Perennial Phil Ch 24 RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT [8,4420]

Perennial Phil Ch 24 RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT [8,4420]

의식, 상징, 성찬식 - 영원으로 통하는 문인가, 속박의 도구인가

ASWALA: Yajnavalkya, since everything connected with the sacrifice is pervaded by death and is subject to death, by what means can the sacrificer overcome death?

YAJNAVALKYA: By the knowledge of the identity between the sacrificer, the fire and the ritual word. For the ritual word is indeed the sacrificer, and the ritual word is the fire, and the fire, which is one with Brahman, is the sacrificer. This knowledge leads to liberation. This knowledge leads one beyond death.

Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad

IN other words, rites, sacraments, and ceremonials are valu­able to the extent that they remind those who take part in them of the true Nature of Things, remind them of what ought to be and (if only they would be docile to the immanent and transcendent Spirit) of what actually might be their own rela­tion to the world and its divine Ground. 

Theoretically any ritual or sacrament is as good as any other ritual or sacrament, provided always that the object symbolized be in fact some aspect of divine Reality and that the relation between symbol and fact be clearly defined and constant. 

1] In the same way, one language is theoretically as good as another.

 Human experi­ence can be thought about as effectively in Chinese as in English or French. But in practice Chinese is the best lan­guage for those brought up in China, English for those brought up in England and French for those brought up in France. It is, of course, much easier to learn the order of a rite and to understand its doctrinal significance than to master the intri­cacies of a foreign language.

1'] Nevertheless what has been said of language is true, in large measure, of religious ritual. For persons who have been brought up to think of God by means of one set of symbols, it is very hard to think of Him in terms of other and, in their eyes, unhallowed sets of words, cere­monies and images.   301  302 

The Lord Buddha then warned Subhuti, saying, 'Subhuti, do not think that the Tathagata ever considers in his own mind: I ought to enunciate a system of teaching for the elucidation of the Dharma. You should never cherish such a thought. And why? Because if any disciple harboured such a thought he would not only be misunderstanding the Tathagata's teaching, but he would be slandering him as well. Moreover, the expression "a system of teaching" has no meaning; for Truth (in the sense of Reality) cannot be cut up into pieces and arranged into a system. The words can only be used as a figure of speech.'

Diamond Sutra

But for all their inadequacy and their radical unlikeness to the facts to which they refer, words remain the most reliable and accurate of our symbols. 

Whenever we want to have a precise report of facts or ideas, we must resort to words. 

2] A ceremony, a carved or painted image, may convey more meanings and overtones of meaning in a smaller compass and with greater vividness than can a verbal formula; but it is liable to convey them in a form that is much more vague and indefinite. 

2'] One often meets, in modern literature, with the notion that medi­aeval churches were the architectural, sculptural and pictorial equivalents of a theological summa, and that mediaeval wor­shippers who admired the works of art around them were thereby enlightened on the subject of doctrine. 

This view was evidently not shared by the more earnest churchmen of the Middle Ages. Coulton cites the utterances of preachers who complained that congregations were getting entirely false ideas of Catholicism by looking at the pictures in the churches instead of listening to sermons. 

(Similarly, in our own day the Catholic Indians of Central America have evolved the wildest heresies by brooding on the carved and painted symbols with which the Conquistadors filled their churches.) 

St. Bernard's objection to the richness of Cluniac architecture, sculpture and ceremonial was motivated by intellectual as well as strictly moral considerations. 303 So great and marvellous a variety of divers forms meets the eye that one is tempted to read in the marbles rather than in the books, to pass the whole day looking at these carvings one after another rather than in meditating on the law of God.' 

Cluniac Reforms - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Cluniac_Reforms

The Cluniac Reforms were a series of changes within medieval monasticism of the Western Church focused on restoring the traditional monastic life, ...

‎Background · ‎Cluny Abbey · ‎Result · ‎The Cistercian Order

3] It is in imageless contemplation that the soul comes to the unitive knowledge of Reality; consequently, for those who, like St. Bernard and his Cistercians, are really concerned to achieve man's final end, the fewer distracting symbols the better.

Most men worship the gods because they want success in their worldly undertakings. This kind of material success can be gained very quickly (by such worship), here on earth.

Bagagavad-Gita

Among those who are purified by their good deeds there are four kinds of men who worship Me:

•  1] the world-weary,
•  2] the seeker for knowledge,
•  3] the seeker for happiness and
•  4] the man of spiritual discrimination.

feeling or indicating feelings of weariness, boredom, or cynicism as a result of long experience of life.  "a tired and slightly world-weary voice"

The man of discrimination is the highest of these. He is continually united with Me. He devotes himself to Me always, and to no other. For I am very dear to that man, and he to Me.

Certainly, all these are noble;

But the man of discrimination

I see as my very Self. 

For he alone loves Me 

Because I am Myself, 

The last and only goal 

Of his devoted heart.

Through many a long life 

His discrimination ripens; 

He makes Me his refuge, 

Knows that Brahman is all. 

How rare are such great ones!

Men whose discrimination has been blunted by worldly desires,

establish this or that ritual or cult and resort to various deities,

according to the impulse of their inborn nature.

But no matter what deity a devotee chooses to worship, if he has faith, 1 make his faith unwavering. Endowed with the faith I give him, he worships that deity and gets from it everything he prays for. In reality, I alone am the giver.

But these men of small understanding pray only for what is transient and perishable. The worshippers of the devas will go to the devas. Those who worship Me will come to Me.

Bkagavad-Gita

304 
If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spirit of faith and devotion, a more or less enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium, in which individual minds bathe and from which they have, so to speak, been crystallized out into per­sonalities more or less fully developed, 

according to the more or less perfect development of the bodies with which they are associated. 

(Of this psychic medium an eminent contempo­rary philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, has written, in an essay on telepathy contributed to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, as follows: 

'We must therefore consider seriously the possibility that a person's experience initiates more or less permanent modifications of structure or process in something which is neither his mind nor his brain. There is no reason to suppose that this substratum would be any­thing to which possessive adjectives, such as "mine" and "yours" and "his," could properly be applied, as they can be to minds and animated bodies.... 

