Perennial Phil Ch 12 TIME AND ETERNITY [11,6279] God, Providence; Fate, eternity-philosophy, the Quakers

Perennial Phil Ch 12 TIME AND ETERNITY [11,6279]

THE universe is an everlasting succession of events; but its ground, according to the Perennial Philosophy, is the time­less now of the divine Spirit. 

A classical statement of the relationship between time and eternity may be found in the later chapters of the Consolations of Philosophy, where Boethius summarizes the conceptions of his predecessors, notably of Plotinus.

It is one thing to be carried through an endless life, another thing to embrace the whole presence of an endless life together, which is manifestly proper to the divine Mind.
The temporal world seems to emulate in part that which it can­not fully obtain or express, tying itself to whatever presence there is in this exiguous and fleeting moment—a presence which, since it carries a certain image of that abiding Presence, gives to what­ever may partake of it the quality of seeming to have being. But because it could not stay, it undertook an infinite journey of time; and so it came to pass that, by going, it continued that life, whose plenitude it could not comprehend by staying.

Boethius

Since God hadi always an eternal and present state, His know­ledge, surpassing time's notions, remaineth in the simplicity of His presence and, comprehending the infinite of what is past and to come, considereth all things as though they were in the act of being accomplished.

Boethius

Knowledge of what is happening now does not determine the event. What is ordinarily called God's foreknowledge is in reality a timeless now-knowledge, which is compatible with the freedom of the human creature's will in time.

212  213

The manifest world and whatever is moved in any sort take their causes, order and forms from the stability of the divine Mind. This hath determined manifold ways for doing things; which ways being considered in the purity of God's understanding are named Providence; but being referred to those things which He moveth and disposeth are called Fate.... Providence is the very divine Reason itself, which disposeth all things. But Fate is a disposition inherent in changeable things, by which Providence connecteth all things in their due order.

For Providence equally embraceth all things together, though diverse, though infinite; but Fate puts into motion all things, distributed by places, forms and times; so that the unfolding of the temporal order, being united in the foresight of the divine Mind, is Providence, and the same uniting, being digested and unfolded in time, is called Fate.
As a workman conceiving the form of anything in his mind, taketh his work in hand and executeth by order of time that which he had simply and in a moment foreseen, so God by his Provi­dence disposeth whatever is to be done with simplicity and stabil­ity, and by Fate effecteth by manifold ways and in the order of time those very things which He disposeth. . . . All that is under Fate is also subject to Providence. But some things which are under Providence are above the course of Fate. For they are those things which, being stably fixed in virtue of their nearness to the first divinity, exceed the order of Fate's mobility.

Boethius

The concept of a clock enfolds all succession in time. In the con­cept the sixth hour is not earlier than the seventh or eighth, although the clock never strikes the hour, save when the concept biddeth.

Nicholas of Cusa

From Hobbes onwards, the enemies of the Perennial Philo­sophy have denied the existence of an eternal now. According to these thinkers, time and change are fundamental; there is no other reality. Moreover, future events are completely inde­terminate, and even God can have no knowledge of them.

214  

Consequently God cannot be described as Alpha and Omega-­merely as Alpha and Lambda, or whatever other intermediate letter of the temporal alphabet is now in process of being spelled out. But the anecdotal evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research and the statistical evidence accumulated during many thousands of laboratory tests for extra-sensory perception point inescapably to the conclusion that even human minds are capable of foreknowledge. And if a finite conscious­ness can know what card is going to be turned up three seconds from now, or what shipwreck is going to take place next week, then there is nothing impossible or even intrinsically improb­able in the idea of an infinite consciousness that can know now events indefinitely remote in what, for us, is future time. The 'specious present' in which human beings live may be, and perhaps always is, something more than a brief section of tran­sition from known past to unknown future, regarded, because of the vividness of memory, as the instant we call 'now'; it may and perhaps always does contain a portion of the immedi­ate and even of the relatively distant future. For the Godhead, the specious present may be precisely that interminabiis vitae tota simul et perpetua possessio,the end of all life together and everlasting possession , of which Boethius speaks.

The existence of the eternal now is sometimes denied on the ground that a temporal order cannot co-exist with another order which is non-temporal; and that it is impossible for a changing substance to be united with a changeless substance. This objection, it is obvious, would be valid if the non-temporal order were of a mechanical nature, or if the changeless sub­stance were possessed of spatial and material qualities. But according to the Perennial Philosophy, the eternal now is a consciousness; the divine Ground is spirit; the being of Brahman is chit, or knowledge. That a temporal world should be known and, in being known, sustained and perpetually created by an eternal consciousness is an idea which contains nothing self-contradictory. 215

Finally we come to the arguments directed against those who have asserted that the eternal Ground can be unitively known by human minds. 

This claim is regarded as absurd because it involves the assertion, 'At one time I am eternal, at another time I am in time.' 

But this statement is absurd only if man is a being of a twofold nature, capable of living on only one level. 

But if, as the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have always maintained, man is not only a body and a psyche, but also a spirit, 

and if he can at will live either on the merely human plane or else in harmony and even in union with the divine Ground of his being, then the statement makes perfectly good sense. 

The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man's being to associate itself to some extent with its body, but capable, if it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit and, through its spirit, with the divine Ground. 

The spirit remains always what it eternally is; but man is so constituted that his psyche cannot always remain identified with the spirit. In the statement, 'At one time I am eternal, at another time I am in time,' the word 'I' stands for the psyche, which passes from time to eternity when it is identified with the spirit and passes again from eternity to time, either voluntarily or by involuntary necessity, when it chooses or is compelled to identify itself with the body.
==

• 'The Sufi,' says Jalal-uddin Rumi, 'is the son of time present.' Spiritual progress is a spiral advance. 
• We start as infants in the animal eternity of life in the moment, without anxiety for the future or regret for the past; 
• we grow up into the specifically human condition of those who look before and after, who live to a great extent, not in the present but in memory and anticipation, not spontaneously but by rule and with prudence, in repentance and fear and hope; 
• and we can continue, if we so desire, up and on in a returning sweep towards a point corresponding to our starting place in animality, but incommensurably above it.

==

• Jalal-uddin Rumi는 '수피 족은 현재의 시간의 아들'이라고 말합니다. 영적 진보는 나선형 전진입니다. 
• 우리는 미래에 대한 불안이나 과거에 대한 후회 없이 순간이라는 동물적 영원 속에서 유아로 시작합니다. 
• 우리는 현재가 아니라 기억과 기대 속에서, 자발적으로가 아니라 규칙에 따라 신중하게, 회개와 두려움과 희망 속에서 크게 사는 사람들의 특별한 인간적 조건으로 성장합니다. 
• 그리고 우리는 우리가 원한다면 동물성에서 우리의 출발점에 해당하지만 비교할 수 없을 정도로 그 위에 있는 지점을 향해 계속해서 되돌아갈 수 있습니다.

==

 Once more life is lived in the moment—the life now, not of a sub-human creature, but of a being in whom charity has cast out fear, vision has taken the place of hope, selflessness has put a stop to the posi­tive egotism of complacent reminiscence and the negative egotism of remorse. 

The present moment is the only aperture  through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which charity can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. 

That is why the Sufi and, along with him, every other practising exponent of the Perennial Philo­sophy is, or tries to be, a son of time present.216  

Past and future veil God from our sight;
Burn up both of them with fire. How long
Wilt thou be partitioned by these segments, like a reed?

So long as a reed is partitioned, it is not privy to secrets, Nor is it vocal in response to lip and breathing.

Jalal-uddin Rumi

This emptying of the memory, though the advantages of it are not so great as those of the state of union, yet merely because it delivers souls from much sorrow, grief and sadness, besides im­perfections and sins, is in reality a great good.

Sr. John of the Cross

In the idealistic cosmology of Mahayana Buddhism memory plays the part of a rather maleficent demiurge. 

'When the triple world is surveyed by the Bodhisattva, he perceives that its existence is due to memory that has been accumulated since the beginningless past, but wrongly interpreted' (Lankavatara Sutra). 

The word here translated as 'memory' means literally 'perfuming.' The mind-body carries with it the ineradicable smell of all that has been thought and done, desired and felt, throughout its racial and personal past. The Chinese translate the Sanskrit term by two symbols, signifying 'habit-energy.' The world is what (in our eyes) it is, because of all the con­sciously or unconsciously and physiologically remembered habits formed by our ancestors or by ourselves, either in our present life or in previous existences. These remembered bad habits cause us to believe that multiplicity is the sole reality and that the idea of 'I,' 'me,' 'mine' represents the ultimate truth. 

