01 The Facts and Doctrines Concerning God

The Facts and Doctrines Concerning God Which Are of Especial Importance in the Life of Prayer.

I FIND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO restrict myself here to explicit tests of Scripture or to the Dogmatic Definitions of the Christian Faith. On the other hand, I will only put forward certain positions which have behind them large affirmations or assured implications of Scripture and great Fathers and theologians of the Church positions which, if, in recent centuries or in our own times, largely ignored or explained away, nevertheless express the never extinct Christian and Catholic experience. Working within these lines and drawing also upon my own fifty years of endeavour in these matters, I find the positions concerning God, which require full and intelligent adoption in our life of Prayer, to be seven.

God is a stupendously rich Reality the alone boundlessly rich Reality. His outward action throughout the Universe His creation, sustentation and direction of the world at large is immensely rich. Still deeper and more delicate is this richness and reality in God’s Incarnation and Redemptive Action. Yet His Being, His Interior Life, are in no wise exhausted by all this outward Action, nor does this action occasion or articulate His character. We indeed, we little mortals they too, the greatest of angels we become our true selves, we articulate our spirtual characters, by apprehending, willing and serving God. But God is God, already apart from His occupation with us. These are the great facts which I believe to be specially revealed to us in the dogma of the Holy Trinity facts of which we have an especial need in these our times. The whole of the Negative Theology, where it is sound and not really agnostic or pantheistic, is but an attempt to utter vividly this stupendous richness of God. Our prayer will lack the deepest awe and widest expansion, if we do not find room within it for this fact concerning God. We will thus retain a strong sense that not even Jesus Christ and His Redemption exhaust God. Christian prayer, indeed Christian theology, are thus not Soteriology, practical or theoretical. Here Fenelon’s great letters to the Carmelite nun, Sceur Charlotte de S. Cyprien, are admirable in their tender devotion to Christ free from all excessive Christocentrism.

God is the author of, and God is variously reflected in, all (innocent} Nature as well as in all Supernature. Here is the doctrine which was central in the outlook of Aquinas and Dante, of St. Francis and of Giotto. It was very largely forgotten or denied afterwards, during the later Middle Ages. And, although the Renaissance and then the Protestant Reformation were (variously wise and wild) protests against the abuses of the later Middle Ages, these movements were themselves largely infected by the impoverished philosophy and the thin theology of these same later Middle Ages. The signs are multiplying that man will return, with such improvements as may be wisely desirable, to that wonderfully rich outlook of the Golden Middle Ages, where God’s outward action moves on two levels the natural level and the supernatural level a Good and a Better or Best two kinds, and not merely two degrees, of Goodness. We thus recognise in man’s actual life a polarity, a tension, a friction, a one thing at work in distinctly another thing like yeast in meal, like salt in meat, like coral insects and whole coral reefs in the huge ocean an ocean so different from themselves. We thus also acquire an explanation, and one which is not discouraging, of the fact that it is a difficult art to prevent religion from overstraining us and from thus leading to a very dangerous reaction against itself. For thus we see that the Beatitude of Heaven the Direct Vision of God, that the sincere forgiveness of our enemies, the love of them, and that the eager acceptance of suffering, are graces and dispositions beyond, and different from, God apprehended as the dim background or groundwork of our lives, and from the honesties and decencies of average domestic and political life. Such honesties and decencies are also good, and they are necessary for us all, in various degrees and forms ; and this, also, as the occasions and material for the supernatural to utilise and transform the Mountain and the Plain, the Edelweiss, and Alpenrose, and the cornfields and potatoes ; here all appear, and this in fruitful contrast and congenital inter-aid.

Such an inclusive and yet discriminating position brings also much help to our prayer. For in prayer, also, it brings a tension, to the verge of strain; and a detente, to the verge of relaxation. In both these movements of the soul God can, and God should, be envisaged in the detente, the God of nature, the source of all that is wholesome and homely ; and in the tension, the God of supernature, the source of all that is ardent and heroic. We thus escape dullness, monotony and the like these subtle dangers of the spiritual life.