Modifications which have been produced in the substratum by certain of M's past experi­ences are activated by N's present experiences or interests, and they become cause factors in producing or modifying N's later experiences.')  305  

Within this psychic medium or non-personal substratum of individual minds, something which we may think of metaphorically as a vortex persists as an independent exist­ence, possessing its own derived and secondary objectivity, so that, wherever the rites are performed, those whose faith and  devotion are sufficiently intense actually discover something out there,' as distinct from the subjective something in their own imaginations. 

And so long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faith and love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, but power to get people's prayers answered. 

Ultimately, of course, 'I alone am the giver,' in the sense that 

all this happens in accordance with the divine laws governing the universe in its psychic and spiritual, no less than in its material, aspects. 

Nevertheless, the devas (those imperfect forms under which, because of their own voluntary ignorance, men worship the divine Ground) may be thought of as relatively independent powers. 

The primitive notion that the gods feed on the sacrifices made to them is simply the crude expression of a profound truth. When their worship falls off, when faith and devotion lose their intensity, the devas sicken and finally die. 

Europe is full of old shrines, whose saints and Virgins and relics have lost the power and the second-hand psychic objectivity which they once possessed. Thus, when Chaucer lived and wrote, the deva called Thomas Becket was giving to any Canterbury pilgrim, who had suffi­cient faith, all the boons he could ask for. 

This once-powerful deity is now stone-dead; but there are still certain churches in the West, certain mosques and temples in the East, where even the most irreligious and un-psychic tourist cannot fail to be aware of some intensely 'numinous' presence. 

It would, of course, be a mistake to imagine that this presence is the presence of that God who is a Spirit and must be worshipped in spirit; it is rather the psychic presence of men's thoughts and feelings about the particular, limited form of God, to which they have resorted 'according to the impulse of their inborn nature'—thoughts and feelings projected into objectivity and haunting the sacred place in the same way as thoughts and feelings of another kind, but of equal intensity, haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime. 

The presence in these consecrated buildings, the presence evoked by the performance of tradi­tional rites, the presence inherent in a sacramental object, name or formula—all these are real presences, 

but real presences, not of God or the Avatar, 

but of something which, though it may reflect the divine Reality, 

is yet less and other than it. 3o6 

Dukis Jesu memoria 

dan.s vera cordi gaudia 

sed super mel et omnia 

ejus dulcis praesentia.

'Sweet is the memory of Jesus, 

giving true joys to the heart; 

but sweeter beyond honey 

and all else is his presence.' 

This opening stanza of the famous twelfth-century hymn sum­marizes in fifteen words the relations subsisting between ritual and real presence and the character of the worshipper's reaction to each. 

Systematically cultivated memoria (a thing in itself full of sweetness) 

first contributes to the evocation, then results, for certain souls, in the immediate apprehension of praeseistia, which brings with it joys of a totally different and higher kind. 

This presence (whose projected objectivity is occasionally so complete as to be apprehensible not merely by the devout worshipper, but by more or less indifferent outsiders) is always that of the divine being who has been previously remembered, Jesus here, Krishna or Amitabha Buddha there.

The value of this practice (repetition of the name of Amitabha Buddha) is this.

So long as one person practises his method (of spirituality) and another practises a different method, they coun­terbalance one another and their meeting is just the same as their not meeting.

Whereas if two persons practise the same method, their mindfulness tends to become deeper and deeper, and they tend to remember each other and to develop affinities for each other, life after life.

Moreover, whoever recites the name of Amitabha Buddha, whether in the present time or in future time, will surely see the Buddha Amitabha and never become separated from him. By reason of that association, just as -one associating with a maker of perfumes becomes permeated with the same per­fumes, so he will become perfumed by Amitabha's compassion, and will become enlightened without resort to any other ex­pedient means.

Surangama Sutra

307
We see then that intense faith and devotion, coupled with perseverance by many persons in the same forms of worship or spiritual exercise, have a tendency to objectify the idea or memory which is their content and so to create, in some sort, a numinous real presence, which worshippers actually find 'out there' no less, and in quite another way, than 'in here.' 

In so far as this is the case, the ritualist is perfectly correct in attributing to his hallowed acts and words a power which, in another context, would be called magical. The mantram works, the sacrifice really does something, the sacrament confers grace ex opere operato: these are, or rather may be, matters of direct experience, facts which anyone who chooses to fulfil the neces­sary conditions can verify empirically for himself. But the grace conferred ex opere operato is not always spiritual grace and the hallowed acts and formulae have a power which is not necessarily from God. Worshippers can, and very often do, get grace and power from one another and from the faith and devotion of their predecessors, projected into independent psychic existences that are hauntingly associated with certain places, words and acts. 

A great deal of ritualistic religion is not spirituality, but occultism, a refined and well-meaning kind of white magic. Now, just as there is no harm in art, say, or science, but a great deal of good, provided always that these activities are not regarded as ends, but simply as means to the final end of all life, so too there is no harm in white magic, 

but the possibilities of much good, so long as it is treated, not as true religion, but as one of the roads to true religion—an effective way of reminding people with a certain kind of psycho-physical make-up that there is a God, 'in knowledge of whom standeth their eternal life.'    308   

 If ritualistic white magic is regarded as being in itself true religion; if the real presences it evokes are taken to be God in Himself and not the projec­tions of human thoughts and feelings about God or even about something less than God; and if the sacramental rites are per­formed and attended for the sake of the 'spiritual sweetness' experienced and the powers and advantages conferred—then there is idolatry. This idolatry is, at its best, a very lofty and, in many ways, beneficent kind of religion. But the conse­quences of worshipping God as anything but Spirit and in any way except in spirit and in truth are necessarily undesirable in this sense—that they lead only to a partial salvation and delay the soul's ultimate reunion with the eternal Ground.

That very large numbers of men and women have an in­eradicable desire for rites and ceremonies is clearly demon­strated by the history of religion. Almost all the Hebrew prophets were opposed to ritualism. 'Rend your hearts and not your garments.' 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice.' 'I hate, I despise your feasts; I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.' 

And yet, in spite of the fact that what the prophets wrote was regarded as divinely inspired, the Temple at Jerusalem continued to be, for hundreds of years after their time, the centre of a religion of rites, ceremonials and blood sacrifice. 

(It may be remarked in passing that the shed­ding of blood, one's own or that of animals or other human beings, seems to be a peculiarly efficacious way of constrain­ing the 'occult' or psychic world to answer petitions and con­fer supernormal powers. If this is a fact, as from the anthropo­logical and antiquarian evidence it appears to be, it would supply yet another cogent reason for avoiding animal sacri­fices, savage bodily austerities and even, since thought is a form of action, that imaginative gloating over spilled blood which is so common in certain Christian circles.) 