Nirvana consists in 'seeing into the abode of reality as  it is and not reality quoad nos, as it seems to us.217 Obviously, this cannot be achieved so long as there is an 'us,' to which reality can be relative. 

Hence the need, stressed by every exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, for mortification, for dying to self. And this must be a mortification not only of the appetites, the feelings and the will, but also of the reasoning powers, of consciousness itself and of that which makes our consciousness what it is—our personal memory and our in­herited habit-energies. To achieve complete deliverance, con­version from sin is not enough; there must also be a conversion of the mind, aparawitti, as the Mahayanists call it, or revulsion in the very depths of consciousness. As the result of this revulsion, the habit-energies of accumulated memory are de­stroyed and, along with them, the sense of being a separate ego. Reality is no longer perceived quoad nos (for the good reason that there is no longer a nos to perceive it), but as it is in itself. In Blake's words, 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would be seen as it is, infinite.' By those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit, sarnsara and nirvana, appear­ance and reality, time and eternity are experienced as one and the same.

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.

Eckhart

Rejoice in God all the time, says St. Paul. He rejoices all the time who rejoices above time and free from time. Three things prevent a man from knowing God. The first is time, the second is corporeality, the third is multiplicity. That God may come in, these things must go out—except thou have them in a higher, better way: multitude summed up to one in thee.

Eckhart

218 
Whenever God is thought of as being wholly in time, there is a tendency to regard Him as a 'numinous' rather than a moral being, 

a God of mere unmitigated Power rather than a God of Power, Wisdom and Love, 

an inscrutable and danger­ous potentate to be propitiated by sacrifices, 

not a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit. 

All this is only natural; for time is a perpetual perishing and a God who is wholly in time is a God who destroys as fast as He creates. 

Nature is as incompre­hensibly appalling as it is lovely and bountiful. 

If the Divine does not transcend the temporal order in which it is immanent, and if the human spirit does not transcend its time-bound soul, then there is no possibility of 'justifying the ways of God to man.' 

God as manifested in the universe is the irresistible Being who speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, and 

whose emblems are Behemoth and Leviathan, the war horse and the eagle. 

It is this same Being who is described in the apocalyptic eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita. '0 Supreme Spirit,' says Arjuna, addressing himself to the Krishna whom he now knows to be the incarnation of the Godhead, 

'I long to see your Isvara-form'—that is to say, his form as God of the world, Nature, the temporal order. 

Krishna answers, 'You shall behold the whole universe, with all things animate and inanimate, within this body of mine.' Arjuna's reaction to the revelation is one of amazement and fear.  

Ah, my God, I see all gods within your body;

Each in his degree, the multitude of creatures;

See Lord Brahma seated upon his lotus,

See all the sages and the holy serpents.
Universal Form, I see you without limit,

Infinite of eyes, arms, mouths and bellies

—See, and find no end, midst or beginning.

There follows a long passage, enlarging on the omnipotence and all-comprehensiveness of God in his Isvara-form. 

Then the quality of the vision changes, 

and Arjuna realizes, with fear and trembling, 

that the God of the universe is a God of destruction as well as of creation.219

Now with frightful tusks your mouths are gnashing, Flaring like the fires of Doomsday morning—North, south, east and west seem all confounded—Lord of devas, world's abode, have mercy!...

Swift as many rivers streaming to the ocean, Rush the heroes to your fiery gullets, Moth-like to meet the flame of their destruction. Headlong these plunge into you and perish.

Tell me who you are, and were from the beginning,
You of aspect grim. 0 God of gods, be gracious.
Take my homage, Lord. From me your ways are hidden.

'Tell roe who you are.' The answer is clear and unequivocal.

I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples, Ready for the hour that ripens to their ruin.

But the God who comes so terribly as Time also exists time­lessly as the Godhead, as Brahman, whose essence is Sat, Chit, Ananda, Being, Awareness, Bliss; 

and within and beyond man's time-tortured psyche is his spirit, 'uncreated and uncreatable,' as Eckhart says, the Atman which is akin to or even identical with Brahman. 

The Gita, like all other formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, justifies God's ways to man by affirming —and the affirmation is based upon observation and immediate experience that man can, if he so desires, die to his separate temporal selfness and so come to union with timeless Spirit. 

It affirms, too, that the Avatar becomes incarnate in order to assist human beings to achieve this union. 

This he does in three ways—

• by teaching the true doctrine in a world blinded by voluntary ignorance; 
• by inviting souls to a 'carnal love' of his humanity, not indeed as an end in itself, but as the means to spiritual love-knowledge of Spirit; and 
• finally by serving as a channel of grace.220 

God who is Spirit can only be worshipped in spirit and for his own sake; 

but God in time is normally worshipped by material means with a view to achieving temporal ends. 

God. in time is manifestly the destroyer as well as the creator; and because this is so, it has seemed proper to worship him by methods which are as terrible as the destructions he himself inflicts. 

Hence, in India, the blood sacrifices to Kali, in her aspect as Nature-the-Destroyer; hence those offerings of chil­dren to 'the Moloclis,' denounced by the Hebrew prophets; hence the human sacrifices practised, for example, by the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Druids, the Aztecs. 

In all such cases the divinity addressed was a god in time, or a per­sonification of Nature, which is nothing else but Time itself; the devourer of its own offspring; and in all cases the purpose of the rite was to obtain a future benefit or to avoid one of the enormous evils which Time and Nature for ever hold in store. 

For this it was thought to be worth while to pay a high price in that currency of suffering, which the Destroyer so evidently valued. The importance of the temporal end justified the use of means that were intrinsically terrible, because intrin­sically time-like. 

Sublimated traces of these ancient patterns of thought and behaviour are still to be found in certain theories of the Atonement, and in the conception of the Mass as a perpetually repeated sacrifice of the God-Man.

In the modern world the gods to whom human sacrifice is offered are personifications, not of Nature, but of man's own, home-made political ideals.

These, of course, all refer to events in time—actual events in the past or the present, fancied events in the future. And here it should be noted that the philosophy which affirms the existence and the immediate realizableness of eternity is related to one kind of political theory and practice; 

the philosophy which affirms that what goes on in time is the only reality, results in a different kind of theory and justifies quite another kind of political practice. 

This has been clearly recognized by Marxist writers,' who point out that when Christianity is mainly preoccupied with events in time, it is a 'revolutionary religion,' and that 

when, under mystical influences, it stresses the Eternal Gospel, of which the historical or pseudo-historical facts recorded in Scripture 

are but symbols, it becomes politically 'static' and 'reactionary.'221

This Marxjan account of the matter is somewhat over­simplified. It is not quite true to say that all theologies and philosophies whose primary concern is with time, rather than eternity, are necessarily revolutionary. 

The aim of all revolu­tions is to make the future radically different from and better than the past. But some time-obsessed philosophies are primarily concerned with the past, not the future, and their politics are entirely a matter of preserving or restoring the status quo and getting back to the good old days. 

But the retrospective time-worshippers have one thing in common with the revolutionary devotees of the bigger and better future; 

they are prepared to use unlimited violence to achieve their ends. It is here that we discover the essential difference between the politics of eternity-philosophers and the politics of time-philosophers. 

For the latter, the ultimate good is to be found in the temporal world—in a future, where everyone will be happy because all are doing and, thinking something either entirely new and unprecedented or, alternatively, some­thing old, traditional and hallowed. 

And because the ultimate good lies in time, they feel justified in making use of any temporal means for achieving it. 

The Inquisition burns and tortures in order to perpetuate a creed, a ritual and an ecclesi-astico-politico-financial organization regarded as necessary to men's eternal salvation. 

Bible-worshipping Protestants fighit long and savage wars, in order to make the world safe for what they fondly imagine to be the genuinely antique Christianity of apostolic times. 

Jacobins and Bolsheviks are ready to sacri­fice millions of human lives for the sake of a political and economic future gorgeously unlike the present. 

* See, for example, Professor J. B. S. Haldane's The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences.

222 

And now all Europe and most of Asia has had to be sacrificed to a crystal-gazer's vision of perpetual Co-Prosperity and the Thousand-Year Reich. From the records of history it seems to be abund­antly clear that most of the religions and philosophies which take time too seriously are correlated with political theories that inculcate and justify the use of large-scale violence. The only exceptions are those simple Epicurean faiths, in which the reac­tion to an all too real time is 'Eat, drink and be merry, for to­morrow we die.' This is not a very noble, nor even a very realistic kind of morality. But it seems to make a good deal more sense than the revolutionary ethic: 'Die (and kill), for tomorrow someone else will eat, drink and be merry.' In practice, of course, the prospect even of somebody else's future merriment is extremely precarious. For the process of whole­sale dying and killing creates material, social and psychological conditions that practically guarantee the revolution against the achievement of its beneficent ends.

