Essays on faith and immortality

Front matter

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Introduction

THE following essays of Father George Tyrrell are drawn, for the most part, from notebooks and unpublished material. It was his habit, as has been mentioned elsewhere, to keep what. he. called. a “Journal” of spiritual and philosophical jottings— day by day he thus noted down any thoughts that occurred to him; and the result was, sometimes a series of detached reflections, such as we find in Nova et Vetera, or Orl and Wine, sometimes a consecutive work, such as Ler Credendt, which was, to a great extent, drawn from such jottings.

The “Journal,” of which a large portion is first published in these pages, was written during the course of the year 1904, while its author was yet a member of the Society of Jesus, but the collection contains also a good deal of matter drawn from a later, and less elaborated notebook, written during the year 1906, in the months succeeding his rupture with the Society, and particularly during the period of his wanderings in France.

The “Journal” of 1904 is undoubtedly the incomplete scheme of a definite work; perhaps one of the most important works that its author ever planned. Part of it had even been typed and arranged, and

1 Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell. v vi ESSAYS ON FAITH AND IMMORTALITY various titles had been under consideration ; of which the one that seems to have been finally preferred was that given to the first chapter of this volume, namely The Doctrinal Authority of Conscience. lt was all designed in the attempt at reaching a fundamental philosophy of belief ; yet, as it was still in the making, the material was not rigorously co-ordinated, and any stray thoughts that presented themselves were put down as they came, regardless of their exact relation to the whole.

The readers of these essays will probably have some acquaintance with the life of their author, and will know how the religious crisis of the day forced him to deal with immediate and pressing problems, which diverted him temporarily from tasks that could be abandoned and resumed. Not that the works brought forth in those years of stress were without relation to the deepest problems of faith; but they had necessarily a more direct bearing on difficulties of the day than a work planned in leisure and tranquillity. Furthermore, the “Journal” also provided material for the works of the moment, and was exploited for that purpose; large portions, for instance, being used, as I have said, in the composition of Lex Credendz.

Hence it could not be said that the work was in any sense ready for publication as a systematic whole, and it seemed, therefore, better to arrange it in fresh order, so that place might be found for everything worth preserving. It was also desirable to take advantage of the occasion to publish anything of interest from the later, unconsecutive “Journal” of 1906; and a new scheme lent itself to this purpose,

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It is here, then, that the present editor must take a share of responsibility. Wherever thought logically succeeds to thought, the original order of the “Journal” has been preserved; but, for the most part, the chapter headings and the sectional titles have been adopted as a means of classification, and the material arranged under those headings, regardless of its place in the MS.

Two great subjects stand out prominent, which give their names to the book and to its two parts— Faith and Immortality. The writer of the “Journal” of 1904 had undoubtedly set out chiefly to consider the fundamental problem of faith; but day by day, as he put down his thoughts, the question of personality, and of personal survival, seems to have appeared and reappeared, till quite a series of the essays were occupied, almost exclusively, with this subject.

Now this is a matter which interests many who care little for religious philosophy in general; hence my original plan was to publish separately the essays dealing with it. Eventually the question was compromised by the division of the work into two parts, whereof the second is devoted to the subject of immortality. To the essays hitherto unpublished have been added two others concerned with the same problem. One of these—“The Parusia and Socialism ”—was published in Italy, but never in England; the second, “Divine Fecundity,’ was delivered as a lecture to the Quest Society in the last year of Father Tyrrell’s life, and published, in part only, in the Quest Magazine. It is well fitted to form the concluding essay of the series.

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The problem of personality, and personal immortality, is one which, more than many others, displays in its treatment the temperament of the one who treats of it. By reason of its personal import it is one in which the character of the thinker will especially inspire his thoughts; and the conjuring feats of the “spiritualist ’”’ will be as characteristic of his outlook on life as the noblest prophetic utterances of the mystic.

It is, therefore, nothing more than we might expect when we find Tyrrell extremely himself in his dealings with this problem. That strange self-detachment which was, as I have elsewhere maintained, the source of his strength and his weakness, made him peculiarly fitted for the handling of a problem which some of us can hardly endure to face in its nakedness. Nothing but the wish could inspire the belief with which the stricken wife or mother will consult a charlatan oracle for news of her lost one; and that same craving will bias more enlightened minds in their study of the same theme. A certain conception of personality has wound itself into the fibres of our faith and our hope; the very limitations of that conception have become, to many of us, its chief meaning. Not even for something better do we wish to exchange the notions we have got. We fear lest the substance should fade to a shadow in the process of transformation.

