in ecstasy) originate in God. �Dubay
Peter Kreeft offers some more insight:
��Ecstasy� means literally �standing-outside-yourself��[n]othing can be physically and literally outside itself, i.e., outside its surface boundaries�[b]ut knowledge and desire enable a person to exist not only inside his skin but also in the knowledge and love of another�in Saint Thomas� words��when he is raised up so as to comprehend things that surpass sense and reason.��
Ecstasy is not a phase, it is not a teresian mansion, it is an experience, rather, like a center in hockey; it is found moving where it wills: anywhere from the Illuminative Way, through the Dark Night of the Soul, to the Unitive State--the highest union with God in this life.
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The Virtues, Love, and Man�s Final End
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Being, Bliss, Awareness; Peace, Joy, Love. This pair of trinities, as Aldous Huxley notes, is essentially equivalent � at least from one perspective � and sums up the fulfillment of man�s final end � The Beatific Vision. From East and West respectively, there come religious traditions which, in their most noble moments, look to an object, the attributes of which this pair of trinities describes and which will be, in some cases, shared with those who partake in this ultimate purpose of our existence for which our hearts long. Peace is the consequence of unified Being, when all our faculties are attached to one purpose, flow from one good will, and do not oppose one another; Joy and Bliss are the positive delight of our will issuing forth from peace, or unified being; and, instead of sense perception and conception, Love becomes the means of Awareness (knowledge) of the object we desire. Through Oriental, Mohammedan, and Judeo-Christian mysticism, religious tendencies have expressed themselves in much the same way as it relates both to the need for nonattachment to our own selfish feelings, desires, thoughts and will; and to the reason for nonattachment: union with the object described by the aforementioned trinities. What the East and West are not agreed on (even within themselves), however, is how to think about what this object is, how it is we meet our hearts desire, and what this means for the individual once attained (a meaning which distinguishes the differing �perspectives� noted in the second sentence).
In so far as it is for the object of our deepest desire, this tendency can be found expressed, in varying degrees, by the great mystics with words very similar to those of St. Augustine, �Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new�Thou hast formed us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee."
And what of the term �love�? We often think of this as a rather weak term, sometimes the adjective �sappy� immediately rides it�s coat tails into our minds. This happens when love is thought of strictly as an emotion. Then there�s the idea of love popularized by the sixties, acting on whatever sensual desire momentarily arises. But, when we think of it as an act of the will, a moment of honest thought and we ask, who was the weaker? the prophets of free love who hid from life in their drug of choice, who acted on every impulse without conscience; or the great Saints such as Mother Teresa who day in and day out left their self centered lives to the undertaker by caring for the sick and dying, who put desires in their proper place, and who took the Cardinal Virtues to heroic levels by denying themselves, facing suffering (theirs and that of others), fear, and life directly in the face as it comes to them -- not diluted by the temporary anesthetics which accompany a hedonistic life. The ancients, who took intellectual pursuit much more seriously than we, did not use one word to cover four distinct meanings. What we blur together by giving one name they knew distinctly. �Ambiguity in language leads to confusion of thought,� and there�s no confusion of thought when �love� is known in these four distinct terms: storge (affection), filia (friendship), eros (love between the sexes, including intimacy), and agape (willing the good of another unconditionally). Agape is also called charity, but that term has been limited to mean �alms giving,� that is, giving to the poor. Giving to the poor may be part of charity, but the full definition means much, much more.
It is love in the agape sense that is strong, and heroic. C.S. Lewis gives a fictional demonstration of what agape may seem like experienced in the presence of the angels in his first book of the Space Trilogy, Perelandra:
�The faces surprised him very much. Nothing like the �angel� of popular art could well be imagined. The rich variety, the hint of undeveloped possibilities, which make the interest of human faces, were entirely absent. One single, changeless expression�so clear that it hurt and dazzled him�was stamped on each and there was nothing else there at all. In that sense their faces were as �primitive,� as unnatural, if you like, as those of archaic statues from Aegina. What this one thing was he could not be certain. He concluded in the end that it was charity. But it was terrifyingly different from the expression of human charity, which we always see either blossoming out of, or hastening to descend into, natural affection. Here there was no affection (emotion) at all; no least lingering memory of it even at ten million years� distance, no germ from which it could spring in any future, however remote. Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightening. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.�
This love is strong, heroic and even, to varying degrees intense, precisely because it works through the Cardinal Virtues, opposite the least of which is Courage. To paraphrase Adler, Temperance (moderating pleasure), along with Courage (withstanding pain and discomfort) are self regarding virtues when taken alone; Justice is that virtue which regards others insofar as we are not to interfere with their pursuit of happiness. But can we in fact take these virtues alone? Or are they instead inseparable from one another? That depends on whether or not they are means or ends. Quite obviously they are means, and the end to which they are means naturally unites and governs them. This governance is called right reason, or Prudence.