For those whose philosophy does not compel them to take time with an excessive seriousness the ultimate good is to be sought neither in the revolutionary's progressive social apoca­lypse, nor in the reactionary's revived and perpetuated past, but in an eternal divine now which those who sufficiently desire this good can realize as a fact of immediate experience. 

The mere act of dying is not in itself a passport to eternity; 

nor can wholesale killing do anything to bring deliverance either to the slayers or the slain or their posterity. 

The peace that passes all understanding is the fruit of liberation into eternity; 

but in its ordinary everyday form peace is also the root of liberation. 

For where there are violent passions and compelling distrac­tions, this ultimate good can never be realized. That is one of the reasons why the policy correlated with eternity-philosophies is tolerant and non-violent. 

The other reason is that the eter­nity, whose realization is the ultimate good, is a kingdom of heaven within. 

Thou art That; and though That is immortal and impassible, the killing and torturing of individual 'thous' is a matter of cosmic significance, inasmuch as it interferes with the normal and natural relationship between individual souls and the divine eternal Ground of all being. 

Every violence is, over and above everything else, a sacrilegious rebellion against the divine order.  223
===
Passing now from theory to historical fact, we find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and the most humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Moham­medanism (all of them obsessed with time), Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism, which has gone hand in hand with the political and economic oppression of the coloured peoples. 

For four hundred years, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, most of the Chris­tian nations of Europe have spent a good part of their time and energy in attacking, conquering and exploiting their non-Christian neighbours in other continents. In the course of these centuries many individual churchmen did their best to mitigate the consequences of such iniquities; but none of the major Christian churches officially condemned them. 

The first collective protest against the slave system, introduced by the English and the Spaniards into the New World, was made in 1688 by the Quaker Meeting of Germantown. This fact is highly significant.

 Of all Christian sects in the seventeenth century, the Quakers were the least obsessed with history, the least addicted to the idolatry of things in time. They believed that the inner light was in all human beings and that salvation came to those who lived in conformity with that light and was not dependent on the profession of belief in historical or pseudo-historical events, nor on the performance of certain rites, nor on the support of a particular ecclesiastical organiza­tion. Moreover, their eternity-philosophy preserved them from the materialistic apocalypticism of that progress-worship which in recent times has justified every kind of iniquity from war and revolution to sweated labour, slavery and the exploitation of savages and children—has justified them on the ground that the supreme good is in future time and that any temporal means, however intrinsically horrible, may be used to achieve that good. 

Because Quaker theology was a form of eternity-philosophy, Quaker political theory rejected war and persecu­tion as means to ideal ends, denounced slavery and proclaimed racial equality. Members of other denominations had done good work for the African victims of the white man's rapacity. 

===

One thinks, for example, of St. Peter Claver at Cartagena. But this heroically charitable 'slave of the slaves' never raised his voice against the institution of slavery or the criminal trade by which it was sustained; nor, so far as the extant documents reveal, did he ever, like John Woolman, attempt to persuade the slave-owners to free their human chattels. The reason, presumably, was that Claver was a Jesuit, vowed to perfect obedience and constrained by his theology to regard a certain political and ecclesiastical organization as being the mystical body of Christ. The heads of this organization had not pro­nounced against slavery or the slave trade. Who was he, Pedro Claver, to express a thought not officially approved by his superiors?

===

Another practical corollary of the great historical eternity-philosophies, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, is a morality inculcating kindness to animals. Judaism and orthodox Chris­tianity taught that animals might be used as things, for the realization of man's temporal ends. Even St. Francis' attitude towards the brute creation was not entirely unequivocal. True, he converted a wolf and preached sermons to birds; but when Brother Juniper hacked the feet off a living pig in order to satisfy a sick man's craving for fried trotters, the saint merely blamed his disciple's intemperate zeal in damaging a valuable piece of private property.

It was not until the nineteenth cen­tury, when orthodox Christianity had lost much of its power over European minds, that the idea that it might be a good thing to behave humanely towards animals began to make headway. 

This new morality was correlated with the new interest in Nature, which had been stimulated by the romantic poets and the men of science. Because it was not founded upon an eternity-philosophy, a doctrine of divinity dwelling in all living creatures, the modern movement in favour of kindness to animals was and is perfectly compatible with intolerance, persecution and systematic cruelty towards human beings. Young Nazis are taught to be gentle with dogs and cats, ruth­less with Jews. That is because Nazism is a typical time-philosophy, which regards the ultimate good as existing, not in eternity, but in the future. Jews are, ex kypot/zesi, obstacles in the way of the realization of the supreme good; dogs and cats are not. The rest follows logically. 225

Selfishness and partiality are very inhuman and base qualities even in the things of this world; but in the doctrines of religion they are of a baser nature. Now, this is the greatest evil that the division of the church has brought forth; it raises in every com­munion a selfish, partial orthodoxy, which consists in courage­ously defending all that it has, and condemning all that it has not.         

And thus every champion is trained up in defence of their own truth, their own learning and their own church, and he has the most merit, the most honour, who likes everything, defends everything, among themselves, and leaves nothing uncensored in those that are of a different communion.

Now, how can truth and goodness and union and religion be more struck at than by such defenders of it? If you ask why the great Bishop of Meaux wrote so many learned books against all parts of the Reformation, it is because he was born in France and bred up in the bosom of Mother Church. Had he been born in England, had Oxford or Cambridge been his Alma Mater, he might have rivalled our great Bishop Stillingfleet, and would have wrote as many learned folios against the Church of Rome as he has done.

- And yet I will venture to say that if each Church could produce but one man apiece that had the piety of an apostle and the impartial love of the first Christians in the first Church at Jerusalem, that a Pro­testant and a Papist of this stamp would not want half a sheet of paper to hold their articles of union, nor be half an hour before they were of one religion.

- If, therefore, it should be said that churches are divided, estranged and made unfriendly to one another by a learning, a logic, a history, a criticism in the hands of partiality, it would be saying that which each particular church too much proves to be true.

- Ask wily even the best amongst the Catholics are very shy of owning the validity of the orders of our Church; it is because they are afraid of removing any odium from the Reformation.

- Ask why no Protestants anywhere touch upon the benefit or necessity of celibacy in those who are separ­ated from worldly business to preach the gospel; it is because that would be seeming to lessen the Roman error of not suffering marriage in her clergy.

- Ask why even the most worthy and pious among the clergy of the Established Church are afraid to assert the sufficiency of the Divine Light, the necessity of seeking only the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit; it is because the Quakers, who have broke off from the church, have made this doctrine their corner-stone. If we loved truth as such, if we sought for it for its own sake, if we loved our neighbour as our­selves, if we desired nothing by our religion but to be acceptable to God, if we equally desired the salvation of all men, if we were afraid of error only because of its harmful nature to us and our fellow-creatures, then nothing of this spirit could have any place in us.

There is therefore a catholic spirit, a communion of saints in the love of God and all goodness, which no one can learn from that which is called orthodoxy in particular churches, but is only to be had by a total dying to all worldly views, by a pure love of God, and by such an unction from above as delivers the mind from all selfishness and makes it love truth and goodness with an equality of affection in every man, whether he is Christian, Jew or Gentile.

- He that would obtain this divine and catholic spirit in this disordered, divided state of things, and live in a divided part of the church without partaking of its division, must have these three truths deeply fixed in his mind.

First, that universal love, which gives the whole strength of the heart to God, and makes us love every man as we love ourselves, is the noblest, the most divine, the Godlike state of the soul, and is the utmost per­fection to which the most perfect religion can raise us; and that no religion does any man any good but so far as it brings this per‑fection of love into him. This truth will show us that true ortho­doxy can nowhere be found but in a pure disinterested love of God and our neighbour.

Second, that in this present divided state of the church, truth itself is torn and divided asunder; and that, therefore, he can be the only true catholic who has more of truth and less of error than is hedged in by any divided part. This truth will enable us to live in a divided part unhurt by its division, and keep us in a true liberty and fitness to be edified and assisted by all the good that we hear or see in any other part of the church.