In a letter of January 13, 1905, almost contemporary with the “Journal” from which the articles are extracted, Tyrrell writes to a friend:

“ You wzll persist in fancying that I am satisfied with

1 See chap. i. vol. ii. of Autobiography, &c.

INTRODUCTION 1X an ‘impersonal immortality’; and this because you make separateness and egotism essential constituents of the ‘I,’ which they are not; being indeed tts limttations.

“We conceive separatism as the condition of love. But look closer and you will see it 1s just what love kicks against. What tt wants ts fulness and inclusion ; not exclusion. Nettleship’s Remains first woke me to that.

“ When the split portions of a personality are reunited the ‘I’ of both persists, and not a third ‘I’ which ts their sum. It ts only what happens every time I remember some forgotten tract of my past experience. It ts a screen, like oblivion, that divides me from what seems te me now as the expertence of others ; and so on and so on.”

Father Tyrrell felt no attraction towards the pseudo- Orientalism of some Europeans; but for the true East he had the respectful veneration of one who knows that if age be less nimble and progressive than youth, it is also wiser; that it has lived through some of the fallacies, outworn some of the illusions on which youth is yet feeding. It may be that East and West have but laid hold of different sides of the same problem; and it may also be that neither can solve it without the other. There are elements in the following essays which would probably appeal to the self-detached spirit of Eastern mysticism ; though, indeed, a certain self-detachment is a characteristic of all true mysticism.

Among the essays of the First Part one or two only have already made their appearance elsewhere. Of one in particular it must be admitted that it is not quite in its right place in this volume; yet the occasion was too favourable to omit its insertion. I refer to the article “A Perverted Devotion,” which played x ESSAYS ON FAITH AND IMMORTALITY so large a part in the life of its author!; and which also presents many of his very best characteristics. This essay was unprocurable, and yet many who had read the Lzfe of Tyrrell were anxious to read it in its entirety; it has therefore been placed at the end of Part I.

With regard to the character of these essays it must be noted that, even had they been arranged by their author, they would not have been finished explanations of the themes with which they deal, nor even final expressions of their writer’s views ; while there are also a certain number which their author might have rejected in a last revision, and which have been inserted by the editor in the desire to save rather too much than too little.

There are minds that not only condemn obscurity gua obscurity, but even reject a truth which is ever so little obscure. They cannot resist the suspicion that an hypothesis is the result of wilful vagueness ; and that it is only a case of opening the shutters which somebody has capriciously closed.

These essays will be, many of them, of little use to such minds, who had far better pass them by. For they often express a guess rather than a conviction; they are gropings and not treatises. But as there is an ever recurring stage, even in physical science, when a new question is an advance on an old answer, when an hypothesis is more precious than a solution, so, a fortzorz, is there an analogous stage in spiritual philosophy. Confused and muddled thought is always objectionable, but the touch is often in advance of the sight in its apprehension of reality.

1 See vol. ii. chap. v. of Azzlobiography, &c.

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Hence I have not feared to put in fragments, in spite of their lack of finish, for the sake of some flash of insight which they convey; and they will serve their purpose if they do what their author was always satished to do, namely to give the lead to some other mind which can carry the search a little further.

It must also be remembered that unfinished work may leave its author exposed to certain charges which further elaboration would have checked. Hence it is necessary, in some cases, to compare these essays with the author’s published works for the completion of their understanding. Thus, in particular, on the question of pragmatism, which was less defined then than now, it is well to consult the essay on that subject in Through Scylla and Charybdis.

I will end with a word of thanks to Archdeacon Lilley, who has once more helped me in the accomplishment of a task which was not without its difficulties.

M. D. PETRE.

CHAP.

I. THr DocTRINAL AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE .

II. Gop

Contents

PARE a] ESSAYS ON FAITH

AND Man . Does Holiness Enlighten?

I 2. “ Unprofitable Servants.” oe 4 5

Chapter I The Doctrinal Authority Of Conscience

THE “intellectualist”? notion of Faith as an assent to mental puzzles on the strength of divine testimony is answerable for much unreality in religion. For Faith is the foundation of the spiritual life, and the vice of the foundation affects the whole superstructure. All this fiction, pretence, make-believe must be purged away; if necessary, by a sort of Cartesian criticism, which cuts away everything questionable till it comes to a positive something that cannot be questioned, and on which the whole edifice may be more solidly constructed. This rock of irresistible reality is Conscience—the sense of the Right and of its absolute claims. No analysis, no explaining away can permanently destroy this faith or lay the ghost—Furca expellas, tamen usque recurret. Yet faith it is, and not understanding or inference, nor experience in the narrower external sense. And it is faith zz God. For (as Euclid would say) let it be supposed that the will of a God who is other than Conscience were revealed to us, should we not, before obeying, submit his will to the verdict of conscience, as to something higher and more absolutely imperative ? Only Conscience, therefore, can say, “Thou shalt have none 3 other Gods but me; thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”