What the Jews did in spite of their prophets, Christians have done in spite of Christ. The Christ of the Gospels is a preacher and not a dispenser of sacraments or performer of rites; he speaks against vain repetitions; he insists on the supreme importance of private worship; he has no use for sacrifices and not much use for the Temple. But this did not prevent historic Chris­tianity from going its own, all too human, way. 

A precisely similar development took place in Buddhism.  For the Buddha  of the Pall scriptures, ritual was one of the fetters holding back the soul from enlightenment and liberation. Nevertheless, the religion he founded has made full use of ceremonies, vain repetitions and sacramental rites.  309 

There would seem to be two main reasons for the observed developments of the historical religions. 

• First, most people do not want spirituality or deliverance, but rather a religion that gives them emotional satisfactions, answers to prayer, super­normal powers and partial salvation in some sort of posthu­mous heaven. 
• Second, some of those few who do desire spirit­uality and deliverance find that, for them, the most effective means to those ends are ceremonies, 'vain repetitions' and sacramental rites. 

It is by participating in these acts and utter­ing these formulae 

that they are most powerfully reminded of the eternal Ground of all being; 

it is by immersing themselves in the symbols that they can most easily come through to that which is symbolized. 

Every thing, event or thought is a point of intersection between creature and Creator, between a more or less distant manifestation of God and a ray, so to speak, of the unmanifest Godhead; 

every thing, event or thought can therefore be made the doorway through which a soul may pass out of time into eternity. That is why ritualistic and sacra­mental religion can lead to deliverance. 

But at the same time every human being loves power and self-enhancement, and every hallowed ceremony, form of words or sacramental rite is a channel through which power can flow out of the fascinating psychic universe into the universe of embodied selves. That is why ritualistic and sacramental religion can also lead away from deliverance.

There is another disadvantage inherent in any system of organized sacramentalism, and that is that it gives to the priestly caste a power which it is all too natural for them to abuse. In a society which has been taught that salvation is exclusively or mainly through certain sacraments, and that these sacraments can be administered effectively only by a pro­fessional priesthood, that professional priesthood will possess an enormous coercive power. 310 

The possession of such power is a standing temptation to use it for individual satisfaction and corporate aggrandizement. To a temptation of this kind, if repeated often enough, most human beings who are not saints almost inevitably succumb. That is why Christ taught his disciples to pray that they should not be led into temptation. 

This is, or should be, the guiding principle of all social reform —to organize the economic, political and social relationships between human beings in such a way that there shall be, for any given individual or group within the society, a minimum of temptations to covetousness, pride, cruelty and lust for power. 

Men and women being what they are, it is only by reducing the number and intensity of temptations that human societies can be, in some measure at least, delivered from evil. Now, the sort of temptations to which a priestly caste is exposed in a society that accepts a predominantly sacramental religion are such that none but the most saintly persons can be expected consistently to resist them. 

What happens when ministers of religion are led into these temptations is clearly illustrated by the history of the Roman Church. 

Because Catholic Chris­tianity taught a version of the Perennial Philosophy, it produced a succession of great saints. But because the Perennial Philo­sophy was overlaid with an excessive amount of sacramentalism and with an idolatrous preoccupation with things in time, the less saintly members of its hierarchy were exposed to enormous and quite unnecessary temptations and, duly suc­cumbing to them, launched out into persecution, simony, power politics, secret diplomacy, high finance and collabora­tion with despots.

I very much doubt whether, since the Lord by his grace brought me into the faith of his dear Son, I have ever broken bread or drunk wine, even in the ordinary course of life, without remem­brance of, and some devout feeling regarding, the broken body and the blood-shedding of my dear Lord and Saviour.

Stephen Grellet

We have seen that, 

when they are promoted to be the central core of organized religious worship, ritualism and sacramentalism are by no means unmixed blessings. 311 

But that the whole of a man's workaday life should be transformed by him into 

a kind of continuous ritual, 

• that every object in the world around him should be regarded as a symbol of the world's eternal Ground, 
• that all his actions should be performed sacramentally —this would seem to be wholly desirable. 

All the masters of the spiritual life, 

from the authors of the Upanishads to Socrates, from Buddha to St. Bernard, 

are agreed 

• that without self-knowledge there cannot be adequate knowledge of God,
• that without a constant recollectedness there can be no complete deliverance. 

The man who has learnt to regard 

• things as symbols, 
• persons as temples of the Holy Spirit and 
• actions as sacraments, 

is a man who has learned constantly to remind himself 

• who he is, 
• where he stands in relation to the universe and its Ground, 
• how he should behave towards his fellows and 
• what he must do to come to his final end.

'Because of this indwelling of the Logos,' writes Mr. Kenneth Saunders in his valuable study of the Fourth Gospel, the Gita and the Lotus Sutra, 

'all things have a reality. They are sacra­ments, not illusions like the phenomenal word of the Vedanta.' 

That the Logos is in things, lives and conscious minds, and 

they in the Logos, 

was taught much more emphatically and explicitly by the Vedantists than by the author of the Fourth Gospel; and 

the same idea is, of course, basic in the theology of Taoism. 

But though all things in fact exist 

at the inter­section between a divine manifestation and a ray of the unmanifest Godhead, it by no means follows that everyone always knows that this is so. 

On the contrary, the vast majority of human beings believe that their own selfness and the objects around them possess a reality in themselves, wholly independ­ent of the Logos. 

This belief leads them to identify their being with their sensations, cravings and private notions, and in its turn this self-identification with what they are not effectively walls them off from divine influence and the very possibility of deliverance. To most of us on most occasions 

things are not symbols and actions are not sacramental; and 

we have to teach ourselves, consciously and deliberately, to remember that they are.  312 

The world is imprisoned in its own activity, except when actions are performed as worship of God. Therefore you must perform every action sacramentally (as if it were yajncz, the sacrifice that, in its divine Logos-essence, is identical with the Godhead to whom it is offered), and be free from all attachment to results.

Bhagavad-Gita

Precisely similar teachings are found in Christian writers, who recommend 

• that persons and even things should be regarded as temples of the Holy Ghost
•  and that everything done or suffered should be constantly 'offered to God.'