Thirdly, he must always have in mind this great truth, that it is the glory of the Divine Justice to have no respect of parties or persons, but to stand equally disposed to that which is right and wrong as well in the Jew as in the Gentile. He therefore that would like as God likes, and condemn as God condemns, must have neither the eyes of the Papist nor the Protestant; he must like no truth the less because Ignatius Loyola or John Bunyan were very zealous for it, nor have the less aversion to any error, because Dr. Trapp or George Fox had brought it forth.

William Law

Dr. Trapp was the author of a religious tract entitled 'On the Nature, Folly, Sin and Danger of Being Righteous Overmuch.' One of Law's controversial pieces was an answer to this work.

Benares is to the East, Mecca to the West; but explore your own heart, for there are both Rama and Allah.

Kabir

Like the bee gathering honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different Scriptures and sees only the good in all religions.

From the Srimad Bhagavatam

228 

His Sacred Majesty the King does reverence to men of all sects, whether ascetics or householders, by gifts and various forms of reverence. His Sacred Majesty, however, cares not so much for gifts or external reverence as that there should be a growth in the essence of the matter in all sects.

The growth of the essence of the matter assumes various forms, but the root of it is restraint of speech, to wit, a man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reasons only; for the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.... He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the glory of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect. Concord therefore is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law of Piety, as accepted by other people.

Edict of Asoka

It would be difficult, alas, to find any edict of a Christian king to match Asoka's. In the West the good old rule, the simple plan, was glorification of one's own sect, disparagement and even persecution of all others. Recently, however, govern­ments have changed their policy. Proselytizing and persecut­ing zeal is reserved for the political pseudo-religions, such as Communism, Fascism and nationalism; and unless they are thought to stand in the way of advance towards the temporal ends professed by such pseudo-religions, the various mani­festations of the Perennial Philosophy are treated with a contemptuously tolerant indifference.

The children of God are very dear but very queer, very nice but very narrow.

Sadiu Sundar Singh

Such was the conclusion to which the most celebrated of Indian converts was forced after some years of association with his fellow Christians. There are many honourable exceptions, of course; but the rule even among learned Protestants and Catholics is a certain blandly bumptious provincialism which, if it did not constitute such a grave offence against charity and truth, would be just uproariously funny.  229

A hundred years ago, hardly anything was known of Sanskrit, Pali or Chinese. The ignorance of European scholars was sufficient reason for their provincialism. Today, when more or less adequate trans­lations are available in plenty, there is not only no reason for it, there is no excuse. And yet most European and American authors of books about religion and metaphysics write as though nobody had ever thought about these subjects, except the Jews, the Greeks and the Christians of the Mediterranean basin and western Europe. This display of what, in the twen­tieth century, is an entirely voluntary and deliberate ignorance is not only absurd and discreditable; it is also socially danger­ous. Like any other form of imperialism, theological imperial­ism is a menace to permanent world peace. The reign of violence will never come to an end until, 

• first, most human beings accept the same, true philosophy of life; until, 
• second, this Perennial Philosophy is recognized as the highest factor common to all the world religions; until, 
• third, the adherents of every religion renounce the idolatrous time-philosophies, with which, in their own particular faith, the Perennial Philo­sophy of eternity has been overlaid; until, 
• fourth, there is a world-wide rejection of all the political pseudo-religions, which place man's supreme good in future time and therefore justify and commend the commission of every sort of present iniquity as a means to that end. 

If these conditions are not fulfilled, no amount of political planning, no economic blue-prints however ingeniously drawn, can prevent the recrudescence of war and revolution.

Perennial Phil Ch 11 GOOD AND EVIL [7, 3343] 자기 안의 자기를 죽이고 하나님을 따르는 것

Perenial Phil Ch 11 GOOD AND EVIL [7, 3343]

DESIRE is the first datum of our consciousness; we are born into sympathy and antipathy, wishing and willing. Unconsciously at first, then consciously, we evaluate: 'This is good, that is bad.' And a little later we discover obligation. 'This, being good, ought to be done; that, being bad, ought not to be done.'

All evaluations are not equally valid. We are called upon to pass judgment on what our desires and dislikes affirm to be good or bad. Very often we discover that the verdict of the higher court is at variance with the decision reached so quickly and light-heartedly in the court of first instance. In the light of what we know about ourselves, our fellow-beings and the world at large, we discover that what at first seemed good may, in the long run or in the larger context, be bad; and that what at first seemed bad may be a good which we feel our­selves under obligation to accomplish.

When we say that a man is possessed of penetrating moral insight we mean that his judgment of value-claims is sound; that he knows enough to be able to say what is good in the longest run and the largest context. When we say that a man has a strong moral character, we mean that he is ready to act upon the findings of his insight, even when these findings are unpleasantly or even excruciatingly at variance with his first, spontaneous valuations.

In actual practice moral insight is never a strictly personal matter. The judge administers a system of law and is guided by precedent. In other words, every individual is the member of a community, which has a moral code based upon past find­ings of what in fact is good in the longer run and the wider context. In most circumstances most of the members of any given society permit themselves to be guided by the generally accepted code of morals; a few reject the code, either in its entirety or in part; and a few choose to live by another, higher and more exacting code. 

===

In Christian phraseology, there are the few who stubbornly persist in living in a state of mortal sin and antisocial lawlessness; there are the many who obey the laws, make the Precepts of Morality their guide, repent of mortal sins when they commit them, but do not make much effort to avoid venial sins; and finally there are the few whose righteousness 'exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees,' who are guided by the Counsels of Perfection and have the insight to perceive and the character to avoid venial sins and even imperfections.

Philosophers and theologians have sought to establish a theoretical basis for the existing moral codes, by whose aid individual men and women pass judgment on their spon­taneous evaluations. From Moses to Bentham, from Epicurus to Calvin, from the Christian and Buddhist philosophies of universal love to the lunatic doctrines of nationalism and racial superiority—the list is long and the span of thought enormously wide. But fortunately there is no need for us to consider these various theories. Our concern is only with the Perennial Philosophy and with the system of ethical principles which those who believe in that philosophy have used, when passing judgment on their own and other people's evaluations. The questions that we have to ask in this section are simple enough, and simple too are the answers. As always, the difficulties begin only when we pass from theory to practice, from ethical principle to particular application.
====

Granted that the ground of the individual soul is akin to, or identical with, the divine Ground of all existence, and granted that this divine Ground is an ineffable Godhead that manifests itself as personal God or even as the incarnate Logos, what is the ultimate nature of good and evil, and what the true purpose and last end of human life?
===

The answers to these questions will be given to a great extent in the words of that most surprising product of the English eighteenth century, William Law. 

(How very odd our educational system is! Students of English literature are forced to read the graceful journalism of Steele and Addison, are expected to know all about the minor novels of Defoe and the tiny elegances of Matthew Prior. But they can pass all their examinations summa cum laude without having so much as looked into the writings of a man who was not only a master of English prose, but also one of the most interesting thinkers of his period and one of the most endearingly saintly figures in the whole history of Anglicanism.) 

Our current neglect of Law is yet another of the many indications that twentieth-century educators have ceased to be concerned with questions of ultimate truth or meaning and (apart from mere vocational training) are interested solely in the dissemination of a root­less and irrelevant culture, and the fostering of the solemn foolery of scholarship for scholarship's sake.

Nothing burns in hell but the self.

Theologia Germanica

The mind is on fire, thoughts are on fire. Mind-consciousness and the impressions received by the mind, and the sensations that arise from the impressions that the mind receives—these too are on fire.
And with what are they on fire? With the fire of greed, with the fire of resentment, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age and death, with sorrow and lamentation, with misery and grief and despair they are on fire.

From the Buddha's Fire Sermon

If thou hast not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

Jalal-uddin Rumi

Your own self is your own Cain that murders your own Abel.

For every action and motion of self has the spirit of Anti-Christ and murders the divine life within you.

William Law

The city of God is made by the love of God pushed to the contempt of self; the earthly city, by the love of self pushed to the contempt of God.

St. Augustine

The difference between a good and a bad man does not lie in this, that the one wills that which is good and the other does not, but solely in this, that the one concurs with the living inspiring spirit of God within him, and the other resists it, and can he chargeable with evil only because he resists it.

