LITMIR.BIZ

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The same Professor Holtzmann is, besides, a most suggestive religious philosopher; and his penetrating though very difficult book Richard Rothe’s Speculatives System, 1899, has also been of considerable use.

      Other recent or contemporary German writers to whom I owe much, are Erwin Rhode, in his exquisite great book, Psyche, 2nd ed., 1898; Professor Johannes Volkelt, in his penetratingly critical Kant’s Erkenntnisstheorie, 1879; Professor Hugo Münsterberg, in his largely planned although too absolute Grundzüge der Psychologie, Vol. I., 1900; Professor Heinrich Rickert, in his admirably discriminating Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, 1902; and also two friends whose keen care for religion never flags—Professors Rudolf Eucken of Jena and Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg. Eucken’s Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker, 1st ed., 1890; der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt, 1896; and the earlier sections of der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, 1902, have greatly helped me. And Troeltsch’s Grund-probleme der Ethik, 1902, has considerably influenced certain central conceptions of my book, notwithstanding the involuntary, rough injustice manifested by him, especially elsewhere, towards the Roman Church.

      Among present-day French writers, my book owes most to Professor Maurice Blondel’s, partly obscure yet intensely alive and religiously deep, work L’Action, 1893; to Dr. Pierre Janet’s carefully first-hand observations, as chronicled in his Etat Mental des Hystériques, 1894; to Monsieur Emil Boutroux’s very suggestive paper Psychologie du Mysticisme, 1902; to various pregnant articles of the Abbé L. Laberthonnière in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, 1898-1906; and to M. Henri Bergson’s delicately penetrating Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience, 2nd ed., 1898.

      And amongst living Englishmen, the work is most indebted to Professor A. S. Pringle-Pattison, especially to his eminently sane Hegelianism and Personality, 2nd ed., 1893; to Professor James Ward, in his strenuous Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1st ed., 1899; to the Reverend George Tyrrell’s Hard Sayings, 1898, and The Faith of the Millions, 2 vols., 1901, so full of insight into Mysticism; and, very especially, to Dr. Edward Caird, in his admirably wide and balanced survey, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904.

      But further back than all the living writers and friends lies the stimulation and help of him who was later on to become Cardinal Newman. It was he who first taught me to glory in my appurtenance to the Catholic and Roman Church, and to conceive this my inheritance in a large and historical manner, as a slow growth across the centuries, with an innate affinity to, and eventual incorporation of, all the good and true to be found mixed up with error and with evil in this chequered, difficult but rich world and life in which this living organism moves and expands. Yet the use to which all these helps have here been put, has inevitably been my own doing: nowhere except in direct quotations have I simply copied, and nowhere are these helpers responsible for what here appears.

      And then there have been great souls, whom I cannot well name here, but whom I would nevertheless refer to in reverent gratitude; souls that have taught me that deepest of facts and of lessons,—the persistence, across the centuries, within the wide range of the visible and indeed also of the invisible Church, of that vivid sense of the finite and the Infinite, of that spacious joy and expansive freedom in self-donation to God, the prevenient, all-encompassing Spirit, of that massively spontaneous, elemental religion, of which Catherine is so noble an example. Thus a world-renouncing, world-conquering, virile piety, humble and daring, humane, tender and creatively strong, is at no time simply dead, but it merely sleepeth; indeed it ever can be found, alive, open-eyed irresistible, hidden away here and there, throughout our earthly space and time.

      In matters directly connected with the publication of the work I have especially to thank Messrs. Sciutto of Genoa, the photographers to whom I owe the very successful photographs from which the plates that stand at the head of my volumes have been taken; Mr. Sidney E. Mayle, publisher, of Hampstead, for permission to use the photogravure of St. Catherine’s portrait which appeared as an illustration to a paper of mine, in his scholarly Hampstead Annual, 1898; Miss Maude Petre, who helped me much towards achieving greater lucidity of style, by carefully reading and criticizing all my proofs; and my publisher, who has not shrunk from undertaking the publication of so long a work on so very serious, abstruse-seeming a subject. Even so, I have had to suppress the notes to my chapter on “Catherine’s Teaching,” which throughout showed the critical reasons that had determined my choice of the particular sayings, and the particular text of the sayings, adopted by me in the text; and have had to excise quite a third of my Appendix, which furnished the analysis of further, critically instructive texts of the Vita e Dottrina, the Dicchiarazione and the Dialogo. If a new edition is ever called for, this further material might be added, and would greatly increase the cogency of my argument.

      The work that now at last I thus submit to the reader, is doubtless full of defects; and I shall welcome any thoughtful criticism of any of its parts as a true kindness. Yet I would point out that all these parts aim at being but so many constituents of a whole, within which alone they gain their true significance and worth. Hence only by one who has studied and pondered the book as a whole, will any of its parts be criticized with fairness to that part’s intention. To gain even but a dozen of such readers would amply repay the labour of these many years.

      I take it that the most original parts are Chapter Eight, with its analysis of Battista Vernazza’s interesting Diary; the Appendix, with its attempts at fixing the successive authors and intentions that have built up the Vita e Dottrina; Chapter Nine, which attempts to assign to psycho-physical matters, as we now know them, their precise place and function within the vast life-system, and according to the practical tests, of the great Mystical Saints; and Chapter Fifteen, with its endeavour to picture that large Asceticism which alone can effect, within the same soul, a fruitful co-habitation of, and interaction between, Social Religion, the Scientific Habit of Mind, and the Mystical Element of Religion.

      Kirkegaard used to claim that he ever wrote existentially, pricked on by the exigencies of actual life, to attempt their expression in terms of that life, and in view of its further spiritual development. More than ever the spiritual life appears now as supremely worth the having, and yet it seems to raise, or to find, the most formidable difficulties or even deadlocks. I can but hope that these pages may have so largely sprung from the exigencies of that life itself,—that they may have caught so much of the spirit of the chief livers of the spiritual life, especially of St. Catherine of Genoa and of St. John of the Cross, and, above all, of the One Master and Measure of Christianity and of the Church,—as to stimulate such life, its practice, love and study, in their readers, and may point them, spur them on, through and beyond all that here has been attempted, missed or obscured, to fuller religious insight, force and fruitfulness.

      Friedrich Von Hügel.

      Kensington, Easter 1908.

      “Grant unto men, O God, to perceive in little things the indications, common-seeming though they be, of things both small and great.”

      St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. XI, ch. xxiii, 1.

      “He is not far from every one of us; for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”—Acts xvii, 27, 28.

      “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”—2 Corinthians iii, 17.

      THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION

       Table of Contents

      PART I

       INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

       THE THREE CHIEF FORCES OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

      

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