Indeed, all these Virtues are inseparable, but Courage, as Lewis notes elsewhere, is the common ingredient found active in each of the others; thus the last thing that can be associated with them is �sappiness,� for they are the very opposite of cowardly -- I would consider them to be termed--in an earthy, figurative and very qualified sense--the John Wayne virtues rather than in any way weak or sappy. Now, the end towards which they work, as just mentioned, is happiness, but happiness is not here taken to mean the momentary psychological satisfaction which comes with the fulfillment of a desire. Instead it is meant to encompass �a whole life enriched by the possession of everything that is really good for human beings.� I do not mean to confuse this end, which can be considered a natural end, with that supernatural end of which I earlier spoke. We will speak more of this natural end later. For now, there�s one more very important thing to keep in mind when considering the virtues. The old saying �creatures of habit� vaguely touches on this last consideration. Lewis uses a very helpful analogy.
�There is a difference between doing some particular just or temperate action and being a just or temperate man. Someone who is not a good tennis player may now and then make a good shot. What you mean by a good tennis player is the man whose eye and muscles and nerves have been so trained by making innumerable good shots that they can now be relied on. They have a certain tone or quality which is there even when he is not playing, just as a mathematician�s mind has a certain habit and outlook which is there even when he is not doing mathematics. In the same way a man who perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character�it is that quality rather than the particular actions which we mean when we talk of �virtue��Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.�
There�s a very particular reason I�ve digressed from the final end of man, to definitions of love, and then to the virtues. The reason is simply that this marks out a descending path for us directly from the Supernatural to the natural, and any variation from this path cannot be the true way to go. This does not mean that this path is open to us, or that we can of ourselves walk it: these are a matters of Faith (again, another misunderstood term). This only means that any particular Faith must inherently walk this specific way. We will explore this more deeply in a moment. But first let us note a second reason for this digression. The virtuous person, as I believe Aristotle once remarked, delights more and more in virtue.
"...[at first] Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of [musical] counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world. A man who has trained himself in goodness comes to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world -- intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man..." --Huxley
Faiths which hold to the Beatific Vision as man�s final end would add that this is the case because partaking in these virtues is like bathing in a light which draws us ever closer to that end while nourishing us at the same time. Aligning our actions with how we ought to act may seem to be a mostly negative chore, as it very often requires giving up immediate sensual and emotional pleasures by which we attempt to achieve and sustain a degree of temporary happiness. However, as those who have achieved a high degree of virtue will tell you, these pleasures are returned ten fold, a hundred fold -- even a thousand, by spiritual pleasures which come as a result of living virtuously, for the good, and this because virtues open up upon that land for which we were made, to speak somewhat figuratively, which we, the average persons, otherwise glimpse and desire only through imagination.
�What would learning do without love?� Huxley quotes St. Bernard, �It would puff up. And love without learning? It would go astray.� This means that learning (how we think) shapes how we love, and how we love shapes how we think � they are causes to one another. It is here we run up against a major dilemma. That which we desire is beyond imagination and conception, yet we must think about this �That� with images and concepts which it is our nature to use. If this is to be possible, then certain images and concepts must balance each other in a way which allows a knowledge that speaks to our will, and at the same time it must work within and preserve the boundaries both of the first principles of speculative knowledge (logic) and practical knowledge (the virtues). This knowledge can be considered the working of the Imagination in the highest sense of the term, and because the imagination has it�s �own laws,� as Chesterton said, the stringing together of images works also when �contradicting one another as the crowded metaphors of a swift poetry may do,� in the words of Lewis. Huxley notes that for this reason knowledge of God is paradoxical. For those who have experienced His touches, there are no words which fully describe their experiences, nor can there be by the very nature of what they�ve experienced. They may use words and descriptions each varying from one another, yet each true in some way; however, because (as the virtues imply) individuals, with all their beautifully differing characteristics, still share the fundamental commonalities of human (else ethics would be a matter of taste or preference), then there must be certain fundamental images and concepts which can only themselves universally reveal the proper way to think about, and therefore truly love, the object of our deepest desire. In other words, God, or the object of our deepest desire, must reveal to us the way to think about Him if in fact this End is open to us.
