MR. LECKY'S ESTIMATE OF CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM.
"IN the second volume of Mr. Leeky's interesting book on the A history of European morality, he gives a characteristically Impartial account of the austerities of the Christian solitaries and ascetics, and of the influence for good and evil,—more evil, he evidently considers, than good,—which the ascetic Christianity exerted over the ethical development of Europe. He is only just in Ins estimate of the stimulus which this prolonged and internecine struggle between flesh and spirit gave to the popular confidence in human free-will, and he may perhaps be equally just in the opposite direction when he condemns the heroism of the saintly ascetics as compared with the patriotic heroism of Greece and Rome, on the
ground that the former proceeded from an intense and almost frantic religious selfishness,—a profound terror of the penalties of the next world, and a fierce desire to escape them, while the latter was truly disinterested after its kind. He is, at all events, warranted by every sound system of absolute morality in speaking as severely and even scornfully as he does of the deliberate cruelty with which the Catholic saints scorned and trampled on the tenderest domestic ties in the interest, as they asserted, of their religious faith. 'rime fame which glorifies so many saints for conduct like that of St. Simeon Styliteti in refusing to see even his mother and resisting on religious grounds all her eloquent reproaches, would certainly affect us in our own day as a deliberate poisoning of the human conscience. Even the modern Catholic biographers of the Saints shrink from relating these anecdotes, and pass them over with a hurried reference. Butler in his life of St. Simeon Stylites mentions his praying earnestly for his mother's soul after her death, but ignores the story told by Mr. Lecky of the conduct which caused her death, and of the eloquent
appeal which rebuked the ambitious ascetic Fili, quare hoe fecisti? Pro ut,ero quo to portavi, satiasti ate luctu ; pro lactation° qua te lactavi, dedisti tnihi lacrymas ; pro osculo quo to osculata sum, dedisti mnibi atuaras cordis angustias ; pro dolore et labore quem passe sum, imposuisti mihi sevissimas plagas" (" My son, why have you done this ? I bore you in my womb, and you have wrung my soul with grief ; I gave you milk from my breast, and you have filled my eyes with tears ; for the kisses I gave you, you have given Inc the anguish of a broken heart ; for all that I have done and suffered for you, you have repaid me by the most bitter wrongs.") Yet these appeals, and more heartrending appeals than these, were not only rejected by the saints of the earlier centuries, but it was held by all their admirers and their biographers one of the greatest triumphs of their virtue if they could persuade themselves to break a mother's, or a wife's, or a sister's, or a child's heart, rather than yield anything to the ties of natural affection. Mr. Lecky evidently holds this hardening of the saiatly heart under the pressure of religious enthusiasm in just horror, and speaks of it with a disgust and abhorrence not at all too strong, if, that is, he were merely measuring its demerits by an ideal humanity.
Yet, historically speaking, we believe that Mr. Lecky does not concede enough value to the undomestic, the indurating side of the mystic principle in most Oriental religions,—tuore especially in Christianity, which, in other respects, was so well adapted to strengthen the love, tenderness, purity, humility, and self-denial which ennoble domestic life. Ile has himself observed that there is, in some respects, more of a feminine than of a masculine ideal of morality in the Christian faith,—a moral attitude due, no doubt., to the habit of submission, resignation, and absolute acquiescence in the divine will, as well as to that hunger of the Christian nature for inward spiritual emotions which it encourages. It was of the very essence of the revolution which Christianity was destined to effect that an ample field of spiritual experience should be conquered from the family, and the world, and their occupations, and vindicated as a part of the higher life of man for ever. And this could hardly have been effected without some lengthened period of what we may call naked spiritual life,—spiritual life in which the monopolizing influence of the human affections over the mind had been resisted and repelled. For this purpose, the soul had to do battle, not merely against the body, but against the family affections of the Western nations for centuries. That was no time when domestic life could have been spiritualized, in the sense in which we now use the term, without first going through an internecine conflict, generations long, and leaving the ideal victory in the hands of the solitary religious spirit. Not only in the lives of the Greeks and Romans do we see bow clinging and carnal were the natural ties of paganism— how strongly the pagan philosophy felt the necessity of trying to shake itself loose from the relaxing influences of human loves and pleasures,—but even in the New Testament itself there is ample evidence that the relations of the family, certainly the relations of the sexes, had none of that play and depth and delicacy of tenderness which make them shade off so naturally, as it seems to us of the present day, into the religious affections themselves. St. Paul's chapters on marriage in his letters to the Corinthians could never have been written by any one who knew our modern life. Nor do we believe that any faith oould have really spiritualized the natural affections without first asserting itself, by a sort of civil war, against them,—a war in which it first painfully conquered and then jealously preserved a territory of its own where the domestic feelings were permitted little influence. Without insisting on the reality of a separate life in God, the life of human affections could never have been transformed as it has been. It may be noted that almost every great and characteristic element of our modern life has in its turn had some centuries of absolute mastery over man's imagination, without which it could not now be the force it is. This is, as far as we know, the only truth of the pompous Comtist principle, that a theology is the first result of the attempt of man to account for the world in which he lives, a metaphysic the next, and science or a study of natural laws of sequence, the last. If we interpret this simply as meaning that in different ages of the world the centre of gravity, as it were, of human life has been found in very different parts of our nature,—the deepest and keenest religious life constituting at one time the controlling power over human affairs, the acutest and clearest abstract speculations assuming the leadership of the intellectual aristocracy in another age, and the most subtle observation of external phenomena claiming the honours of the purple in our own age, the remark is true, but it is by no means limited to the three principles mentioned. It is equally true to say that there have been ages when physical courage and strength were the qualities which chiefly controlled life ; other ages, when art, beauty, and sentiment were for a time at least in the ascendant ; others, when enthusiastic social movements, movements tending to break down the separatism of our individual life and to draw closer the bonds of society, have passed over great countries leaving an indelible trace behind.