Yet I cannot say that “my Conscience” and “my God” are synonyms; and before the difficulty of giving distinct expression to the above truth, that “Conscience is God,’ I must for ever be helpless, because I can never define either term, or put into form what is given only as feeling and experience. Besides, ‘‘MZy Conscience”’ seems to be part of me, to be a “faculty” of my soul, or a department of my judgment, or the higher impulse of my will, and “ Conscience”’ in general, like Right in general, seems quite impersonal, an abstraction, a principle, like Beauty or Truth or Wisdom. But “ God,” on the other hand, at once suggests a person, a spirit, an other-than-self, above, outside, beyond self.

Hence my understanding can never frame one concept to unite the two in which it has presented to itself different aspects of one and the same experience, calling the one God and the other Conscience.

The very term ‘God,’ as meaning at least a person and a spirit, is already a “graven image” of the ineffable, nor can the Divine be presented to our understanding without being zso facto limited and misrepresented; we cannot possibly express, what nevertheless we feel and touch and resist and yield to, except in “the likeness of something in Heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.” We are not idolaters, however, unless we affirm an existence and reality exactly correspondent to this image, and give it Divine honours. This is the beginning of evil, of unreality, fiction and pretence ; of belief in conceptions and inferences, rather than faith in facts, persons, and experiences. “Thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”

Hence Faith in that directive Power which my understanding figures to me, now as Conscience or as my Conscience, now as God or as my God, is for me the one immutable foundation stone of the life of religion ; or it is the germ, the nucleus, of which every fruitful growth of that life must be the legitimate and natural expansion. As the object of that Faith (sc. God or Conscience) is elusive and difficult, or impossible, to formulate mentally, so is Faith itself; and yet we must try to say what we mean by it, though the most vigorous Faith, like the deepest compunction, may be least capable of self-definition, nor do men live, think, and love any the less for being unable to agree as to the nature and definition of life, thought, and love. Acollapse of theory leaves things and facts standing unimpaired.

By Faith, then, I mean, not my assent to any statement about Conscience, or to any definition or conception of its nature, but my deliberately approved or fostered affection and practical attitude and disposition in regard to its felt checks or impulses. I may explain this attitude in my mind as a sense of the absolute claims of Right; I may speak of Conscience as the voice of God; I may (and even must) try to construct a scheme of things that will find room for and explain this inward experience; but the mental assent I give to all these hypotheses and conceptions is not Faith, it is at best the nucleus of a theology, of an orthodoxy or heterodoxy.

To hold such a theology or orthodoxy merely by tradition or imitation or inference, and not as a provisional and faulty expression of a real experience, is religious “intellectualism,” not faith. It is “idealism,” not “realism”; that is to say, one’s life is, in such case, controlled, not by reality, but by a symbol or formula of reality; or if by experience at all, by the experience of others accepted on testimony.

Faith implies vision and obscurity, light and shadow, but in no contradictory sense. The shadow and obscurity of Faith is only in the understanding, in its endeavour to formulate the implications of faith, to harmonise them with its formulation of experience in general, to bring the psychic and spiritual, the natural and supernatural, the visible and invisible into the unity of one system of categories and common measures ; an endeavour antecedently doomed to perpetual failure as long as our mind works under its present conditions and borrows its language from physics —from things common, external, and communicable. The light and vision of Faith is that of direct evidence of touch and taste, of pleasure and pain, of attraction and repulsion. The “vision” to which “faith” is to give place in the ideal order, which is not Faith but abolishes Faith, is that of the intelligence or understanding made adequate to reality, and reaching a true expression of what we now symbolise as God or Conscience. At present the discord between the light and shadow of Faith is inevitable, and constitutes a “temptation against Faith” for the intellectualist who will not believe in a felt value which he cannot explain or account for; or who believes in it, yet lives by his account of the thing rather than by the thing itself, thus leading a theoretical, unsubstantial, make-believe life that is not in contact with reality.