It is hardly necessary to add that this process of conscious sacramentalization can be applied only to such actions as are not intrinsically evil. 

Somewhat unfortunately, the Gita was not originally published as an independent work, but as a theo­logical digression within an epic poem; and since, like most epics, the Mahabharata is largely concerned with the exploits of warriors, it is primarily in relation to warfare that the Gita's advice to act with non-attachment and for God's sake only is given. 

Now, war is accompanied and followed, among other things, by a widespread dissemination of anger and hatred, pride, cruelty and fear. But, it may be asked, is it possible (the Nature of Things being what it is) to sacramentalize actions whose psychological by-products are so completely God-eclipsing as are these passions?

 The Buddha of the Pali scrip­tures would certainly have answered this question in the nega­tive. So would the Lao Tzu of the Tao Teh King. So would the Christ of the Synoptic Gospels. The Krishna of the Gita (who is also, by a kind of literary accident, the Krishna of the Mahabharata) gives an affirmative answer. 

But this affirma­tive answer, it should be remembered, is hedged around with limiting conditions. Non-attached slaughter is recommended only to those who are warriors by caste, and to whom warfare is a duty and vocation.313 

But what is duty or dharma for the Kshatriya is adharma and forbidden to the Brahman; nor is it any part of the normal vocation or caste duty of the mercantile and labouring classes. 

Any confusion of castes, any assump­tion by one man of another man's vocation and duties of state, is always, say the Hindus, a moral evil and a menace to social stability. Thus, it is the business of the Brahmans to fit them­selves to be seers, so that they may be able to explain to their fellow-men the nature of the universe, of man's last end and of the way to liberation. 

When soldiers or administrators, or usurers, or manufacturers or workers usurp the functions of the Brahmans and formulate a philosophy of life in accordance with their variously distorted notions of the universe, then society is thrown into confusion. 

Similarly, confusion reigns when the Brahman, the man of non-coercive spiritual author­ity, assumes the coercive power of the Kshatriya, or when the Kshatriya's job of ruling is usurped by bankers and stock­jobbers, or finally when the warrior caste's dizarma of fighting is imposed, by conscription, on Brahman, Vaisya and Sudra alike. 

The history of Europe during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance is largely a history of the social confusions that arise when large numbers of those who should be seers aban­don spiritual authority in favour of money and political power. 

And contemporary history is the hideous record of what happens when political bosses, business men or class-conscious proletarians assume the Brahman's function of formulating a philosophy of life; 

when usurers dictate policy and debate the issues of war and peace; and 

when the warrior's caste duty is imposed on-all and sundry, regardless of psycho-physical make­up and vocation.

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'numinous'   ˈn(y)o͞omənəs

Adjective

1

having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.

the strange, numinous beauty of this ancient landmark

Synonyms:

spiritual religious divine holy sacred mysterious otherworldly unearthly awe-inspiring transcendent

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Perennial Phil Ch 23 THE MIRACULOUS [3,1021]

Perennial Phil Ch 23 THE MIRACULOUS [3,1021]

기적 - 영혼과 신 사이에 드리워진 방해물

Revelations (특별)계시 (성경+예수)are the aberration of faith; they are an amusement that spoils simplicity in relation to God, that embarrasses the soul and makes it swerve 빗나감 from its directness in relation to God. They distract the soul and occupy it with other things than God. 

Special illuminations, auditions, prophecies and the rest are marks of weakness in a soul that cannot support the assaults of temptation or of anxiety about the future and God's judgment upon it. 

Prophecies are also marks of creaturely curiosity in a soul to whom God is indulgent and to whom, as a father to his importunate child, he gives a few trifling sweetmeats to satisfy its appetite.

J. J. Olier

In religion and theology, revelation is the revealing or disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge through communication with a deity or other supernatural entity or entities. Wikipedia

The slightest degree of sanctifying grace is superior to a miracle [?], which is supernatural only by reason of its cause, by its mode of production (quoad modum), not by its intimate reality; the life restored to a corpse is only the natural life, low indeed in com­parison with that of grace.

R. Garrigou-Lagrange

Can you walk on water? You have done no better than a straw. Can you fly in the air? You have done no better than a blue­bottle. Conquer your heart; then you may become somebody. 

Ansari of Herat

THE abnormal bodily states, by which the immediate aware­ness of the divine Ground is often accompanied, are not, of course, essential parts of that experience. Many mystics, indeed, deplored such things as being signs, not of divine grace, but of the body's weakness. To levitate, to go into trance, to lose the use of one's senses—in De Condren's words,  298 299 this is 'to receive the effects of God and his holy communica­tions in a very animal and carnal way.'

'One ounce of sanctifying grace,' he (St. Francois de Sales) used to say, 'is worth more than a hundredweight of those graces which theologians call "gratuitous," among which is the gift of miracles. It is possible to receive such gifts and yet to be in mortal sin; nor are they necessary to salvation.'

Jean Pierre Camus

1] The Sufis regard miracles as 'veils' intervening between the soul and God. The masters of Hindu spirituality urge their disciples to pay no attention to the siddhis, or psychic powers, which may come to them unsought, as a by-product of one-pointed contemplation. The cultivation of these powers, they warn, distracts the soul from Reality and sets up insurmount­able obstacles in the way of enlightenment and deliverance. 

2] A similar attitude is taken by the best Buddhist teachers, and in one of the Pali scriptures there is an anecdote recording the Buddha's own characteristically dry comment on a prodigious feat of levitation performed by one of his disciples. 'This,' he said, will not conduce to the conversion of the uncon­verted, nor to the advantage of the converted.' Then he went back to talking about deliverance.

3] Because they know nothing of spirituality and regard the material world and their hypotheses about it as supremely significant, rationalists are anxious to convince themselves and others that miracles do not and cannot happen. 

4] Because they have had experience of the spiritual life and its by-products, the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy are convinced that miracles do happen, but regard them as things of little import­ance, and that mainly negative and anti-spiritual.

5] The miracles which at present are in greatest demand, and of which there is the steadiest supply, are those of psychic healing. In what circumstances and to what extent the power of psychic healing should be used has been clearly indicated in the Gospel: 'Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take  up thy bed and walk?' 300 

 If one can 'forgive sins,' one can safely use the gift of healing. 