God alone is fully free. Here is another ancient doctrine which calls aloud for resuscitation. It is already clearly formulated by St. Augustine, and Aquinas elaborates it in its fullness. But the later Middle Ages largely lost it, and Protestants to this hour have, in this point, merely extended and hardened the later Mediaeval obtuseness. Indeed, even the present Broad High Churchmen of the type of Foundations have, for the most part, elaborated an apologetic with regard to the dread fact of Evil which deliberately eliminates the great doctrine here envisaged. St. Augustine tells us : "It is already a great freedom to be able not to sin. But the greatest freedom consists in the inability to sin." And Aquinas elaborates how Perfect Freedom consists in the spontaneous and joyous self-expression of a perfect nature. Thus God cannot will, God possesses no inclination to, Evil; and this absence of choice springs from precisely the perfection of His Freedom. The persistent and vivid apprehension of this fact will greatly help our prayer. For thus only are we adequately humbled before God, since the difference between God and man is thus, essentially, not a difference, however great, in performance but in nature. Far beyond the range of our actual sinfulness extends the range of our potential sinfulness of the imperfection inherent in our human degree and kind of Freedom. Whereas God is not only not actually sinful at all He is incapable of sin, incapable of temptation to sin. But there exists, not only God Pure, but also God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. Here, again, there is no actual sinfulness, and here also the sinlessness is a most wholesome occasion of humility to ourselves, the manifoldly sinful. In Jesus Christ the closeness of the union of His human nature with the Divine nature with a Divine Person renders actual sin impossible even in that Human nature. Nevertheless this human nature in itself is, even here, not above real temptation. "He was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin," says the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 4:15). Here, again, it is important for us to understand that even such temptation without sin is an imperfection pertaining to a certain kind of freedom to the human kind of freedom and not a necessary condition of all freedom, of freedom as such. For thus in Prayer we can, we will, look up to, adore God, the Perfect Freedom, which contrasts so grandly with our own poor little freedom even with our freedom where this exists in us, and is used by us, at its very best.

God is the Supreme Good of the stone and of the plant, of the animal, of man, of the angel, but in what wondrously various degrees both of self -communication on the part of God, and of consciousness on the part of the creature, as to this gift from God, and still more as to the Giver, God Himself 1 In proportion to the depth and the breadth of any and every creature’s nature, the creature possesses, or can attain to, the consciousness that God is its sole ultimate rest, sole pure delight. Religion, as distinct from ethics, flies straight at once to this great ultimate fact, to this unique personalist reality, to God as Beatitude and Beatifier. Thus the religious soul, in proportion to the strength of its religion, always reaches beyond all abstract law, all mere sense of duty and of obligation. St. Augustine is the great doctor of this our divine rest and our divine delight. Our prayer will be immensely enriched and expanded by a persistent cultivation of this sense of God as our true home. For thus the rivalry between God and creatures for the possession of our hearts will become less and less a struggle between a mysterious obligation and a clear fascination, and more and more a competition between an oceanwide, all-penetrating joy, when our souls come to their true, deep selves, and pleasures feverish, fleeting and shallow, when we allow ourselves heedlessly to be carried along by our superficial selves.

God, we have thus already found, is, indeed, not all unlike man. For how, if God were all unlike him, could man apprehend God, and love God, and try "to be perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect"? Yet God is also other than man. Other, because He, God, is a Reality, an Identity, a Consciousness, distinct from the reality, identity, consciousness of any of His creatures or of the sum-total of them. And God is other, because this His distinct Reality is, by its nature, so much higher and richer, not only in degree but in kind, than is the nature of man or of any other creature. "Man is made in the image and likeness of God." Yes, but we must not press this as an exhaustive norm, as though God were simply man writ large man’s better and best instincts and conditions on an immense scale. We shall doubtless be much nearer the facts if we think of God as the living Source and the always previous, always prevenient Realisation, in degrees and ways for us ineffable, of our ideals and ever imperfect achievements a Realisation which must not be taken directly to contain concretely what our conditions and strivings contain ideally. I am deeply convinced that the truth, and hence the fascination of Religion, as really requires some such emphasis on the unlikeness of God as it requires emphasis upon the likeness. So, for instance, "God is Love" is a central truth proclaimed by the New Testament and by all the saints of God. And so again, "God careth for us" that God is full of sympathy for all His creatures, and for man especially, Jesus Himself never ceases to proclaim and to illustrate. Yet we must beware not to press this further, so as to mean suffering in God. For suffering Is an evil, and there exists no evil in God: the religious instinct spontaneously and unchangeably hungers after God as Pure Joy. With St. Bernard, in his classic lament on the death of his darling twin-brother Gerard, we will hold that there exists the deepest compassio, but no -passio in God.

