You have spent all your life in the belief that you are wholly devoted to others, and never self-seeking. Nothing so feeds self-conceit as this sort of internal testimony that one is quite free from self-love, and always generously devoted to one's neighbours.
But all this devotion that seems to be for others is really for yourself. Your self-love reaches to the point of perpetual self-congratulation that you are free from it; all your sensitiveness is lest you might not be fully satisfied with self;
this is at the root of all your scruples.
It is the 'I' which makes you so keen and sensitive.
You want God as well as man to be always satisfied with you, and
you want to be satisfied with yourself in all your dealings with God.
Besides, you are not accustomed to be contented with a simple good will—your self-love wants a lively emotion, a reassuring pleasure, some kind of charm or excitement. You are too much used to be guided by imagination and to suppose that your mind and will are inactive, unless you are conscious of their workings.
And thus you are dependent upon a kind of excitement similar to that which the passions arouse, or theatrical representations. By dint of refinement you fall into the opposite extreme—a real coarseness of imagination. Nothing is more opposed, not only to the life of faith, but also to true wisdom. There is no more dangerous illusion than the fancies by which people try to avoid illusion. It is imagination which leads us astray; and the certainty which we seek through imagination, feeling, and taste, is one of the most dangerous sources from which fanaticism springs. This is the gulf of vanity and corruption which God would make you discover in your heart; you must look upon it with the calm and simplicity belonging to true humility. It is mere self-love to be inconsolable at seeing one's own imperfections; but to stand face to face with them, neither flattering nor tolerating them, seeking to correct oneself without becoming pettish—this is to desire what is good for its own sake, and for God's. 292 293
Fénelon
A LETTER from the Archbishop of Cambrai—what an event, what a signal honour! And yet it must have been with a certain trepidation that one broke the emblazoned seal. To ask for advice and a frank opinion of oneself from a man who combines the character of a saint with the talents of a Marcel Proust, is to ask for the severest kind of shock to one's self-esteem. And duly, in the most exquisitely lucid prose, the shock would be administered—and, along with the shock, the spiritual antidote to its excruciating consequences.
Fénelon never hesitated to disintegrate a correspondent's complacent ego;
but the disintegration was always performed with a view to reintegration on a higher, non-egotistic level.
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This particular letter is not only an admirable piece of <character analysis>; it also contains some very interesting remarks on the subject of emotional excitement in its relation to the life of the spirit.
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The phrase, 'religion of experience,' has two distinct and mutually incompatible meanings.
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This particular letter is not only an admirable piece of <character analysis>; it also contains some very interesting remarks on the subject of emotional excitement in its relation to the life of the spirit.
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The phrase, 'religion of experience,' has two distinct and mutually incompatible meanings.
1] There is the 'experience' of which the Perennial Philosophy treats—the direct apprehension of the divine Ground in an act of intuition possible, in its fullness, only to the selflessly pure in heart.
And there is the 'experience' induced by revivalist sermons, impressive ceremonials, or the deliberate efforts of one's own imagination.
2] This 'experience' is a state of emotional excitement—an excitement which may be mild and enduring or brief and epileptically violent, which is sometimes exultant in tone and sometimes despairing, which expresses itself here in song and dance, there in uncontrollable weeping.
But emotional excitement, whatever its cause and whatever its nature, is always excitement of that individualized self, which must be died to by anyone who aspires to live to divine Reality.
'Experience' as emotion about God (the highest form of this kind of excitement) is incompatible with 'experience' as immediate awareness of God by a pure heart which has mortified even its most exalted emotions. 294
That is
- why Fénelon, in the foregoing extract, insists upon the need for 'calm and simplicity,'
- why St. Fran-çois de Sales is never tired of preaching the serenity which he himself so consistently practised,
- why all the Buddhist scriptures harp on tranquillity of mind as a necessary condition of deliverance.
The peace that passes all understanding is one of the fruits of the spirit.
But there is also the peace that does not pass understanding, the humbler peace of emotional self-control and self-denial; this is not a fruit of the spirit, but rather one of its indispensable roots.
The imperfect destroy true devotion, because they seek sensible sweetness in prayer.
The fly that touches honey cannot use its wings; so the soul that clings to spiritual sweetness ruins its freedom and hinders contemplation.
What is true of the sweet emotions is equally true of the bitter.
The imperfect destroy true devotion, because they seek sensible sweetness in prayer.
St. John of the Cross
The fly that touches honey cannot use its wings; so the soul that clings to spiritual sweetness ruins its freedom and hinders contemplation.
St. John of the Cross
What is true of the sweet emotions is equally true of the bitter.
For as some people enjoy bad health, so others enjoy a bad conscience. Repentance is metanoia, or 'change of mind'; and without it there cannot be even a beginning of the spiritual life—for the life of the spirit is incompatible with the life of that 'old man,' whose acts, whose thoughts, whose very existence are the obstructing evils which have to be repented. This necessary change of mind is normally accompanied by sorrow and self-loathing.
But these emotions are not to be persisted in and must never be allowed to become a settled habit of remorse. In Middle English 'remorse' is rendered, with a literalness which to modern readers is at once startling and stimulating, as 'again-bite.'