But the forgiving of sins is possible, in its fullness, only to those who 'speak with authority,' in virtue of being selfless channels of the divine Spirit. 

To these theocentric saints the ordinary, unregenerate human being reacts with a mixture of love and awe—longing to be close to them and yet constrained by their very holiness to say, 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.' Such holiness makes holy to the extent that the sins of those who approach it are forgiven and they are enabled to make a new start, to face the consequences of their past wrong-doings (for of course the consequences remain) in a new spirit that makes it possible for them to neutralize the evil or turn it into positive good. 

A less perfect kind of forgiveness can be bestowed by those who are not themselves outstandingly holy, but who speak with the delegated authority of an institution which the sinner believes to be in some way a channel of supernatural grace. In this case the contact between unregenerate soul and divine Spirit is not direct, but is mediated through the sinner's imagination.

Those who are holy in virtue of being selfless channels of the Spirit may practise psychic healing with perfect safety; for they will know which of the sick are ready to accept for­giveness along with the mere miracle of a bodily cure. 

Those who are not holy, but who can forgive sins in virtue of belong­ing to an institution which is believed to be a channel of grace, may also practise healing with a fair confidence that they will not do more harm than good. 

But unfortunately the knack of psychic healing seems in some persons to be inborn, while others can acquire it without acquiring the smallest degree of holiness. ('It is possible to receive such graces and yet be in mortal sin.') 

Such persons will use their knack indiscrimin­ately, either to show off or for profit. Often they produce spectacular cures—but, lacking the power to forgive sins or even to understand the psychological correlates, conditions or causes of the symptoms they have so miraculously dispelled, 

they leave a soul empty, swept and garnished against the coming of seven other devils worse than the first.

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일반계시와 특별계시란 무엇인가?

https://www.gotquestions.org/Korean/Korean-general-special-revelation.html

답변

일반계시와 특별계시는 하나님이 인류에게 자신을 계시하기로 택하신 두 가지 방법입니다. 

일반계시는 자연을 통하여 하나님에 대해 알 수 있는 일반적인 진리를 말합니다. 

특별계시는 초자연적인 것을 통하여 하나님에 대해 알 수 있는, 보다 구체적인 진리를 말합니다.

시편 19:1-4은 일반계시와 관련하여 선포합니다. “하늘이 하나님의 영광을 선포하고 궁창이 그의 손으로 하신 일을 나타내는도다. 날은 날에게 말하고 밤은 밤에게 지식을 전하니 언어도 없고 말씀도 없으며 들리는 소리도 없으나 그의 소리가 온 땅에 통하고 그의 말씀이 세상 끝까지 이르도다 하나님이 해를 위하여 하늘에 장막을 베푸셨도다.” 이 본문에 따르면, 하나님의 존재와 능력은 우주를 관찰함으로써 분명히 알 수 있습니다. 창조의 질서와 복잡함과 경이로움은 능력이 많고 영광스러운 창조주의 존재를 알려줍니다.

로마서 1:20 역시 일반계시에 대해 가르칩니다. “창세로부터 그의 보이지 아니하는 것들 곧 그의 영원하신 능력과 신성이 그가 만드신 만물에 분명히 보여 알려졌나니 그러므로 그들이 핑계하지 못할지니라.” 시편 19편처럼, 로마서 1:20은 하나님의 영원하신 능력과 신성이 분명히 보여 알려졌고, 지어진 피조물로부터 “이해되며”, 이 사실을 부인할 수 있는 변명의 여지가 없다고 가르칩니다. 이러한 성경 내용을 염두에 둔다면, 일반계시의 잠정적인 정의는 “모든 사람에게, 언제나, 모든 곳에서 하나님의 존재와 그분의 지혜와 능력과 초월하심을 증명하는 하나님의 계시"라고 할 수 있겠습니다.

특별계시는 하나님이 기적적인 방법을 통하여 자신을 계시하기로 택하신 방법입니다. 특별계시는 하나님의 현현, 꿈, 환상, 기록된 하나님의 말씀, 그리고 가장 중요한, 예수 그리스도를 포함합니다. 성경은 여러 차례 물리적인 형태로 나타나신 하나님을 기록하고 있으며 (창세기 3:8, 18:1; 출애굽기 3:1-4, 34:5-7), 하나님이 꿈 (창세기 28:12, 37:5, 열왕기상 3:5, 다니엘 2)과 환상 (창세기 15:1; 에스겔 8:3-4; 다니엘 7; 고린도후서 12:1-7)을 통해 사람들에게 말씀하신 것을 기록하고 있습니다.

하나님을 계시하는데 있어서 가장 중요한 것은 특별계시의 한 형태인 그분의 말씀, 즉 성경입니다. 하나님은 성경 저자들의 문체와 성격을 사용하면서도, 기적적으로 그들을 이끄셔서 인류에게 전달할 그분의 메시지를 정확하게 기록하도록 인도하셨습니다. 하나님의 말씀은 살아 있고 활력이 있습니다 (히브리서 4:12). 하나님의 말씀은 감동되어 있고 유익하며 충분합니다 (디모데후서 3:16-17). 하나님은 구전이 부정확하고 신뢰성이 없다는 것을 아셨기 때문에, 그분 자신에 대한 진리를 서면 형태로 기록하기로 정하셨습니다. 그분은 또한 인간의 꿈과 환상이 오해될 수 있음을 아셨습니다. 하나님은 인류가 그분에 대해 알아야 할 모든 것, 그분이 기대하시는 것, 그리고 그분이 우리를 위해 행하신 것을 성경을 통해 계시하기로 결정하셨습니다.

특별계시의 궁극적인 형태는 예수 그리스도입니다. 하나님이 인간이 되셨습니다 (요한복음 1:1, 14). 히브리서 1:1-3은 이것을 가장 잘 요약하고 있습니다. “옛적에 선지자들을 통하여 여러 부분과 여러 모양으로 우리 조상들에게 말씀하신 하나님이 이 모든 날 마지막에는 아들을 통하여 우리에게 말씀하셨으니 .. 이 아들은 하나님의 영광의 광채시요 그 본체의 형상이시라.” 하나님은 우리와 하나가 되고, 우리를 위한 모범이 되고, 우리를 가르치고, 자신을 우리에게 계시하시기 위하여, 또 가장 중요한 것은, 자신을 낮추사 십자가에서 죽으심으로 우리에게 구원을 베푸시기 위하여 예수 그리스도를 통해 사람이 되셨습니다 (빌립보서 2:6-8). 예수 그리스도는 하나님의 궁극적인 "특별계시"입니다.