선한 사람과 악한 사람의 차이는 한 사람이 선한 것을 원하고 다른 사람이 원하지 않는다는 데 있지 않고 오직 여기에　있다．　한　사람은 자기 안에 있는 하나님의 살아 있는 영감을 주는 영과 일치하려고　한다는 것과, 다른 사람은 그것에 저항한다는　것．　그　하나님의　영에　저항한다는　것에　악이　있다고　볼　수　있다．　

William Law

People should think less about what they ought to do and more about what they ought to be. If only their being were good, their works would shine forth brightly. Do not imagine that you can ground your salvation upon actions; it must rest on what you are. The ground upon which good character rests is the very same ground from which man's work derives its value, namely a mind wholly turned to God. Verily, if you were so minded, you might tread on a stone and it would be a more pious work than if you, simply for your own profit, were to receive the Body of the Lord and were wanting in spiritual detachment.

Eckhart

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

Bliagavad-Gita

It is mind which gives to things their quality, their foundation and their being. Whoever speaks or acts with impure mind, him sorrow follows, as the wheel follows the steps of the ox that draws the cart.

Dhammapada

The nature of a man's being determines the nature of his actions; and the nature of his being comes to manifestation first of all in the mind. What he craves and thinks, what he believes and feels—this is, so to speak, the Logos, by whose agency an individual's fundamental character performs its creative acts. 

These acts will be beautiful and morally good if the being is God-centred, 

bad and ugly if it is centred in the per­sonal self. 

'The stone,' says Eckhart, 'performs its work with­out ceasing, day and night.' For even when it is not actually falling the stone has weight.

 A man's being is his potential energy directed towards or away from God; 

and it is by this potential energy that he will be judged as good or evil—for it is possible, in the language of the Gospel, to commit adultery and murder in the heart, even while remaining blameless in action.

Covetousness, envy, pride and wrath are the four elements of self, or nature, or hell, all of them inseparable from it. And the reason why it must be thus, and cannot be otherwise, is because the natural life of the creature is brought forth for the participation of some high supernatural good in the Creator.

But it could have no fitness, no possible capacity to receive such good, unless it was in itself both an extremity of want and an extremity of desire for some high good.

When therefore this natural life is deprived of or fallen from God, it can be nothing else in itself but an extremity of want continually desiring, and an extremity of desire continually wanting.

And because it is that, its whole life can be nothing else but a plague and torment of covetousness, envy, pride and wrath, all which is precisely nature, self, or hell.

Now covetousness, pride and envy are not three different things, but only three different names for the restless workings of one and the same will or desire. Wrath, which is a fourth birth from these three, can have no existence till one or all of these three are contradicted, or have something done to them that is contrary to their will.

These four properties generate their own torment. They have no outward cause, nor any inward power of altering themselves. And therefore all self or nature must be in this state until some supernatural good comes into it, or gets a birth in it.

Whilst man indeed lives among the vanities of time, his covetous­ness, envy, pride and wrath may be in a tolerable state, may hold him to a mixture of peace and trouble; they may have at times their gratifications as well as their torments. But when death has put an end to the vanity of all earthly cheats, the soul that is not born again of the supernatural Word and Spirit of God, must find itself unavoidably devoured or shut up in its own insatiable, un­changeable, self-tormenting covetousness, envy, pride and wrath.

William Law

covetousness탐욕

covetous, greedy, acquisitive, grasping, avaricious mean having or showing a strong desire for especially material possessions. 

covetous implies inordinate desire often for another's possessions.

It is true that you cannot properly express the degree of your sinfulness; but that is because it is impossible, in this life, to represent sins in all their true ugliness; nor shall we ever know them as they really are except in the light of God. God gives to some souls an impression of the enormity of sin, by which He makes them feel that sin is incomparably greater than it seems. Such souls must conceive their sins as faith represents them (that is, as they are in themselves), but must be content to describe them in such human words as their mouth is able to utter.

Charles de Cona'ren

Lucifer, when he stood in his natural nobility, as God had created him, was a pure noble creature. But when he kept to self, when he possessed himself and his natural nobility as a property, he fell and became, instead of an angel, a devil. So it is with man. If he remains in himself and possesses himself of his natural nobility as a property, he falls and becomes, instead of a man, a devil.

The Following of Christ

If a delicious fragrant fruit had a power of separating itself from the rich spirit, fine taste, smell and colour, which it receives from the virtue of the air and the spirit of the sun, or if it could, in the beginning of its growth, turn away from the sun and receive no virtue from it, then it would stand in its own first birth of wrath, sourness, bitterness, astringency, just as the devils do, who have turned back into their own dark root and have rejected the Light and Spirit of God. So that the hellish nature of a devil is nothing but its own first forms of life withdrawn or separated from the heavenly Light and Love; just as the sourness, bitterness and astringency of a fruit are nothing else but the first form of its vege­table life, before it has reached the virtue of the sun and the spirit of the air.

And as a fruit, if it had a sensibility of itself, would be full of torment as soon as it was shut up in the first forms of its life, in its own astringency, sourness and stinging bitterness, so the angels, when they had turned back into these very same first forms of their own life, and broke off from the heavenly Light and Love of God, became their own hell.

No hell was made for them, no new qualities came into them, no vengeance or pains from the Lord of Love fell on them; they only stood in that state of division and separation from the Son and Holy Spirit of God, which by their own motion they had made for themselves. They had nothing in them but what they had from God, the first forms of a heavenly life; but they had them in a state of self-torment, because they had separated them from birth of Love and Light.

William Law

In all the possibility of things there is and can be but one happi­ness and one misery. The one misery is nature and creature left to itself, the one happiness is the Life, the Light, the Spirit of God, manifested in nature and creature. This is the true meaning of the words of Our Lord: There is but one that is good, and that is God.

William Law

Men are not in hell because God is angry with them;

they are in wrath and darkness because they have done to the light,

which infinitely flows forth from God,

as that man does to the light of the sun, who puts out his own eyes.

William Law

Though the light and comfort of the outward world keeps even the worst of men from any constant strong sensibility of that wrathful, fiery, dark and self-tormenting nature that is the very essence of every fallen unregenerate soul, yet every man in the world has more or less frequent and strong intimations given him that so it is with him in the inmost ground of his soul. How many inventions are some people forced to have recourse to in order to keep off a certain inward uneasiness, which they are afraid of and know not whence it comes? Alas, it is because there is a fallen spirit, a dark aching fire within them, which has never had its proper relief and is trying to discover itself and calling out for help at every cessation of worldly joy.

William Law

In the Hebrew-Christian tradition the Fall is subsequent to creation and is due exclusively to the egocentric use of a free will, which ought to have remained centred in the divine Ground and not in the separate selfhood. 

The myth of Genesis embodies a very important psychological truth, but falls short of being an entirely satisfactory symbol, because it fails to men­tion, much less to account for, the fact of evil and suffering in the non-human world. 

To be adequate to our experience the myth would have to be modified in two ways. 

In the first place, it would have to make clear that creation, the incompre­hensible passage from the unmanifested One into the manifest multiplicity of nature, from eternity into time, is not merely the prelude and necessary condition of the Fall; to some extent it is the Fall. 

And in the second place, it would have to indi­cate that something analogous to free will may exist below the human level.

That the passage from the unity of spiritual to the manifold-ness of temporal being is an essential part of the Fall is clearly stated in the Buddhist and Hindu renderings of the Perennial Philosophy. 

Pain and evil are inseparable from individual existence in a world of time; and, for human beings, there is an intensification of this inevitable pain and evil when the desire is turned towards the self and the many, rather than towards the divine Ground. 

To this we might speculatively add the opinion that perhaps even sub-human existences may be endowed (both individually and collectively, as kinds and species) with something resembling the power of choice. 

==== 

동물과 인간의 차이

There is the extraordinary fact that 'man stands alone'—that, so far as we can judge, every other species is a species of living fossils, capable only of degeneration and extinction, not of further evolutionary advance. 

In the phraseology of Scholastic Aristotelianism, matter possesses an appetite for form—not necessarily for the best form, but for form as such. Looking about us in the world of living things, we observe (with a delighted wonder, touched occasionally, it must be admitted, with a certain questioning dismay) the innumerable forms, always beautiful, often extravagantly odd and sometimes even sinister, in which the insatiable appetite of matter has found its satisfaction. 

Of all this living matter only that which is organized as human beings has succeeded in finding a form capable, at any rate on the mental side, of further develop­ment. 

All the rest is now locked up in forms that can only remain what they are or, if they change, only change for the worse. 

It looks as though, in the cosmic intelligence test, all living matter, except the human, had succumbed, at one time or another during its biological career, to the temptation of assuming, not the ultimately best, but the immediately most profitable form. 

