CHAPTER L
Christmas Day 1934
God – a person or not a
person? Quien sabe?
Only revelation can decide such metaphysical questions. And revelation isn't playing the game – is
equivalent to pulling three aces of trumps from up your sleeve.
Of more significance is the practical question. Which gives a man more power to realize
goodness – belief in a personal or an impersonal God? Answer: it depends. Some minds work one way, some another. Mine, as it happens, finds no need, indeed,
finds it impossible to think of the world in terms of personality. Patanjali says you may believe in a personal
God, or not, according to taste. The
psychological results will be the same in either case.
For those whose nature demands personality as a source of
energy, but who find it impossible to believe that the universe is run by a
person in any sense of the word that we can possibly understand – what's the
right policy? In most cases, they reject
any practice which might be called religious.
But this is throwing away the baby with the bath water. The desired relationship with a personality
can be historical, not ontological. A contact, not with somebody existing at present as manager of the
universe, but with somebody known to have existed at some time in the past. The Imitation of Christ (or of any other
historical character0 is just as effective if the model be regarded as having
existed there, then, as it is if the model be conceived as existing here,
now. And meditation on goodness,
communication with goodness, contemplation of goodness are demonstrably
effective means of realizing goodness in life, even when that which is meditated
on, communicated with and contemplated, is not a person, but a general mind, or
even an ideal supposed to exist only in human minds. The fundamental problem is practical – to
work out systems of psychological exercises for all types of men and women. Catholicism has many systems of mental prayer
– Ignatian, Franciscan, Liguorian, Carmelite and so
on. Hinduism, Nothern, Southern and Zen
Buddhism also have a variety of practices.
There is a great work to be done here.
Collecting and collating information from all these sources. Consulting books and, more important, people
who have actually practised what is in the books, have had experience of
teaching novices. In time, it might be
possible to establish a complete and definitive Ars Contemplativa. A series of techniques, adapted to every type
of mind. Techniques
for meditating on, communicating with and contemplating goodness. Ends in themselves and at
the same time means for realizing some of that goodness in practice.
Machinery and good organization – modern inventions; and, like
all blessings, have to be paid for. In many ways. One
item is the general belief, encouraged by mechanical and social efficiency,
that progress is automatic and can be imposed from outside. We, as individuals, need do nothing about
it. Liquidate undesirables, distribute
enough money and goods – all will be well.
It is a reversion to magic, a pandering to man's natural sloth. Note the striking way in which this tendency
runs through the whole of modern life, cropping up at every point. There seems no obvious connection between the
Webbs and the Soviets on the one hand and Modern Catholicism on the other. But what profound subterranean
resemblances! The recent Catholic point
of view, this is a 'sacramental age'.
Magic power of sacraments regarded as sufficient for salvation. Mental prayer conspicuously
absent. Exact
analogy to the Webbs-Soviet idea of progress from without, through machinery
and efficient organization. For
English Catholics, sacraments are the psychological equivalents of tractors in