English

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Perennial Phil Ch 22 EMOTIONALISM, [4,2005]

Perennial Phil Ch 22 EMOTIONALISM, [4,2005]

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.
==
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.
==
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.

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.

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.

Perennial Phil Ch 21 IDOLATRY [4,1421]

Perennial Phil Ch 21 IDOLATRY [4,1421]

TO educated persons the more primitive kinds of idolatry have ceased to be attractive. They find it easy to resist the temptation to believe that particular natural objects are gods, or that certain symbols and images are the very forms of divine entities and as such must be worshipped and propitiated. True, much fetishistic superstition survives even today. But though it survives, it is not considered respectable. Like drinking and prostitution, the primitive forms of idolatry are tolerated, but not approved. Their place in the accredited hierarchy of values is among the lowest.

How different is the case with the developed and more modern forms of idolatry! These have achieved not merely survival, but the highest degree of respectability. They are recommended by men of science as an up-to-date substitute for genuine religion and by many professional religious teachers are equated with the worship of God. All this may be de­plorable; but it is not in the least surprising. Our education disparages the more primitive forms of idolatry; but at the same time it disparages 얕보다 , or at the best it ignores, the Perennial Philosophy and the practice of spirituality. In place of mumbo-jumbo at the bottom and of the immanent and transcendent Godhead at the top, it sets up, as objects of admiration, faith and worship, a pantheon of strictly human ideas and ideals. In academic circles and among those who have been subjected to higher education, there are few fetishists and few devout contemplatives; but the enthusiastic devotees of some form of political or social idolatry are as common as blackberries. Significantly enough, I have observed, when making use of university libraries, that books on spiritual religion were taken out much less frequently than was the case in public libraries, patronized in the main by men and women who had not enjoyed the advantages, or suffered under the handicaps, of prolonged academic instruction.287 288 

The many varieties of higher idolatry may be classed under three main heads: 

1. technological, 
2. political and 
3. moral. 

1] Techno­logical idolatry is the most ingenuous and primitive of the three; for its devotees, like those of the lower idolatry, believe that their redemption and liberation depend upon material objects—in this case gadgets. Technological idolatry is the religion whose doctrines are promulgated, explicitly or by implication, in the advertisement pages of our newspapers and magazines—the source, we may add parenthetically, from which millions of men, women and children in the capitalistic countries derive their working philosophy of life. In Soviet Russia too, technological idolatry was strenuously preached, becoming, during the years of that country's industrialization, a kind of state religion. So whole-hearted is the modern faith in technological idols that (despite all the lessons of mechanized warfare) it is impossible to discover in the popular thinking of our time any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doc­trine of hubris and inevitable nemesis. There is a very general belief that, where gadgets are concerned, we can get something for nothing—can enjoy all the advantages of an elaborate, top-heavy and constantly advancing technology without having to pay for them by any compensating disadvantages.

2] Only a little less ingenuous are the political idolaters. For the worship of redemptive gadgets these have substituted the worship of redemptive social and economic organizations. Im­pose the right kind of organizations upon human beings, and all their problems, from sin and unhappiness to nationalism and war, will automatically disappear. Most political idolaters are also technological idolaters—and this in spite of the fact that the two pseudo-religions are finally incompatible, since technological progress at its present rate makes nonsense of any political blue-print, however ingeniously drawn, within a matter, not of generations, but of years and sometimes even of months. Further, the human being is, unfortunately, a creature endowed with free will; and if, for any reason, individuals do not choose to make it work, even the best organization will not produce the results it was intended to produce.289

3] The moral idolaters are realists inasmuch as they see that gadgets and organizations are not enough to guarantee the triumph of virtue and the increase of happiness, and that the individuals who compose societies and use machines are the arbiters who finally determine whether there shall be decency in personal relationship, order or disorder in society. Material and organizational instruments are indispensable, and a good tool is preferable to a bad one. But in listless or malicious hands the finest instrument is either useless or a means to evil.

The moralists cease to be realistic and commit idolatry inas­much as they worship, not God, but their own ethical ideals, inasmuch as they treat virtue as an end in itself and not as the necessary condition of the knowledge and love of God—a knowledge and love without which that virtue will never be made perfect or even socially effective.

What follows is an extract from a very remarkable letter written in 1836 by Thomas Arnold to his old pupil and future biographer, A. P. Stanley.

 'Fanaticism is idolatry; and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it; that is, a fanatic worships something which is the creation of his own desire, and thus even his self-devotion in support of it is only an apparent self-devotion; for in fact it is making the parts of his nature or his mind, which he least values, offer sacrifice to that which he most values. 

The moral fault, as it appears to me, is the idolatry—the setting up of some idea which is most kindred to our own minds, and the putting it in the place of Christ, who alone cannot be made an idol and inspire idolatry, because He combines all ideas of perfection and exhibits them in their just harmony and combination. Now in my own mind, by its natural tendency—that is, taking my mind at its best—truth and justice would be the idols I should follow; 

and they would be idols, for they would not supply all the food which the mind wants, and 

whilst worshipping them, reverence and humility and tenderness might very likely be forgotten. 290 

But Christ Himself includes at once truth and justice and all these other qualities too.. . . 

Narrow-mindedness tends to wicked­ness, because it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral nature, and the neglect fosters wickedness in the parts so neglected.'  

As a piece of psychological analysis this is admirable. 

Its only defect is one of omission; for it neglects to take into account those influxes from the eternal order into the temporal, which are called grace or inspiration. 

Grace and inspiration are given when, and to the extent to which, 

a human being gives up self-will and abandons himself, moment by moment, through constant recollectedness and non-attachment, to the will of God. 

As well as the animal and spiritual graces, whose source is the divine Nature of Things, there are human pseudo-graces—such as, for example, the accessions of strength and virtue that follow self-devotion to some form of political or moral idolatry. 

To distinguish the true grace from the false is often difficult; but as time and circumstances reveal the full extent of their consequences on the soul, discrimination be­comes possible even to observers having no special gifts of insight. 

Where the grace is genuinely 'supernatural,' an amelioration in one aspect of the total personality is not paid for by atrophy or deterioration elsewhere. 