But you can scarcely say of any great constituent element of modern society, except, indeed, the newest of all, the scientific tendency, that it has gained the place it has in our life without at some former time or other having asserted a far more exclusive and distinct spell over the life of man than it asserts at present. Without the medieval metaphysics, we should never have known what the the intellectual faculties of man working, as it were, in vacuo, can, and what they cannot, do. The days of the schoolmen were days when the mind was training itself to define the extent of its own intellectual power, to fathom its own resources, to estimate the worth of its various faculties considered apart from the external world on which they were to operate, when, in a word, it was mastering the use of its own instruments, and rating them, as was necessary for the time, far above their true intrinsic worth. Precisely in the same manner, we maintain, that without ages when the lonely spiritual life arrogated to itself all that was of any worth in human nature, and sternly battled with the human affections, it might probably have been swallowed up in the strong earthly nature of the Western races. The human affections had to learn the full power and controlling strength of the mystic life with God, before the two could in any way blend so as to preserve their true reciprocal relations to each other. That " detachment " of soul for which the ascetic Christianity so fiercely, and often cruelly, fought, and to attain which it crushed remorselessly the tenderest and most sacred ties, was thus severely battled for, we believe, because the battle was a matter of life and death to the religious life of man at that period. Had anchorites not rushed forth into the desert, had they not struck fiercely at the heart of their human ties, had they not despised father and mother and sister and child, for a life of mystic meditation and devotion, the new faith would hardly have established its distinct sway over the world at large, and might have been lost, like a river without any clear and definite channel, in the sands of the world through which it had to pass. All the principal streams of human motive have had a long course of something like separate windings and separate accumulations, before they have been allowed to mingle freely with others of anything like equal strength and magnitude. Not only were the centuries of religious asceticism in the Catholic Church essential, as Mr. Lecky half admits, to inspire a deep and wide-spread belief in that power of human free-will to check the moat imperious of involuntary emotions and passions which the Catholic Church has defended with so profound a theoretical subtlety, and so much more potent a practical force,— but they were also necessary, as we believe, to develop and justify permanently the invisible side of our life against the encroachments of the visible, to weave into our nature the threads of the separate religious affections so firmly that even in the most tenderhearted, even in those who feel earthly affections most deeply, there shall for all time be a reserve-force of feeliug which may be called in to counteract when necessary the pleadings of domestic tenderness and human love.
The leading scientific school of our own day insists, doubtless with truth, on the accumulating inheritance of capacities which the nervous system of each generation derives from those of the last. Mx. Herbert Spencer believes that the moral faculty is a result of the inheritance of nerve-forces accumulated through generations. Whether this be true or false as regards the physical side of the doctrine, it is unquestionably true that the moral elements worked up into the character of each generation must vitally affect us for ages afterwards,—sometimes, indeed, for short periods by the law of reaction,—but, after the reaction is over, by the force of the direct residual influence which the literature and example of any great age cannot but leave behind it. That this is ultimately strong in proportion to the force of the control it has actually exerted, and the length of time during which it has been exerted, cannot, we think, be doubted. Indeed, this is only another way of saying that as God teaches us,—if not exactly but one thing at a time, at least but one thing prominently at a time,—the lesson which is longest continued and most striking, is likely to prove to have been of the greatest ultimate importance. Internecine as was the conflict between the mystic side of the Christian faith and its social and domestic side during many ages of the Christian Church, we do not believe that the human affections could ever have been fully imbued with their present spiritual elements without that long, lonely, and cruel monopoly of authority by spiritual Mysticism. Indeed, it seems to us quite on the cards, in spite of science and in spite of the humanitarian tendencies of the present age, that the time may come when our domestic life may be so clinging, so relaxing, so empty of spiritual depth, and so averse to the sterner work of the day, that a reign of modified mysticism might again be needed to ensure that 'detachment' of soul, that willingness to give up human affections for religious claims, which the ascetic and monastic ages did at least for some centuriea engrave deep upon the heart of Europe.
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