A worse faithlessness is that of a self-induced insensibility to the impulses and checks of conscience, and a hardening of the heart, a stiffening of the neck, brought about by a blind acceptance of illusory good; by a refusal to look forward to the end, to see change and decay and death all around us, or to learn by one’s own or others’ experience the vanity, bitterness, nothingness of any creature out of relation to and connection with the Creator. Hence, shadows become solid and substantial for us; and the only abiding reality grows ever more dreamy, fantastic and far away, and may be lost to sight for ever. Then, suddenly, men wake from dreams of wealth to find their hands empty; they call on God and He will not hear; the bartered heritage is gone for ever. They have put out their own eyes. Short of such an extreme, faith abides so long as man sins open-eyed and with a bad conscience; so long as he plays with illusions knowing them to be such, and prefers them to what he still feels to be the only realities; so long as he lives, even as a rebel, in the world of faith, and does not construct another world in which the shadows of the present take the place of God and Conscience.

What is more real to me than myself? Is it not because I interpret other things by myself that I attribute to them a certain reality and selfhood? The first impulse of the wakening mind is to assume that everything is like itself; unlikenesses are taught only by slow experience; at first everything is alive, sentient, free, and even to the last everything is at least “real”; for to think of it at all is to liken it to ourselves, and reality is the least degree of such likeness that we can predicate. And yet, when I meditate on it, this reality, that I seem to find so surely in myself, melts away and vanishes into thin air, and I want something far more real than myself. Do I not want explaining? I am not ultimate, self-explanatory, necessary. What was I a few years since? What shall I be a few years hence? What am I for? What does my being, my action, my life mean or matter? And of all my action and thought and speech and effort is there anything that is absolutely worth doing, and not merely relatively to some end that is itself of like relative value; and so on for ever ?

That there ave actions of this absolute value, nay, that my every action may be of such value, is the affirmation, the assurance of Conscience—an affirmation that Faith only can accept, since the understanding can never justify it. For the world which the understanding reconstructs and symbolically represents is that of appearances; reality figures there only in terms of appearance, and must be degraded and debased in order to be understood; must be received after the fashion of the receiver. Faith then tells me that my actions may have an absolute worth and value, which they could not have were they referred solely to myself, considered in my isolation, a mere shadow flitting across the stage of history. The service of a nothing is nothing. My actions are therefore the service of something which is absolutely real, good, worthy, abiding ; something whose instrument I am; something, in dynamic union with which, and in the serving of which, I share a certain absoluteness, reality, and eternity ; and apart from which I am nothing—not even capable of feeling and deploring my separate unreality, or of aspiring after a greater reality. I am, only because It is; and my being is merely dependence on Its being.

It is Faith then, Faith in Conscience, in God, in the Right, that puts me in touch with reality, and delivers me from the sense of vacuity and exmuz that mere understanding rather fosters than mitigates; for the understanding can offer me but notions and signs, not things; nor can it, by its analyses and dialectical processes, justify or explain the absolute values that are revealed to me in Conscience.

The attempt to formulate these primary religious experiences, to find a place for them in the schemata of the understanding, to attain orthodoxy in thought as well as Faith in affection, is not only inevitable, but profitable. It is inevitable, since the understanding is restless till it has brought all experiences, of what kind soever, into the unity of one rational system, so as to be able to control and utilise them all, and direct them to a common end. It is profitable, somewhat as natural science is profitable to the fulness of our life in reference to external nature, in so far as it registers our experiences symbolically, classifies their groupings and sequences, observes their uniformities, rises from lower to higher laws, and thus enables us more and more to divine what is distant, to predict what is future, to regulate our action by a fuller and wider light than that offered by immediate perception, or even by remembered personal experiences. Within somewhat narrower limits the understanding can be similarly serviceable and instrumental to the mystical life. An experience remembered and understood is thereby made fertile of other and fuller experiences; and these, in their turn, of others still more full. To despise orthodoxy is to despise all knowledge; it is to live from hand to mouth like savages; it is to be stupidly and literally dependent on Providence, where we should . be actively self-provident, self-cultivating, progressive, independent. In no way are we more bound to be co-operant in the development of our inward life than in our endeavour to understand it in order to regulate it.

But if for any reason orthodoxy becomes petrified and permanently canonised, so as to be unable to accommodate itself to new kinds of experience, or to explain more of the new than can be explained in terms of the old, it becomes as a bar set across the road of spiritual progress. New experiences are wasted ; they cannot be registered or fertilised. The old channels simply overflow, but can hold no more than they did before. This happens whenever the honours of faith are given to orthodoxy ; whenever a any temporary explanation of experience is made final, exhaustive, infallible, binding for all possible contingencies.

As in natural, so too in religious science, every explanatory system and hypothesis is relative to the data, the amount and kind of experience to hand. It will possess a certain degree of flexibility, and be capable of a sort of dialectical development, so as to accommodate new facts up to a certain point. But a day comes when our library must be pulled down and catalogued on an entirely new system ; when, in other words, we must look out for new categories, and new methods of development. The development of doctrine is a familiar conception, but that of Faith, of Conscience, of spiritual life, is less easy to grasp, especially when it is allowed that the former but shadows the latter, and, as a whole, is dependent on it, in the way that science is dependent on experience more than experience is dependent on science.