The virtue which is accompanied and perfected by the love and knowledge of God is something quite different from the 'righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees' which, for Christ, was among the worst of moral evils. 

Hardness, fanaticism, uncharitableness and spiritual pride—these are the ordinary by-products of a course of stoical self-improvement by means of personal effort, either unassisted or, if assisted, seconded only by the pseudo-graces which are given when the individual devotes himself to the achievement of an end which is not his true end, when the goal is not God, but merely a magnified projection of his own favourite ideas or moral excellences. The idolatrous worship of ethical values in and for themselves defeats its own object and defeats it not only because, as Arnold insists, there is a lack of all-round development, but also and above all because even the highest forms of moral idolatry are God-eclipsing and therefore guarantee the idolater against the enlightening and liberating knowledge of Reality.291

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Perennial Phil Ch 20 The practice of religion leads people to practise evil [5,2528]

Perennial Phil Ch 20 TANTUM RELIGIO POTUIT SUADERE MALORUM [5,2528]

The practice of religion leads people to practise evil. 

Would you know whence it is that so many false spirits have appeared in the world, who have deceived themselves and others with false fire and false light, laying claim to information, illumin­ation and openings of the divine Life, particularly to do wonders under extraordinary calls from God? It is this: they have turned to God without turning from themselves; would be alive to God before they are dead to their own nature. Now religion in the hands of self, or corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, self-exaltation, hatred and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own.

William Law

TURNING to God without turning from self'—the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion. Those who turn to God without turning from them­selves are tempted to evil in several characteristic and easily recognizable ways.

==

Michael Oakeshott Selected Writings Collection - Google Books resulthttps://books.google.com.au › books

Michael Oakeshott, ‎Luke O'Sullivan · 2014 · ‎Political Science

... 'Turning to God without turning from Self'4 ie pursuing personal ends with religious passion Imposing our 'ideals' with religious conviction and passion ...

Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA was an English philosopher  Born: 11 December 1901,

==

 They are tempted, first of all, to practise magical rites, by means of which they hope to compel God to answer their petitions and, in general, to serve their private or collective ends. 

All the ugly business of sacrifice, incantation and what Jesus called 'vain repetition' is a product of this wish to treat God as a means to indefinite self-aggrandizement, rather than as an end to be reached through total self-denial. 

 Next, they are tempted to use the name of God to justify what they do in pursuit of place, power and wealth.270280  And because they believe themselves to have divine justification for their actions, they proceed, with a good conscience, to perpetrate abominations, 'which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own.'

 Throughout recorded history an incredible sum of mischief has been done by ambitious idealists, self-deluded by their own verbiage and a lust for power into a conviction that they were acting for the highest good of their fellow-men. 

In the past, the justification for such wickedness was 'God' or 'the Church,' or 'the True Faith'; 

today idealists kill and torture and exploit in the name of 'the Revolution,' 'the New Order,' the World of the Common Man,' or simply 'the Future.' 

Finally there are the temptations which arise when the falsely religious begin to acquire the powers which are the fruit of their pious and magical practices. For, let there be no mistake, sacrifice, incantation and 'vain repetition' actually do produce fruits, especially when practised in conjunction with physical austerities. 

Men who turn towards God without turning away from themselves do not, of course, reach God; but if they devote themselves energetically enough to their pseudo-religion, they will get results. 

Some of these results are doubtless the product of auto-suggestion. (It was through 'vain repetition' that Coué got his patients to cure themselves of their diseases.) 

Others are due, apparently, to that 'some­thing not ourselves' in the psychic medium—that something which makes, not necessarily for righteousness, but always for power. 

Whether this something is a piece of second-hand objectivity, projected into the medium by the individual wor­shipper and his fellows and predecessors; whether it is a piece of first-hand objectivity, corresponding, on the psychic level, to the data of the material universe; or whether it is a com­bination of both these things, it is impossible to determine. 

All that need be said in this place is that people who turn towards God without turning from themselves often seem to acquire a knack of getting their petitions answered and some­times develop considerable supernormal powers, such as those of psychic healing and extra-sensory perception. 281

But, it may be asked: Is it necessarily a good thing to be able to get one's petitions answered in the way one wants them to be? And how far is it spiritually profitable to be possessed of these 'miraculous' powers? These are questions which were con­sidered in the chapter on 'Prayer' and will be further discussed in the chapter on 'The Miraculous.'

The Grand Augur, in his ceremonial robes, approached the shambles and thus addressed the pigs. 'How can you object to die? I shall fatten you for three months. I shall discipline my­self for ten days and fast for three. I shall strew fine grass and place you bodily upon a carved sacrificial dish. Does not this satisfy you?'

Then, speaking from the pigs' point of view, he continued: 'It is better perhaps, after all, to live on bran and escape from the shambles.'

'But then,' he added, speaking from his own point of view, to enjoy honour when alive, one would readily die on a war-shield or in the headsman's basket.'

So he rejected the pigs' point of view and adopted his own point of view. In what sense, then, was he different from the pigs?

Chuang Tu

Anyone who sacrifices anything but his own person or his own interests is on exactly the same level as Chuang Tzu's pigs. The pigs seek their own advantage inasmuch as they prefer life and bran to honour and the shambles; the sacrificers seek their own advantage inasmuch as they prefer the magical, God-constraining death of pigs to the death of their own passions and self-will. And what applies to sacrifice, applies equally to incantations, rituals and vain repetitions, when these are used (as they all too frequently are, even in the higher religions) as a form of compulsive magic. Rites and vain repetitions have a legitimate place in religion as aids to recollectedness, reminders of truth momentarily forgotten in the turmoil of worldly dis­tractions. When spoken or performed as a kind of magic, their use is either completely pointless; or else (and this is worse) it may have ego-enhancing results, which do not in any way contribute to the attainment of man's final, end.282

The vestments of Isis are variegated to represent the cosmos;

that of Osiris is white, symbolizing the Intelligible Light beyond the cosmos.

Plutarch

So long as the symbol remains, in the worshippers mind, firmly attached and instrumental to that which is symbolized, the use of such things as white and variegated vestments can do no harm. But if the symbol breaks loose, as it were, and becomes an end in itself, then we have, at the best, a futile aestheticism and sentimentality, at the worst a form of psychologically effective magic.

All externals must yield to love; for they are for the sake of love, and not love for them.