By an act of something analogous to free will every species, except the human, has chosen the quick returns of specialization, the present rapture of being perfect, but per­fect on a low level of being. 

The result is that they all stand at the end of evolutionary blind alleys. To the initial cosmic Fall of creation, of multitudinous manifestation in time, they have added the obscurely biological equivalent of man's volun­tary Fall. 

As species, they have chosen the immediate satis­faction of the self rather than the capacity for reunion with the divine Ground. 

For this wrong choice, the non-human forms of life are punished negatively, by being debarred from real­izing the supreme good, to which only the unspecialized and therefore freer, more highly conscious human form is capable. 

But it must be remembered, of course, that the capacity for supreme good is achieved only at the price of becoming also capable of extreme evil. 

Animals do not suffer in so many ways, nor, we may feel pretty certain, to the same extent as do men and women. 

Further, they are quite innocent of that literally diabolic wickedness which, together with sanctity, is one of the distinguishing marks of the human species.

----

결론

We see then that, for the Perennial Philosophy, 

• good is the separate self's conformity to, and finally annihilation in, the divine Ground which gives it being; 
• evil, the intensification of separateness, the refusal to know that the Ground exists. 

This doctrine is, of course, perfectly compatible with 

the formulation of ethical principles as a series of negative and positive divine commandments, 

or even in terms of social utility. 

The crimes which are everywhere forbidden proceed from states of mind which are everywhere condemned as wrong; and these wrong states of mind are, as a matter of empirical fact, absolutely incompatible with that unitive know­ledge of the divine Ground, which, according to the Perennial Philosophy, is the supreme good.

Perennial Phil Ch 10 GRACE AND FREE WILL [7, 3815]

Perenial Phil Ch 10 GRACE AND FREE WILL [7, 3815]

DELIVERANCE is out of time into eternity, and 

is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things. 

We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a 'state of grace.' 

All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive [?] in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. 

We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

===

rescue, 

deliverance, 

extrication

in a state of grace : having asked God to forgive one's sins

He died in a state of grace.그는 은혜를 입고 죽었다.

===

Examples of 'state of grace' in a sentence

state of grace

--

• Just once, he achieved a state of grace, as if in a dream.
• The state of grace of these characters allows the manifestations of the uncanny.
• Sleep isn't a state of grace; it doesn't make you unimpeachable.
• Work your way towards a nun-like state of grace gently.
• Politicians want your love, grovelling if they say anything that suggests motherhood isn't a permanent state of grace and wisdom.
• It must somehow resume a state of grace that ended roughly half-way through the last century.

===

The Valley Spirit never dies.

It is called the Mysterious Female.
And the doorway of the Mysterious Female [현빈]
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth spring.
It is there within us all the time.
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.

Lao Tu

In every exposition of the Perennial Philosophy the human soul is regarded as feminine in relation to the Godhead, the personal God and even the Order of Nature. 

Hubris, which is the original sin, consists in regarding the personal ego as self-sufficiently masculine in relation to the Spirit within and to Nature without, and in behaving accordingly.

hubris - excessive pride or self-confidence.

St. Paul drew a very useful and illuminating distinction between the psyche and the pneuma. 

But the latter word never achieved any degree of popularity, and the hopelessly ambigu­ous term, 

psyche, came to be used indifferently for either the personal consciousness or the spirit. And why, in the Western church, did devotional writers choose to speak of man's anima (which for the Romans signified the lower, animal soul) instead of using the word traditionally reserved for the rational soul, namely animus?190 

The answer, I suspect, is that they were anxious to stress by every means in their power the essential femininity [?] of the human spirit in its relations with God. 

Pneuma, being grammatically neuter, and animus, being mascu­line, were felt to be less suitable than anima and psyche. 

Con­sider this concrete example; given the structure of Greek and Latin, it would have been very difficult for the speakers of these languages to identify anything but a grammatically feminine soul with the heroine of the Song of Songs—an allegorical figure who, for long centuries, played the same part in Christian thought and sentiment as the Gopi Maidens played in the theology and devotion of the Hindus.

Take note of this fundamental truth. Everything that works in nature and creature, except sin, is the working of God in nature and creature.

The creature has nothing else in its power but the free use of its will, and its free will hath no other power but that of concurring with, or resisting, the working of God in nature. The creature with its free will can bring nothing into being, nor make any alteration in the working of nature; it can only change its own state or place in the working of nature, and so feel or find something in its state that it did not feel or find before.

William Law

====

Defined in psychological terms, grace is something other than our self-conscious personal self, by which we are helped. 

We have experience of three kinds of such helps—animal grace, human grace and spiritual grace. 

Animal grace 

• comes when we are living in full accord with our own nature on the bio­logical level—not abusing our bodies by excess, not interfering with the workings of our indwelling animal intelligence by conscious cravings and aversions, but living wholesomely and laying ourselves open to the 'virtue of the sun and the spirit of the air.' 
• The reward of being thus in harmony with Tao or the Logos in its physical and physiological aspects is a sense of well-being, 
• an awareness of life as good, not for any reason, but just because it is life. 192 
• There is no question, when we are in a condition of animal grace, of propter vitam vivendi perdere causas; for in this state there is no distinction between the reasons for living and life itself. 
• Life, like virtue, is then its own reward. 
• But, of course, the fullness of animal grace is reserved for animals. 
• Man's nature is such that he must live a self-conscious life in time, not in a blissful sub-rational eternity on the hither side of good and evil. 
• Consequently animal grace is something that he knows only spasmodically in an occasional holiday from self-consciousness, or as an accompaniment to other states, in which life is not its own reward but has to be lived for a reason outside itself.

Human grace comes to us either from persons, or from social groups, or from our own wishes, hopes and imaginings pro­jected outside ourselves and persisting somehow in the psychic medium in a state of what may be called second-hand objec­tivity. 

We have all had experience of the different types of human grace. 

1. There is, for example, te grace which, during childhood, comes from mother, father, nurse or beloved teacher. 
2. At a later stage we experience the grace of friends; the grace of men and women morally better and wiser than ourselves; the grace of the guru, or spiritual director. 
3. Then there is the grace which comes to us because of our attachment to country, party, church or other social organization—a grace which has helped even the feeblest and most timid individuals to achieve what, without it, would have been the impossible. 
4. And finally there is the grace which we derive from our ideals, whether low or high, whether conceived of in abstract terms or bodied forth in imaginary personifications. 
5. To this last type, it would seem, belong many of the graces experienced by the pious adherents of the various religions. 
6. The help received by those who devotedly adore or pray to some personal saint, deity or Avatar is often, we may guess, not a genuinely spiritual grace, but a human grace, coming back to the worshipper from the vortex of psychic power set up by repeated acts (his own and other people's) of faith, yearning and imagination.193

Spiritual grace cannot be received continuously or in its full ness, except by those who have willed away their self-will to the point of being able truthfully to say, 'Not I, but God in me.' 

There are, however, few people so irremediably self-condemned to imprisonment within their own personality as to be wholly incapable of receiving the graces which are from instant to instant being offered to every soul. 

By fits and starts most of us contrive to forget, if only partially, our pre­occupation with 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' and so become capable of receiving, if only partially, the graces which, in that moment, are being offered us.

• Spiritual grace originates from the divine Ground of all being, and 
• it is given for the purpose of helping man to achieve his final end, 
• which is to return out of time and selfhood to that Ground. 
• It resembles animal grace in being derived from a source wholly other than our self-conscious, human selves; indeed, 
• it is the same thing as animal grace, but manifesting itself on a higher level of the ascending spiral that leads from matter to the Godhead. 

In any given instance, human grace may be wholly good, inasmuch as it helps the recipient in the task of achieving the unitive knowledge of God; but 

because of its source in the individualized self, it is always a little sus­pect and, in many cases, of course, the help it gives is help towards the achievement of ends very different from the true end of our existence.

All our goodness is a loan; God is the owner. God works and his work is God.

St. John of the Cross

---

Perpetual inspiration is as necessary to the life of goodness, holi­ness and happiness as perpetual respiration is necessary to animal life.

William Law

Conversely, of course, the life of goodness, holiness and beatitude is a necessary condition of perpetual inspiration. 

The relations between action and contemplation, ethics and spirituality are circular and reciprocal. 

Each is at once cause and effect.194

It was when the Great Way declined that human kindness and morality arose.

Lao Tu

Chinese verbs are tenseless. This statement as to a hypo­thetical event in history refers at the same time to the present and the future. 