Let us return then to the primary datum of religion. Faith is not a blind, unrelated love or loyalty or devotion, yet neither is it evoked in the first instance by any zdea of God, or of Goodness, or of Right and Duty; these are but attempted afterexpressions of its object. What I really encounter is a certain ideal of conduct, that seeks to impose itself on me and to assume the control of my action in each particular case. Of several courses open to me there is one that inclines me unaccountably to a sort of unqualified reverence, subjection, self-abandonment ; which does not take any account of my private separate interests as such; which uses me as an instrument of some end beyond and above my own outlook. What is revealed to me in each such suggestion, and in the whole collection of them, is a Will, a Character, a Spirit that would live my life and use my powers and opportunities very differently from the way in which I do, and that is struggling with me to get its own way in the matter. It is through and in this ideal of conduct, through the sum-total of these experienced suggestions and inspirations, that the divine is directly revealed to me, even as my fellow-man is revealed to me by his life and conduct. It is to the Power so revealed that the loyalty of faith, hope and love are related, prior to any attempt to understand that Power, or to formulate it as Power, or Will, or Spirit, or God. Apart, then, from the assistance rendered by the understanding we can see how, in the measure that one yields oneself to the guidance of Conscience, its direction (and therefore its self-revelation) becomes more abundant, more clear, more delicately discerning; how the ideal unfolds and reveals itself and becomes more and more imperative and all-dominating ; and how, consequently, the answering affections of faith, reverence, trust and love are deepened, enriched and refined.

But is revelation concerned only with the moral character of the Deity viewed as the archetype of human character? Directly, this undoubtedly is the substance and central value of revelation, which was given us in no way in the interests of intellectual curiosity, physical or metaphysical, but only “that we might have life and have it more abundantly” ; that we might possess it rather than know about it. Yet conduct has reference to society, to our whole environment, to our nature, our origin, our destiny ; and therefore, precisely so far as the ideal is determined by the truth as to these things, that truth is implicit in the ideal and can be inferred from it. It is the task of the theological understanding to try to unravel, express, and set in order these implications ; to ask: Why is this right? What hypothesis would explain its rightness? How should we have to arrange and explain the world to account for it; in a word; What are the postulates and implications of the moral and religious sense ?

What right have I to suppose that metaphysical, physical and even historical truth must be fundamentally in harmony with the affirmations of Conscience ? or to suppose that Right and Wrong can be lawfully used as criteria of truths outside the moral order ? or that “authority” can dictate to science and override its findings ?—for, in principle, it amounts to that.

This right is itself based on faith—faith in the unity and rationality of all that is, faith in the supremacy of Right as the goal towards which all is working, as the guiding and formative principle of all development ; faith in the spirit of the “Just Man made perfect”’ as the final resultant of the workings of God in history and Nature. This is the faith we express when at last we make Conscience the depositary of that notion of Deity which we first ascribed to the source and author of physical power, next, to the primal intelligence and wisdom and beauty; when we speak of Conscience or Righteousness as the Creator, the

Alpha and Omega of the physical and metaphysical orders of being, including such lower godship in, and subjecting it to, the only true godship of spiritual goodness; or when we bid earth and heaven and all who dwell therein to worship and fall down before that which is their Maker, “for whose sake they are, and were created” ; who is the razson d étre, the governing principle of all.

According to this faith the best action is that which is most harmonious with reality, which fits in most truly with the sequence of history, which most effectually furthers and carries out the Divine Will that is revealing itself in the secular process.

The value of this moral and religious sense as a criterion of philosophical and historical truth is no doubt limited, like the blind judgments of instinct; yet, zz default of clearly contradictory evidence, its guidance may be accepted. Sentiments of loyalty and affection, as involving certain implications concerning his character, are somewhat similarly allowed in cases of doubt to determine my belief as to what my friend did or is likely to do—to determine, that is, my reading of his history by a non-historical criterion. So too the appetite and digestive power of an animal exercise a certain chemical discrimination by a method other than chemical. It is not more inconceivable that the moral and religious appetite should, within limits, act as a virtual criterion of false and true. Aquinas tells us that his doctrine of Predestination should not be preached to the crowds, as it would be morally mischievous and decadent. Here, in default surely of convincing evidence, he might justly have regarded this as a reductio ad absurdum; he might have said: What is religiously and morally hurtful cannot be true; or: A conception of Nature which is fatal to life must be false.