Yet our hearts long also (though less strongly, I believe) for downright fellowsuffering, when they suffer and when they are exhorted to suffer well. Such fellowsuffering (deeper than ever we ourselves could suffer, and in One Who shares with us the evil of suffering, but without any admixture of the far greater evil of sin) is supplied by the Humanity of Our Lord. The Humanity of Jesus Christ, we have already found, brings temptation as near to God as is compatible with Godhead. And now we find this same Humanity of Jesus brings suffering as near to God as is compatible with the same Godhead. Indeed, the sufferings are so great as to require, for their sustainment by His human nature, the presence and action of the Divine nature, of the Divine Person which has conjoined itself to, and which informs, this human nature. Our prayer will profit greatly if we thus hold firmly and fervently this double truth: of the Pure Joy of God and of the Deep Suffering of Jesus. For we will thus neither diminish God to a man of but larger size than we little men are, nor will we dehumanise Jesus by ignoring the immense sufferings, as well as the storm and stress the temptations of His earthly life. The definition of the Council of Chalcedon, difficult as it may be to apply it in any great detail, will thus continue to enshrine for us, also as praying souls, an imperishable truth: Jesus Christ is both truly God and truly Man.

All we have so far said implies or leads up to the great fact and truth: that we men need God much more than, and very differently from f the way and degree in which God needs us men. God is the Absolute Cause, the Ultimate Reason, the Sole True End and Determiner of our existence, of our persistence, of our nature, of our essential calls and requirements. God is all these things for man. Man is not one of these things for God. Man comes to his true self by loving God. God is the very ocean of Himself of Love apart from all creation. Thus the positions between God and Man, and between Man and God, are entirely uninterchangeable. Hence the most fundamental need, duty, honour and happiness of man, is not petition, nor even contrition, nor again even thanksgiving; these three kinds of prayer which, indeed, must never disappear out of our spiritual lives; but adoration. Probably the greatest doctor and the greatest practiser among souls well known to us in these respects, of such overwhelmingly adoring prayer, is St. Augustine. Never, in spite of his tenderly anthropomorphic devotion, does the great African forget this profound non-equality, this non-interchangeable relation between God and man. Our prayer will greatly deepen and widen out, if we also develop such a sense a sense which is now continually exposed to the subtle testing and sapping of the pure immanentisms and the sentimental anthropocentrisms which fill the air. The Prevenience of God thus appears as the root-fact and the root-truth of all our previous positions. God not only loves us more and better than we can ever love ourselves, "carior est illis" to the Gods "homo quam sibi," already Juvenal told us ; but God loved us before we loved, or could love, Him. God’s love of us rendered possible and actual our love of God. This is emphatically proclaimed by the First Epistle of St. John, and is a favourite doctrine of St. Bernard. Thus the great Cistercian Abbot bids his monks rise never so early for their night choir prayer in coldest mid-winter; they will find God awake, Him the awakener ; they will find Him waiting for them, always anticipating even their earliest watches. How scandalously much is this great fact forgotten in our days, even by otherwise alert preachers to educated congregations! I had much talk with an Australian nonconformist minister upon this point, some ten years ago; and he determined to preach it before such a congregation a large one in London. He afterwards reported to me that his discourse had made a great stir, crowds of his hearers flocking into the vestry to declare to him that they never in their lives had heard such doctrine, and how wonderful and awakening it was ! Our prayer will certainly gain in depth and aliveness, if we thus continually think of God as the true inspirer of our most original seeming thoughts and wishes, whensoever these are good and fruitful as Him Who secretly initiates what He openly crowns.

I take these to be the seven great facts and doctrines concerning God His richness, His double action, natural and supernatural, His perfect Freedom, His delightfulness, His otherness, His adorableness and His prevenience. These seven facts, vividly apprehended, will even singly and how much more if seen conjointly, each penetrating and calling forth the others, bring much depth and breadth, much variety and elasticity into our prayer. This, however, only if we understand plainly that there is no occasion whatsoever for us to constrain ourselves positively on these points. I mean that, though a Christian’s prayer will suffer in its Christianity, if it consciously and systematically excludes, still more if it denies, any of these facts, yet no one soul, at any one period of its spiritual life, will feel equally attracted to them all. It will be quite enough indeed it will be the only wise course if each particular soul, at any one period of its growth, attends positively, affirmatively, and lovingly to two or three, or even to but one of these facts. Thus not any one soul, but the society of souls, the Church of Christ, will simultaneously apprehend and apply all these facts and truths. The Church’s several constituents and organs will supplement each other, and will, collectively, furnish a full perception and a full practice of these great facts of God.