It means simply this: that with the rise of self-consciousness, animal grace is no longer sufficient for the conduct of life, and must be supplemented by conscious and deliberate choices between right and wrong—choices which have to be made in the light of a clearly formulated ethical code. 

===

[Tao]

But, as the Taoist sages are never tired of repeating, codes of ethics and deliberate choices made by the surface will are only a second best. 

The individualized will and the superficial intel­ligence are to be used for the purpose of recapturing the old animal relation to Tao, but on a higher, spiritual level. 

• The goal is perpetual inspiration from sources beyond the personal self; and 
• the means are 'human kindness and morality,' lead­ing to the charity, 
• which is unitive knowledge of Tao, as at once the Ground and Logos.

Lord, Thou hast given me my being of such a nature that it can continually make itself more able to receive thy grace and good­ness. And this power, which I have of Thee, wherein I have a living image of Thine almighty power, is free will. By this I can either enlarge or restrict my capacity for Thy grace.

Nicholas of Cusa

Shun asked Ch'eng, saying, 'Can one get Tao so as to have it for oneself?'

'Your very body,' replied Ch'eng, 'is not your own. How should Tao be?'

'If my body,' said Shun, 'is not my own, pray whose is it?'

'It is the delegated image of God,' replied Ch'eng.

'Your life is not your own. It is the delegated harmony of God.

Your individuality is not your own. It is the delegated adaptability of God. Your posterity is not your own.

It is the delegated exuviae of God.

You move, but know not how.

You are at rest, but know not why.

You taste, but know not the cause.

These are the operations of God's laws.  

How then should you get Tao so as to have it for your own?'

Chuang Tsu

It is within my power either to serve God, or not to serve Him. Serving Him I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.

Leo Tolstoy

God did not deprive thee of the operation of his love, but thou didst deprive Him of thy cooperation. God would never have rejected thee, if thou hadst not rejected his love. 0 all-good God, thou dost not forsake unless forsaken, thou never takest away thy gifts until we take away our hearts.

St. François de Sales

Ch'ing, the chief carpenter, was carving wood into a stand for musical instruments. When finished, the work appeared to those who saw it as though of supernatural execution; and the Prince of Lu asked him, saying, 'What mystery is there in your art?'

'No mystery, Your Highness,' replied Ch'ing. 'And yet there is something. When I am about to make such a stand, I guard against any diminution of my vital power. I first reduce my mind to absolute quiescence. Three days in this condition, and I become oblivious of any reward to be gained. Five days, and I become oblivious of any fame to be acquired. Seven days, and I become unconscious of my four limbs and my physical frame. Then, with no thought of the Court present in my mind, my skill becomes concentrated, and all disturbing elements from without are gone. I enter some mountain forest, I search for a suitable tree. It contains the form required, which is afterwards elaborated. I see the stand in my mind's eye, and then set to work. Beyond that there is nothing. I bring my own native capacity into relation with that of the wood. 'What was sus­pected to be of supernatural execution in my work was due solely to this.'

Chuang Tu

The artist's inspiration may be either a human or a spiritual grace, or a mixture of both. High artistic achievement is im­possible without at least those forms of intellectual, emotional and physical mortification appropriate to the kind of art which is being practised. Over and above this course of what may be called professional mortification, some artists have practised the kind of self-naughting which is the indispensable pre-condition of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground. Fra Angelico, for example, prepared himself for his work by means of prayer and meditation; and from the foregoing extract from Chuang Tzu we see how essentially religious (and not merely profes­sional) was the Taoist craftsman's approach to his art.

Here we may remark in passing that mechanization is incom­patible with inspiration. The artisan could do and often did do a thoroughly bad job. But if, like Ch'ing, the chief carpenter, he cared for his art and were ready to do what was necessary to make himself docile to inspiration, he could and sometimes did do a job so good that it seemed 'as though of supernatural execution.' 

Among the many and enormous advantages of efficient automatic machinery is this: it is completely fool­proof. But every gain has to be paid for: The automatic machine is fool-proof; but just because it is fool-proof it is also grace-proof. 

The man who tends such a machine is impervious to every form of aesthetic inspiration, whether of human or of genuinely spiritual origin.

 'Industry without art is brutality.' But actually Ruskin maligns the brutes. The industrious bird or insect is inspired, when it works, by the infallible animal grace of instinct—'by Tao as it manifests itself on the level immediately above the physiological. The indus­trial worker at his fool-proof and grace-proof machine does his job in a man-made universe of punctual automata—a uni­verse that lies entirely beyond the pale of Tao on any level, brutal, human or spiritual.197

In this context we may mention those sudden theophanies which are sometimes vouchsafed to children and sometimes to adults, who may be poets or Philistines, learned or unsophisti­cated, but who have this in common, that they have done nothing at all to prepare for what has happened to them. 

These gratuitous graces, which have inspired much literary and pictorial art, some splendid and some (where inspiration was not seconded by native talent) pathetically inadequate, seem generally to belong to one or other of two main classes —sudden and profoundly impressive perception of ultimate Reality as Love, Light and Bliss, and a no less impressive per­ception of it as dark, awe-inspiring and inscrutable Power. 
==

theophany - a visible manifestation to humankind of God or a god.

vouchsafe - give or grant (something) to (someone) in a gracious or condescending manner.

"it is a blessing vouchsafed him by heaven"

==

In memorable forms, Wordsworth has recorded his own experi­ence of both these aspects of the divine Ground.

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light.

And so on. But that was not the only vision.

Lustily

I dipped my oars into the silent lake,

And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat

Went heaving through the water like a swan;

When, from behind that craggy steep, till then

The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,

As if with voluntary power instinct,

Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,

And growing still in stature, the grim shape

Towered up between me and the stars....

But after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days my brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts There hung a darkness, call it solitude,

Or blank desertion.

Significantly enough, it is to this second aspect of Reality that primitive minds seem to have been most receptive. The for­midable God, to whom Job at last submits, is an 'unknown mode of Being,' whose most characteristic creations are Behemoth and Leviathan. He is the sort of God who calls, in Kierkegaard's phrase, for 'teleological suspensions of moral­ity,' chiefly in the form of blood sacrifices, even human sacri­fices. The Hindu goddess, Kali, in her more frightful aspects, is another manifestation of the same unknown mode of Being. And by many contemporary savages the underlying Ground is apprehended and theologically rationalized as sheer, unmiti­gated Power, which has to be propitiatively worshipped and, if possible, turned to profitable use by means of a compulsive magic.

To think of God as mere Power, and not also, at the same time as Power, Love and Wisdom, comes quite naturally to the ordinary, unregenerate human mind. 

Only the totally self­less are in a position to know experimentally that, in spite of everything, 'all will be well' and, in some way, already is well. 'The philosopher who denies divine providence,' says Rumi, 'is a stranger to the perception of the saints.' Only those who have the perception of the saints can know all the time and by immediate experience that divine Reality manifests itself as a Power that is loving, compassionate and wise. The rest of us are not yet in a spiritual position to do more than accept their findings on faith. If it were not for the records they have left behind, we should be more inclined to agree with Job and the primitives.

Inspirations prevent us, and even before they are thought of make themselves felt; but after we have felt them it is ours either to consent to them, so as to second and follow their attractions, or else to dissent and repulse them. They make themselves felt without us, but they do not make us consent without us.

St. François tie Sales

===

Our free will can hinder the course of inspiration, and when the favourable gale of God's grace swells the sails of our soul, it is in our power to refuse consent and thereby hinder the effect of the wind's favour; but when our spirit sails along and makes its voyage prosperously, it is not we who make the gale of inspira­tion blow for us, nor we who make our sails swell with it, nor we who give motion to the ship of our heart; but we simply receive the gale, consent to its motion and let our ship sail under it, not hindering it by our resistance.

St. François tie Sales

Grace is necessary to salvation, free will equally so—but grace in order to give salvation, free will in order to receive it. Therefore we should not attribute part of the good work to grace and part to free will; it is performed in its entirety by the common and inseparable action of both; entirely by grace, entirely by free will, but springing from the first in the second.

St. Bernard

====

St. Bernard distinguishes between voluntas communis and voluntaspropria. Voluntas communis is common in two senses; it is the will to share, and it is the will common to man and God. For practical purposes it is equivalent to charity. Vo-luntas propria is the will to get and hold for oneself, and is the root of all sin. In its cognitive aspect, voluntas propria is the same as sensum proprium, which is one's own opinion, cherished because it is one's own and therefore always morally wrong, even though it may be theoretically correct.