�God is too big to be contained in any one religion,� so the bumper sticker goes. The sentiment is understandable, but the logic, which we�ll follow in a moment, merely births yet one more religion in which the person who holds it believes God to be contained. If religion X believes the only way to Heaven is to take step A, and one believes God is too big to be confined to that step, then logic says one believes religion X is wrong in so far as step A is wrong. If parts of all religions are correct and incorrect in this way, but every one is wrong as a whole, then the true religion is the one in which a given person sharing this bumper sticker sentiment takes the best parts of all worthy religions to the exclusion of the rest. Yet, keeping in mind the virtues just discussed, if God is to be, in any way, a meaningful reality He must have some relation to the way we should act (and the sentiment implies this). If we should act in certain ways then the flip side of the coin has it that we shouldn�t act in certain ways. Thus morality must be an integral part of any meaningful religion, and most religions acknowledge this fact. So far then our bumper sticker religion is in agreement with most major religions, for if it has no relation to the way we should act, then the sentiment which led us this far is meaningless�it would be only as good as the religions it is criticizing.
So what distinguishes our BSR (Bumper Sticker Religion)? Scriptures? Creeds? Interpretation? The mode of worship? It�s final end? The means to that end? It is here, at the point of practice and doctrine, that the various religions contradict each other, so how will BSR keep itself from becoming just one more religion claiming to contain God? It will have to endeavor to take the highest common factor among them all. But can this be done? I want to examine the most noble attempt that, in my opinion, has ever been made and contrast it with the Catholicity of Traditional Christianity. Keeping in mind the common moral law, we will see why this attempt is not truly possible, why, in fact, it winds up merely placing itself alongside the many other religions. These reasons, in turn, will clarify the criteria for a real universal religion and reveal why Sacramental Christianity is the only current religion which can lay claim to being the true subject of the bumper sticker sentiment�to the dismay, no doubt, of many previous adherents to the ambiguous BSR.
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Aldous Huxley, in his book The Perennial Philosophy, opens with a definition, which, in my opinion, is the most perfect attempt at capturing the BSR: �the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man�s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being�; this, he says, is the �Highest Common Factor� in every one of the higher religions.� In short, mysticism--the aim at transcending ourselves toward union with God--is found, in practice, in every major religion. And how is this achieved?
�Man�s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on, being a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. � Aldous Huxley
It�s achieved, according to Huxley, primarily through the via-negativa -- the negative route of denial. Yet not everyone agrees. Rufus M. Jones, whose positive review of Huxley�s book found on the back cover, later leveled the following criticism:
��He (Huxley) is quite right in maintaining that the way of negation has been perennial. My question is�is it the right way to Reality? �For him, first, last and all time, �Perennial Philosophy,� i.e., mystical wisdom, is a via negativa. One would not guess from this book that there has ever been any other true path to the Ultimately Real, the Goal of the Soul, but this way of negation�this means: �Naught� the self, stop thinking, give up reason, deny desires, cease to will the particular, attain detachment. This state, if it can be called a �state,� is presented by a vast array of quotations from the great mystics�There can be no question that there is an element of truth in this insistence on the severe reduction of self-importance. Egoism is an undoubted hindrance, not only to the religious life, but to the social life as well, even on a purely human level�But, pushed to it�s limit, this aim at self-naughting, at the elimination of �I� and �me� and �my,� at the obliteration of being a separate self, means, if it is taken seriously, that you cease to be a person at all, and I assume that the major business we are here for in this world is to be a rightly fashioned person as an organ of the divine purpose. �May it not be just barely possible that the Essential Reality�is a Concrete Infinite, a Being whose very nature it is to reveal Himself?