In this cannibalistic encounter, who bites whom? Observation and self-analysis provide the answer: the creditable aspects of the self bite the discreditable and are themselves bitten, receiving wounds that fester with incurable shame and despair. But, in Fénelon's words, 'it is mere self-love to be inconsolable at seeing one's own imperfections.' Self-reproach is painful; but the very pain is a reassuring proof that the self is still intact;
so long as attention is fixed on the delinquent ego, it cannot be fixed upon God and the ego (which lives upon attention and dies only when that sustenance is withheld) cannot be dissolved in the divine Light.295
Eschew as though it were a hell the consideration of yourself and your offences. No one should ever think of these things except to humiliate himself and love Our Lord. It is enough to regard yourself in general as a sinner, even as there are many saints in heaven who were such.
Faults will turn to good, provided we use them to our own humiliation, without slackening in the effort to correct ourselves.
Eschew as though it were a hell the consideration of yourself and your offences. No one should ever think of these things except to humiliate himself and love Our Lord. It is enough to regard yourself in general as a sinner, even as there are many saints in heaven who were such.
Charles de Condrea
Faults will turn to good, provided we use them to our own humiliation, without slackening in the effort to correct ourselves.
Discouragement serves no possible purpose; it is simply the despair of wounded self-love. The real way of profiting by the humiliation of one's own faults is to face them in their true hideousness끔찍함, without ceasing to hope in God, while hoping nothing from self.
Fénelon
Came she (Mary Magdalene) down from the height of her desire for God into the depth of her sinful life, and searched in the foul stinking fen and dunghill of her soul? Nay, surely she did not do so. And why? Because God let her know by His grace in her soul that she should never so bring it about. For so might she sooner have raised in herself an ableness to have often sinned than have purchased by that work any plain forgiveness of all her sins.
The Cloud of Unknowing
296 In the light of what has been said above, we can understand the peculiar spiritual dangers by which every kind of predominantly emotional religion is always menaced. A hell-fire faith that uses the theatrical techniques of revivalism in order to stimulate remorse and induce the crisis of sudden conversion;
a saviour cult that is for ever stirring up what St. Bernard calls the amor carnalis or fleshly love of the Avatar and personal God;
a ritualistic mystery-religion that generates high feelings of awe and reverence and aesthetic ecstasy by means of its sacraments and ceremonials, its music and its incense, its numinous darknesses and sacred lights—in its own special way, each one of these runs the risk of becoming a form of psychological idolatry, in which God is identified with the ego's affective attitude towards God and
finally the emotion becomes an end in itself, to be eagerly sought after and worshipped, as the addicts of a drug spend life in the pursuit of their artificial paradise.
All this is obvious enough. But it is no less obvious that religions that make no appeal to the emotions have very few adherents. Moreover, when pseudo-religions with a strong emotional appeal make their appearance, they immediately win millions of enthusiastic devotees from among the masses to whom the real religions have ceased to have a meaning or to be a comfort. But whereas no adherent of a pseudo-religion (such as one of our current political idolatries, compounded of nationalism and revolutionism) can possibly go forward into the way of genuine spirituality,
such a way always remains open to the adherents of even the most highly emotionalized varieties of genuine religion.
Those who have actually followed this way to its end in the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground constitute a very small minority of the total.
Many are called; but, since few choose to be chosen, few are chosen.
The rest, say the oriental exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, earn themselves another chance, in circumstances more or less propitious행운의 according to their deserts, to take the cosmic intelligence test.
If they are 'saved,' their incomplete and undefinitive deliverance is into some paradisal state of freer personal existence, from which (directly or through further incarnations) they may go on to the final release into eternity.
If they are 'lost,' their 'hell' is a temporal and temporary condition of thicker darkness and more oppressive bondage to self-will, the root and principle of all evil.297
We see, then, that if it is persisted in, the way of emotional religion may lead, indeed, to a great good, but not to the greatest.
But the emotional way opens into the way of unitive knowledge, and those who care to go on in this other way are well prepared for their task if they have used the emotional approach without succumbing to the temptations which have beset them on the way.
Only the perfectly selfless and enlightened can do good that does not, in some way or other, have to be paid for by actual or potential evils.
The religious systems of the world have been built up, in the main, by men and women who were not completely selfless or enlightened.
Hence all religions have had their dark and even frightful aspects, while the good they do is rarely gratuitous, but must, in most cases, be paid for, either on the nail or by instalments.
The emotion-rousing doctrines and practices, which play so important a part in all the world's organized religions, are no exception to this rule.
They do good, but not gratuitously. 무상으로
The price paid varies according to the nature of the individual worshippers.
Some of these choose to wallow in emotionalism and, becoming idolaters of feeling, pay for the good of their religion by a spiritual evil that may actually outweigh that good.
Others resist the temptation to self-enhancement and go forward to the mortification of self, including the self's emotional side,
and to the worship of God rather than of their own feelings and fancies about God.
The further they go in this direction, the less they have to pay for the good which emotionalism brought them and which, but for emotionalism, most of them might never have had.