Two students from the University of Paris came to visit Ruys-broeck and asked him to furnish them with a short phrase or motto, which might serve them as a rule of life.

Vos estis tam sancti sicut vultis, Ruysbroeck answered. 'You are as holy as you will to be.'

God is bound to act, to pour Himself into thee as soon as He shall find thee ready.

Eckhart

The will is that which has all power; it makes heaven and it makes hell; for there is no hell but where the will of the creature is turned from God, nor any heaven but where the will of the creature worketh with God.

William Law

O man, consider thyself! Here thou standest in the earnest per­petual strife of good and evil; all nature is continually at work to bring forth the great redemption; the whole creation is travailing in pain and laborious working to he delivered from the vanity of time; and wilt thou he asleep? Everything thou hearest or seest says nothing, shows nothing to thee but what either eternal light or eternal darkness has brought forth; for as day and night divide the whole of our time, so heaven and hell divide all our thoughts, words and actions. Stir which way thou wilt, do or design what thou wilt, thou must be an agent with the one or the other. Thou canst not stand still, because thou livest in the perpetual workings of temporal and eternal nature; if thou workest not with the good, the evil that is in nature carries thee along with it. Thou hast the height and depth of eternity in thee and therefore, be doing what thou wilt, either in the closet, the field, the shop or the church, thou art sowing that which grows and must be reaped in eternity.

William Law

God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.

Eckhart

 201

For those who take pleasure in theological speculations based upon scriptural texts and dogmatic postulates, there are the thousands of pages of Catholic and Protestant controversy upon grace, works, faith and justification. And for students of comparative religion there are scholarly commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gita, on the works of Ramanuja and those later Vaishnavites, whose doctrine of grace bears a striking resem­blance to that of Luther; 

there are histories of Buddhism which duly trace the development of that religion from the Hinayanist doctrine that salvation is the fruit of strenuous self-help to the Mahayanist doctrine that it cannot be achieved without the grace of the Primordial Buddha, whose inner consciousness and 'great compassionate heart' constitute the eternal Suchness of things. 

For the rest of us, the foregoing quotations from writers within the Christian and early Taoist tradition provide, it seems to me, an adequate account of the observable facts of grace and inspiration and their relation to the observable facts of free will.

Perennial Phil Ch 9 SELF-KNOWLEDGE [4,1139] a very negative Ego.view of self.

Perenial Phil Ch 9 SELF-KNOWLEDGE [4,1139]

In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature; in man it is vice.

Boethius [a Roman senator]

VICE may be defined as a course of behaviour consented to by the will and having results which are bad, 

primarily because they are God-eclipsing and, 

secondarily, because they are physically or psychologically harmful to the agent or his fellows.

 Ignorance of self is something that answers to this description. In its origins it is voluntary; for by introspection and by listening to other people's judgments of our character we can all, if we so desire, come to a very shrewd understand­ing of our flaws and weaknesses and the real, as opposed to the avowed and advertised, motives of our actions. 

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion. 

As for the consequences of such ignorance, these are bad by every cri­terion, from the utilitarian to the transcendental. 

Bad because self-ignorance leads to unrealistic behaviour and so causes every kind of trouble for everyone concerned; 

and bad because, without self-knowledge, there can be no true humility, therefore no effective self-naughting 자책 , therefore no unitive knowledge of the divine Ground underlying the self and ordinarily eclipsed by it.

    
The importance, the indispensable necessity, of self-know­ledge has been stressed by the saints and doctors of every one of the great religious traditions. 

To us in the West, the most familiar voice is that of Socrates. More systematically than Socrates the Indian exponents of the Perennial Philosophy harped on the same theme. 185

There is, for example, the Buddha, whose discourse on 'The Setting-Up of Mindlness'expounds (with that positively inexorable exhaustiveness characteristic of the Pali scriptures) the whole art of self-knowledge in all its branches—knowledge of one's body, one's senses, one's feelings, one's thoughts. 

This art of self-knowledge is prac­tised with two aims in view. 

1] The proximate aim is that 'a brother, as to the body, continues so to look upon the body, that he remains ardent, self-possessed and mindful, having overcome both the hankering and dejection common in the world. 

2] And in the same way as to feelings, thoughts and ideas, he so looks upon each that he remains ardent, self-possessed and mindful, without hankering or dejection."  

Beyond and through this desirable psychological condition lies the final end of man, knowledge of that which underlies the individualised self. 

IN their own vovabulary, Christian writers expressthe same ideas.

A man has many skins in himself, coering the depths of his heart. Man knows so many things; he does not know himself. Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, just like an ox's or a bear's, so thick and hard, cover the soul. 

Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

Eckhart

Fools regard themselves as awake now--so personal is their knowledge. It may be as a prince or it may he as a herdsman, but so cock-sure of themselves!

Chuang Tu

This metaphor of waking from dreams recurs again and again in the various expositions of the Perennial Philosophy. In this context liberation might be defined as the process of waking up out of the nonsense, nightmares and illusory plea­sures of what is ordinarily called real life into the awareness of eternity. 

The 'sober certainty of waking bliss'—that won­derful phrase in which Milton described the experience of the noblest kind of music—comes, I suppose, about as near as words can get to enlightenment and deliverance. 187

Thou (the human being) art that which is not. I am that I am. If thou perceivest this truth in thy soul, never shall the enemy deceive thee; thou shalt escape all his snares.

St. Catherine of Siena

Knowledge of ourselves teaches us whence we come, where we are and whither we are going. We come from God and we are in exile; and it is because our potency of affection tends towards God that we are aware of this state of exile.

Ruysbroeck

Spiritual progress is through the growing knowledge of the self as nothing and of the Godhead as all-embracing Reality. 

(Such knowledge, of course, is worthless if it is merely theo­retical; to be effective, it must be realized as an immediate, intuitive experience and appropriately acted upon.) 

Of one great master of the spiritual life Professor Etienne Gilson writes: 

'The displacement of fear by Charity by way of the practice of humility—in that consists the whole of St. Ber­nard's ascesis, its beginning, its development and its term.' 

Fear, worry, anxiety—these form the central core of indi­vidualized selfhood. 

Fear cannot be got rid of by personal effort, 

but only by the ego's absorption in a cause greater than its own interests.

 Absorption in any cause will rid the mind of some of its fears; 

but only absorption in the loving and know­ing of the divine Ground can rid it of all fear. 

For when the cause is less than the highest, the sense of fear and anxiety is transferred from the self to the cause —as when heroic self-sacrifice for a loved individual or institution is accompanied by anxiety in regard to that for which the sacrifice is made. 

Whereas if the sacrifice is made for God, and for others for God's sake, there can be no fear or abiding anxiety, since nothing can be a menace to the divine Ground and even fail­ure and disaster are to be accepted as being in accord with the divine will. 

In few men and women is the love of God intense enough to cast out this projected fear and anxiety for cherished persons and institutions. i88 

The reason is to be sought in the fact that few men and women are humble enough to be capable of loving as they should. And they lack the necessary humility because they are without the fully realized knowledge of their own personal nothingness.

Humility does not consist in hiding our talents and virtues, in thinking ourselves worse and more ordinary than we are, but in possessing a clear knowledge of all that is lacking in us and in not exalting ourselves for that which we have, seeing that God has freely given it us and that, with all His gifts, we are still of infinitely little importance.

Lacordaire

===

As the light grows, we see ourselves to be worse than we thought. We are amazed at our former blindness as we see issuing from our heart a whole swarm of shameful feelings, like filthy reptiles crawling from a hidden cave. But we must be neither amazed nor disturbed. We are not worse than we were; on the con­trary, we are better. But while our faults diminish, the light we see them by waxes brighter, and we are filled with horror.

So long as there is no sign of cure, we are unaware of the depth of our disease; we are in a state of blind presumption and hardness, the prey of self-delusion. While we go with the stream, we are unconscious of its rapid course; but when we begin to stem it ever so little, it makes itself felt.

Fénelon

===

My daughter, build yourself two cells.

First a real cell, so that you do not run about much and talk, unless it is needful, or you can do it out of love for your neighbour.

Next build yourself a spiritual cell, which you can always take with you, and that is the cell of true self-knowledge;

you will find there the knowledge of God's goodness to you.

Here there are really two cells in one, and if you live in one you must also live in the other; otherwise the soul will either despair or be presumptuous. If you dwelt in self-knowledge alone, you would despair; if you dwelt in the knowledge of God alone, you would be tempted to presump­tion. One must go with the other, and thus you will reach perfection.189

Sr. Catherine of Siena