What is Jones getting at? Huxley writes �Let us consider these negative definitions of the transcendent and imminent Ground of being. In statements such as Eckart�s, God is equated with nothing. And in a certain sense the equation is exact�The Ground can be denoted as being there, but not defined as having qualities.� Jones himself can be found agreeing with this statement: �Nobody could, or should, conclude that this inward apprehension of God was a terminus, that he had attained all there was ever to be to attained. And yet, what was apprehended was a real and true experience of God��Inapprehensible we clutch Thee!� St. Augustine�expressed.�
Both, it appears, would agree with C.S. Lewis� illuminating insight:
�Great prophets and saints have an intuition of God which is positive in the highest degree. Because, just touching the fringes of His being, they have seen that He is plenitude of life and energy and joy, therefore they have to pronounce that he transcends those limitations which we call personality, passion, change, materiality, and the like. The positive quality in Him�is their only ground for all the negatives. But when we come limping after and try to construct an intellectual or �enlightened� religion, we take over these negatives and use them unchecked by any positive intuition�He is unspeakable�by being too definite. It would be safer to call His trans-corpreal, trans-personal.�
So what, precisely, is the nature of Jones� disagreement? The answer stems from the second phrase of Huxley�s formulation �the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or identical with, divine Reality.� The two differing conceptions of what�s found in the soul, which Huxley subtly breezes over with a simple �or�, lead to two mutually contradictory practices down two different paths seeking two contrary ends. Jones detected this:
�Parmenides and Plato and Plotinus, and their followers in the West; the Upinshads, LaoTzu, Buddhist philosophers, the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedanta, Shankara, and their followers in the East, have plowed this trail of negation so deep that it has come to seem to be the only track of Truth�but it is not the only track. There are intimations of another way, even in Plato, in Plotinus, in all of the Mystics of the West, except Dionysius, and occasionally glimpsed in the East�It is undoubtedly true, as Aldous Huxley has shown, that the great mystics of the Western world, at least down to the Reformation, have traveled the via negativa. It was due, however, to the prevailing metaphysical theory�There is, nevertheless, as I have already intimated, an unlost insistence in the writings of nearly all these mystics�on the direct experience of God�as felt and known.�
This God who can be felt and known is likewise �occasionally glimpsed� in Huxley; his tendency, however, certainly sides with the track of negation where this track is at odds with the �note of affirmation.� And these two paths descend directly from the conceptual difference in Huxley�s formulation.
�Isn�t it possible that there is a perennial philosophy, equally mystical, and equally true, that has always been concerned with the affirmation and true realization of personality?� �Jones
�,,,If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. ..It is just here where Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and immanence. And it is just here that Christianity is on the side of humanity and liberty and love. Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say �little children love one another� rather than to tell one large person to love himself�for the Buddhist�personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God.� �G.K. Chesterton
The conceptual difference is made historically apparent by contrasting anatta (no soul), the core doctrine of the most logically consistent formulation of the negative way�Buddhism--, with the Christian interpretation of the �White Stone� from the Book of Revelations:
�The giving of the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the �Come, thou blessed,� spoken to the individual�The true name is the one which exorcises the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man�s own symbol�his soul�s picture, in a word�the sign which belongs to him and no one else�It is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness, that determines the name.� �George MacDonald
�There is no massing of men with God. When he speaks of gathered men, it is a spiritual body, not as a mass.� �George MacDonald
��.Hence it is truly said of heaven �in heaven there is no ownership. If any there took upon him to call anything his own, he would straightway be thrust out into hell and become an evil spirit.� But it is also said �To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.� What can be more a man�s own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely should love all differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the community of the saints. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of likes, and St. Paul that a body is a unity of different members. Heaven is a city and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell the others�fresh and ever fresh news of the �My God� whom each finds in Him whom all praise as �Our God.� �CS Lewis
Huxley sides with Buddhism:
Yet perhaps it�s still not clear why this is so important. (quote Buddhism white stone and Huxley on tao and how his interpretation of tao conflicts with insight of Declration of Independ