The Christian Consciousness

The important 1967 encyclical of Pope Paul VI, Populorum progressio (On the development of peoples) called for, among other things, a new transcendental humanism (§16, §20). In May 2011, Pope Benedict XVI, addressing the faculty of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, renewed the call for “a new, integral and transcendent humanism.”

Precisely such a transcendental humanism can be found articulated with great depth, insight, and beauty in the literature of the 19th century American Transcendentalists and Unitarians, many of whom were Christian. I believe that modern Roman Catholics would do well to examine this literature.  It is a treasure-trove of ideas and inspiration, and the ‘old religion’ expressed in a form uniquely suited to the American mind.

As an example, below are excerpts from an 1859 discourse by Octavius B. Frothingham, ‘The Christian Consciousness, Its Elements and Expression’.  (O. B. Frothingham, Christian Consciousness. Philadelphia, 1859; pp. 3—33).

* * * *

I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit. (John 15:5a)

“HAVE you ever fairly mastered this thought: That once upon a time, eighteen hundred years ago, what we call Christianity was all gathered up in the person of a single man, who lived and breathed like other men, in the far-off land of Judea, — when Christ was Christianity, and all the Christianity there was on earth? … In that remote corner of the earth, