Neither by force of arms nor by brute strength, but by my spirit! says the Lord of Hosts. (Zechariah 4:6)
THE HOLY SPIRIT enters fully into our lives when we are ready to receive Him. He does not overwhelm us so as to obliterate our own sense of identity; on the contrary, He inspires us to grow into something of the stature of a real person, potentially a son of God. Furthermore, that growth is not simply a transaction between God and the individual. The Communion of Saints is working in ceaseless collaboration for the sanctification of all life.
As I have already noted, this Communion consists not only of those in the greater world beyond death, but also of those aspiring to a knowledge of God on earth. Our growth into the stature of full persons is not an isolated process. We are to become members of the divine community of those dedicated to the good - indeed the Communion of Saints - both for our own fulfilment and for the unique contribution we make by our very essence to that community. I only begin to know what it is to be a real person when I have shed all selfish concerns, even for life itself, and have bequeathed all my attributes to the community out of deep love for its members. Individual growth without concern for the greater community merely separates me from my fellow creatures. But if I offer up myself, even to death, for God's Kingdom, I shall know true fellowship and I shall gain knowledge of the eternal principle within me.
This is a key teaching of the mystics of all religious traditions, and it is close to the heart of Jesus" gospel.
Jesus came into the world as a light for blind, struggling humanity. In man's association with the world, he had wandered far from the source of truth within him. Though fashioned in the image of God, he had been trapped in a slough of meaninglessness over the ages of his independent existence. He needed desperately to be brought back to the light of understanding. To bring this about, the Word of God spoke through many great teachers, who were entrusted with the thankless but ever joyous task of opening the eyes of those who were spiritually blind. These great souls were to release their brethren from the shackles of darkness and death, so that they might pass from darkness to light, from death to immortality.
It is hardly necessary for me to pay tribute to these servants of mankind by name. This is the realm of history and comparative religion. But a few great names stand out. The light that lightens every man enlightened the saints of India so that they were aware of the divinity and immortality inherent in all creatures. In the Buddha there was one who showed and taught the way of personal renunciation in right living, thinking and contemplating, so that the final impediment to divine realisation, the clamant, assertive ego, could be transcended and even annihilated. The Word spoke through the philosophers of Greece, through the brilliance of a liberated mind; in them intellectual speculation was united with mystical intuition to produce a synthesis that leads us to heaven described in the Enneads of Plotinus. In a different way the earthy prophets of Israel taught that God is known in the historical process and that righteousness in living is the great requirement for co-operating with Him.
It is noteworthy that, although the Word spoke through all these inspired agents, and His Spirit proceeded from them, they all had an individual light to shed on the human dilemma. None was more correct than the other; the aspect that the one might ignore because of his racial or historical background was the very teaching emphasised by the other. We are indeed all historically conditioned, as we all bear the scars and the glory of a particular racial and religious (or non-religious) background. The Buddha had no use for a personal god, whereas the religion of Israel was prophetic in inspiration; through its prophets God Himself spoke. In truth whatever is said about God is wrong, as Meister Eckhart declared. The Buddha, realising the harm personal assertions about God can do, and how God can easily be degraded to a man-like, an anthropomorphic image (a tendency only too obvious in early 01d Testament religion) wisely discouraged his disciples from entering into futile speculations about the ultimate state of reality, but encouraged them instead to live the proper life and experience the Nirvanic state of self transcendence. But such a religion can be cold and lack the glow of human relationships that comes from a full expression of the personal self. It also by-passes the historical process and pays far too little attention to the world in which we live. The genius of the religion of Israel acknowledged the world, its hatred as well as its love, and was, above all, an historical account of the personal God working in the lives of people. It is often not realised that the pre-exilic Jews had no clear-cut belief in the life beyond death. The great prophets could look forward to nothing more than a wraith-like existence in Sheol. While this may shock those of us who see the life of the world to come as an essential part of reality, and without which God's love to us would be of little worth, it is to the credit of those honest prophets that they taught the law of righteousness in terms of present actions in this world and not by promises of future punishments or rewards in an after-life. The people of Israel were gradually prepared for a wider appreciation of the survival of death through their contact with Babylonian, Persian, and Greek thought. On the other hand, the Hindu-Buddhist scheme has taken immortality as a basic principle of existence and on it has grafted a scheme of reincarnation. This again has a ring of truth about it, provided a return to this world is not insisted on as an invariable sequence, and of even greater importance, the round of rebirth is seen as one of growing into the knowledge and love of God. Where punishment and retribution are the main themes of an after-life state, the personal self is once more exalted to a dominant status in the life of the person.
In the life of Jesus, an unpretentious Palestinian Jew of the first century of our era, there was one who showed what it meant to be a full, proper human being. He was, like His predecessors, a great ethical teacher. In addition He had an understanding of the psychology of man that is a source of amazement to us even now. He was so attuned to the psychic dimension of reality that He could perform remarkable healing feats; even the natural world around Him was under His control. But, as I have stressed already and on more than one occasion, it was His perfect identification with His fellow-men that was His greatest achievement and His gift to us. To be sure, He revealed man at His most supreme, but He also came down to redeem those who were lost by becoming one with them and living through their agony until its last dread had been exposed and transformed into the radiant hope of eternal salvation. It was this renunciation of self in order to be able to take on the burden of the most debased criminal that marked Jesus out as distinct from any of His great predecessors. He is the image of eternal man, not simply by what He taught, or achieved, or even the life He lived, but by what He was in Himself when He took on the nature of failure, futility, and execration. Indeed, no man comes to the Father except by the way Jesus showed in His life. Of Him it can be said truly that He is the way, the truth and life itself. St John was inspired when he wrote: "He who possesses the Son has life indeed." (1 John 5:12)
It thus came about that in Jesus Christ, the Word of God not only speaks prophetically but also lives, suffers and dies with men. Only then is He resurrected to a glory even greater than was His before His incarnation. Most Christians believe that this supreme manifestation of God's Word in the world of form and change was also the final one. The canon of Holy Scripture ended, so it is asserted, with the last book of the New Testament. After that the Spirit had nothing further of theological importance to impart to mankind. But, alas, even the Word made flesh Who dwells among us is soon misinterpreted once He leaves us. His teaching tends to be misunderstood and even perverted. "The written word condemns to death, but the Spirit gives life." (2 Corinthians 3:6) It is a lamentable fact that once the new religion, Christianity, had attained temporal power, it lapsed from its pristine love and charity to become an instrument of persecution and destruction. It started to destroy the relics of Greek culture, and, had it been allowed full dominion, it is conceivable that every vestige of pre-Christian learning would have been lost to the world. How apt is the prophecy of Zechariah quoted at the beginning of the chapter!
And so it came about that God's Word spoke through the Arabian prophet Mohammed. While few non-Moslems can respond with enthusiasm to the violence of this very great man and his successors, nor can they altogether accept his teaching about the utter transcendence of God Whose power is supreme and not to be questioned, there can be no doubt that Islam was one of the great bastions of civilisation during the dark ages of barbarism and Christian bigotly. While darkness enveloped Northern and Central Europe, art, science, and the wonderful mysticism of the Sufis illuminated the world of Islam. Without the embracing liberalism of many (but not all) Moslem rulers, there might have been no continuity between Hellenistic thought and the modern world of science and philosophy.
In this sequence of events we can clearly discern the Holy Spirit at work in a prophet who lived six centuries after Christ, who was inspired to found a new religion that was to civilise vast areas of the world. Its complement of mystics and saints testifies to its permanent importance in the world of spiritual values. It has brought many different people to a recognition of God's sovereignty in a world too often dominated by human power.
By the end of the Middle Ages, the Spirit of God was working in many men. They had outgrown the limitation of thought of their religious tradition, and were now ready to explore the tangible world of the senses with a new awareness of reality. The great discoveries of the natural scientists transformed mankind's view of the world. The Word of God in His creative manifestation and the Creator Spirit were becoming more available to man, at least at the level of his rational mind. The Spirit was directing him on to a fuller appreciation of the truth. This truth was primarily scientific, and man was enabled to penetrate to the very core of the inner mechanism of his environment. Today man is technically expert and of great intellectual understanding. He has been liberated from many of the shackles of past superstition. What he once attributed in terror to the power of God, he has now grasped, and often mastered, as a mere phenomenon of the natural world. Far from lamenting the advance in man's power, we should give thanks to God for it. Today intelligent people realise how intolerable it would be if the universe we inhabited could not be trusted for what it was. If God had a tendency to intervene in cosmic affairs when the mechanism He had devised broke down, not only would our lives be completely unpredictable, but, far worse, God would Himself be exposed as a faulty creator and sustainer of the universe.
"The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul," as Psalm Nineteen informs us. There is one law only, but it manifests itself physically, psychically, and spiritually according to our understanding of reality. It is indeed man's purpose to know this law, to co-operate with it, and to use it as co-heir with Christ in the resurrection of the world. As I have already noted, man's grasp of the physical laws that control his world is now very considerable. But the fully realised man, typified by Jesus, is in harmony with the higher psychical and spiritual dimensions of God's law also. This attunement with the law of God, and indeed His identification with that law, enabled Jesus to perform the signs and miracles described in the Gospel. The very concept of miracle implies a special intervention of God in the affairs of our world to achieve an effect outside the range of the natural order of things. As I have already stated, I do not believe God works in this way, but He enables the perfect man to do His works as He would have them done. This perfect man reveals in His life the divine image imprinted on the souls of al1 men, but left unmanifested in the lives of the great majority of mankind. What we see as a miracle is, I believe, a special gift from the Holy Spirit working through the Communion of Saints whereby energy of enormous potency is transmitted directly from the spiritual order of reality to the material, physical order of our world. The transference of rather less powerful psychical energy to this physical order is by now well authenticated in the lives of many people who have received what is called "spiritual healing", but what is more accurately psychic, or paranormal, healing from those who call themselves Spiritualists or Charismatics (as I have already indicated, I believe the basis of the healing power is the same in both instances, despite the antagonism each shares for the other's theological position). And I repeat, there is only one law, the law of God. The manifestation of this law in the physical energy that sustains the world is as divine as the psychical energy that emanates from the charismatic healer, or the spiritual radiance of the mystic and the saint.
The Word of God has never lacked a mouth-piece. He has spoken through the scientist, the philosopher and the artist as well as the theologian. His Spirit has inspired them to serve mankind with a burning dedication to the truth that cuts across all personal striving and advantage. The Spirit drives the creative person into the wilderness far from personal comfort, where he is rejected by the counsels of the worldly wise and exiled from the hollow conviviality of the conforming majority who desire to be left in peace to follow the well-tried routine of surface existence. The Spirit of God builds up, but He also casts down. What is no longer of service to the progress of mankind, what assumes the nature of a stumbling-block, is summarily demolished.
There is no sentimentality about the Spirit. An attitude that may have been perfectly appropriate at one stage in the history of mankind becomes outdated as the spiritual understanding of humanity advances. The view of God that the ancient Hebrews had - a wrathful, jealous tribal potentate, who could be placated by animal sacrifices - became refined and universalised in the teachings of the later prophets. In Jesus, a God of love sufficient to be identified with the lowest man is finally revealed. God does not change, but man's view of Him is constantly shifting as he moves closer to the divine image engraved in his own soul.
The Word of God and the Spirit that proceeds from that Word have inflamed the hearts of many whose work it was to transcend limited, imprisoning views of reality. All too often a static, even reactionary aspect of religion has been the limiting factor in man's advance to freedom. The agent of limitation can easily be worshipped as the divine principle in aberrant forms of all the great religions. It is no wonder that atheism itself has, on occasion, been an instrument of divine grace. It was never the will of God that man should for ever remain a mere passenger, travelling to glory on the divine train. God willed man's freedom so that he could learn from the experience of life and make real the divinity inherent in him. The rather naive intellectual atheism of past times may have truncated man's full nature, which is, among other attributes, inherently spiritual and intent on mastering the deepest mysteries of the universe, but it also threw man back on to his own resources. The astonishing advances in science of our own time have been based on a view of reality that sees man and nature as an end in their own right. This does not mean, of course, that many of the greatest scientists have not also been religious men, but simply that their intellectual perspectives were concentrated on achieving mastery of the world around them. Had their attention been dissipated in fascinating speculations about the meaning of the world they were investigating analytically, their contribution to knowledge would have been less, and they would not have been such profitable servants of mankind.
It has, therefore, also been necessary for the Holy Spirit to speak through other people about other aspects of reality. Man is more than simply an intellectual animal. He has a soul that seeks meaning in a dark, indifferent world, and a spirit that is at home only in the realm of eternal values. These modalities of human nature are not open to scientific investigation, at least by the methods of contemporary research. They are known by their existential impact on the life of the person, and by this I mean the effect that they have on our lives at the present moment in time. The Word has therefore not been silent in many contemporary movements that have emphasised a particular aspect of truth that has unfortunately been neglected by the great religious traditions of the world. These movements cannot be equated with the higher religions because they stress one aspect of truth to the virtual exclusion of the wider nature of reality. But their witness is important both in the positive message it brings and in the way that message shows its own inadequacy for the growth of the full man.
When atheistic materialism was at its height in the nineteenth century, the Spiritualistic movement was inaugurated. After making due allowance for hysteria, fraud, and superstition, there remains a body of evidence which clearly proves the existence of a psychic dimension of reality. It was to the credit to the practitioners of Spiritualism that a serious attempt was made to prove survival of death in order to provide comfort and reassurance for the bereaved. But it must be admitted that neither the intelligent agnostic nor the orthodox religious believer has been greatly moved from his previously held position by the claims of Spiritualism. This is because the movement has not succeeded in impressing either the scientist or the philosopher with its probity or the religious believer with its sanctity. What might have been an epoch-making advance in human understanding has passed unnoticed, if not derided, by most educated people. And yet some of the claims of Spiritualism are probably true, and if used with intelligence and reverence, it could shed much light on such articles of belief as the Resurrection of the Dead and the Communion of Saints. In fact the one positive benefit the Spiritualistic Movement has brought with it has been the establishment of a number of highly reputable societies devoted to the study of psychical phenomena. The reason Spiritualism has foundered on the rocks of triviality and sensationalism is that its sights were raised only to the psychical level of reality and not to God Himself. Guidance from intermediate entities is never to be relied on, not only because of the mixed company of inhabitants of the psychic realm but also because even a well-intentioned entity is by no means infallible.
Anyone who looks for guidance outside his own centre will fall into serious error in the course of time. But even to have learned this painful lesson is no misfortune, and some people have graduated through the Spiritualistic Movement to a more mystical approach to reality.
Another movement that started in the nineteenth century was Christian Science. At a time when the Church's mission to heal the sick was ignored by almost all believers the call to healing through mental identification with the perfection of God struck a chord in the lives of many chronically ill people. While the metaphysic on which Christian Science is based is clearly an inadequate account of the nature of reality, scarcely noticing such important factors as the holiness of matter, the redemptive value of suffering, and the uncomfortable fact of evil that transcends a mere error in the way it is thought about, the positive benefits of this system of thought should not be overlooked. It has emphasised the power of the mind over the body, and has been an unrecognised pioneer in what today is called psychosomatic medicine. As a man thinks, so indeed he becomes. The Buddha said this long ago in the very first sentence of the Dhammapada: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts." St Paul says in his very well-known exhortation from Philippians 4:8, "All that is true, ... noble, ... just, ... pure, ... lovable, ... gracious, whatever is excellent and admirable - fill your thought with these things." There is no doubt that the positive thinking of Christian Science can produce a calmness and evenness of temper that is very salutory in a world of stress and anxiety. But the truth lies deeper than Christian Science proclaims. It is what a man thinks in the unconscious part of his mind that especially influences his conduct and health.
The unconscious depths can be skated over by glib, superficial, edifying thoughts, but the ice is liable to crack and terrifying chasms be revealed. It is here that the deeper evil of the world lies hidden; it has to be exposed and redeemed, and not merely explained away as if it did not really exist. But when this deeper reality is acknowledged, the application of positive constructive thinking can be a valuable adjunct to the healing process. Where the system has failed is in not paying enough attention to the physical causes of disease or the state of sin common to us all, in the limitation of which we have to attain mastery over our lower nature with the help of the Holy Spirit. Once again a potentially valuable system of religious thought has proved inadequate because its methods are too circumscribed; it has emphasised healing of the body and mind through the power of thought, but has not given due attention to the social or psychological dimensions of human suffering and disorder.
A third noteworthy movement is modern Theosophy, founded in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It sought to rediscover in contemporary terms the ancient wisdom inherent in Hinduism, and as such has formed a valuable link between Eastern and Western religious thought. Its emphasis on meditation has played its part in the spiritual development of many people - once again a judgement on the inadequate provision much conventional religion has made for contemplative prayer and the study of mysticism amongst its adherents. In addition the Theosophical Movement has made a useful contribution to the mystery of human personality and its survival of physical death. But it too has failed to lead man to his full development in the image of God. This is due in part to its adulation of intermediate psychic personalities, who are called "Masters", to the comparative eclipse of the Godhead. This infatuation with the psychic realm is allied to a search for "occult" powers, which are invoked in meditation exercises. In this way divine grace is superseded by personal grasping. The result is that the human being strains after a god-like power without first attaining a Christ-like humility and self-sacrifice.
It therefore comes about that four contemporary ways of viewing the world - atheistic Humanism, Spiritualism, Christian Science (and related New Thought movements), and Theosophy - each have their contribution to make to the spiritual advance of man. Atheism develops man's own sense of responsibility so that he no longer relies in a supine way on a god-like father figure to do his thinking for him. Spiritualism broadens man's grasp of reality, bringing with it an introduction to the psychic dimension that is denied by atheistic materialism. Once this dimension is accepted, the immaterial principle, called mind and soul, is seen to extend beyond the limitation of matter, so that, even if mediumistic communication is dismissed, the possibility of survival of an aspect of the personality beyond physical death is no longer an unreasonable hypothesis. At once a number of the gifts of the Holy Spirit defined by St Paul in I Corinthians 12 fall into place - but not into the place of sanctity demanded by the truly spiritual person. Christian Science emphasises non-physical aspects of the healing process and exalts the evangelical virtue of faith - indeed faith in God's sustaining power and love. Theosophy stresses the intellectual and psychic unfoldment of man who could, if only he were functioning properly, be in full possession of many powers that are at present latent within him.
In my opinion none of these views of reality is adequate, because none can lead man to that mystical union with all things in which God Himself is known. This knowledge is not discursive or analytical. It is the knowledge of love whose nature it is to bring all creation together, unite with it, and so identify with it that we know as we are known, and work with Him as He works in us all. But these modern movements have the Spirit coursing through them. If their members were obedient to the Spirit of God, they would move beyond the confines of their various restraining systems of thought and explore new avenues of that Spirit. And in doing this they would at last be able to impart their particular insights to the body of rather staid, unimaginative religious believers, in whom the true orthodoxy still waits to live and transform the world. At the same time they would enlighten the hard, uninspired path of the unbeliever with hope and joy.