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.

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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.

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Examples of 'state of grace' in a sentence

state of grace

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• 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.

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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

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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

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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. 

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[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. 
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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"

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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

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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

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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.