Hans Denk

Ceremonies in themselves are not sin; but whoever supposes that he can attain to life either by baptism or by partaking of bread is still in superstition.

Hans Denk

If you be always handling the letter of the Word, always licking the letter, always chewing upon that, what great thing do you? No marvel you are such starvelings.

John Everard

While the Right Law still prevailed, innumerable were the con­verts who fathomed the depths of the Dharma by merely listen­ing to half a stanza or even to a single phrase of the Buddha's teaching. But as we come to the age of similitude and to these latter days of Buddhism, we are indeed far away from the Sage.283

People find themselves drowning in a sea of letters; they do not know how to get at the one substance which alone is truth. This was what caused the appearance of the Fathers (of Zen Bud­dhism) who, pointing directly at the human mind, told us to see here the ultimate ground of all things and thereby to attain Buddhahood. This is known as a special transmission outside the scriptural teaching. If one is endowed with superior talents or a special sharpness of mind, a gesture or a word will suffice to give one an immediate knowledge of the truth. Hence, since they were advocates of 'special transmission,' Ummon treated the (historical) Buddha with the utmost irreverence and Yakusan forbade his followers even to read the sutras.

Zen is the name given to this branch of Buddhism, which keeps itself away from the Buddha. It is also called the mystical branch, because it does not adhere to the literal meaning of the sutras. It is for this reason that those who blindly follow the steps of Buddha are sure to deride Zen, while those who have no liking for the letter are naturally inclined towards the mystical approach. The followers of the two schools know how to shake the head at each other, but fail to realize that they are after all complementary. Is not Zen one of the six virtues of perfection? If so, how can it conflict with the teachings of the Buddha? In my view, Zen is the outcome of the Buddha's teaching, and the mystical issues from the letters. There is no reason why a man should shun Zen because of the Buddha's teaching; nor need we disregard the letters on account of the mystical teachings of Zen.

Students of scriptural Buddhism run the risk of becoming sticklers for the scriptures, the real meaning of which they fail to understand. By such men ultimate reality is never grasped, and for them Zen would mean salvation. Whereas those who study Zen are too apt to run into the habit of making empty talks and practising sophistry. They fail to understand the significance of letters. To save them, the study of Buddhist scriptures is recom­mended. It is only when these one-sided views are mutually corrected that there is a perfect appreciation of the Buddha's teaching.

Chiang Chih-chi

284

It would be hard to find a better summing up of the conclu­sions, to which any spiritually and psychologically realistic mind must sooner or later come, than the foregoing paragraphs written in the eleventh century by one of the masters of Zen Buddhism.

The extract that follows is a moving protest against the crimes and follies perpetrated in the name of religion by those sixteenth-century Reformers who had turned to God without turning away from themselves and who were therefore far more keenly interested in the temporal aspects of historic Christianity—the ecclesiastical organization, the logic-chop­ping, the letter of Scripture—than in the Spirit who must be worshipped in spirit, the eternal Reality in the selfless know­ledge of whom stands man's eternal life. Its author was Sebas­tian Castelio, who was at one time Calvin's favourite disciple, but who parted company with his master when the latter burned Servetus for heresy against his own heresy. Fortun­ately Castellio was living in Basel when he made his plea for charity and common decency; penned in Geneva, it would have earned him torture and death.

If you, illustrious Prince (the words were addressed to the Duke of Wurtemberg) had informed your subjects that you were coming to visit them at an unnamed time, and had requested them to be prepared in white garments to meet you at your coming, what would you do if on arrival you should find that, instead of robing themselves in white, they had spent their time in violent debate about your person—some insisting that you were in France, others that you were in Spain; some declaring that you would come on horseback, others that you would come by chariot; some holding that you would come with great pomp and others that you would come without any train or following? And what especially would you say if they debated not only with words, but with blows of fist and sword strokes, and if some suc­ceeded in killing and destroying others who differed from them? 'He will come on horseback.' 'No, he will not; it will be by chariot.' 'You lie.' 'I do not; you are the liar.' 'Take that'‑

a blow with the fist. 'Take that'—a sword-thrust through the body. Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put on the white robes of a pure and holy life; but what occupies our thoughts? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of his relation to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of the nature of God, of the angels, of the condition of the soul after death—of a multitude of matters that are not essential to salvation; matters, moreover, which can never be known until our hearts are pure; for they are things which must be spiritually perceived.

Sebastian Casteiio

People always get what they ask for; the only trouble is that they never know, until they get it, what it actually is that they have asked for. 

Thus, Protestants might, if they had so desired, have followed the lead of Castellio and Denk; but they pre­ferred Calvin and Luther—preferred them because the doc­trines of justification by faith and of predestination were more exciting than those of the Perennial Philosophy. 

And not only more exciting, but also less exacting; for if they were true, one could be saved without going through that distasteful process of self-naughting, which is the necessary pre-condition of deliverance into the knowledge of eternal Reality. And not only less exacting, but also more satisfying to the intellectual's appetite for clear-cut formulae and the syllogistic demonstra­tions of abstract truths.

 Waiting on God is a bore; but what fun to argue, to score off opponents, to lose one's temper and call it 'righteous indignation,' and at last to pass from contro­versy to blows, from words to what St. Augustine so deli­ciously described as the 'benignant asperity' of persecution and punishment!286

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Choosing Luther and Calvin instead of the spiritual reformers who were their contemporaries, Protestant Europe got the kind of theology it liked. 

But it also got, along with other unantici­pated by-products, the Thirty Years War, capitalism and the first rudiments of modern Germany.

 'If we wish,' Dean Inge has recently written, 'to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought upon the world. . . I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but Martin Luther.... 

It (Lutheranism) worships a God who is neither just nor merciful.... The Law of Nature, which ought to be the court of appeal against unjust authority, is identified (by Luther) with the existing order of society, to which absolute obedience is due.' And so on. 

Right belief is the first branch of the Eightfold Path leading to deliverance; the root and primal cause of bondage is wrong belief, or ignor-ance—an ignorance, let us remember, which is never com­pletely invincible, but always, in the last analysis, a matter of will. If we don't know, it is because we find it more con­venient not to know. Original ignorance is the same thing as original sin.

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William Ralph Inge KCVO FBA was an English author, Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and dean of St Paul's Cathedral, which provided the appellation by which he was widely known, Dean Inge. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times. Wikipedia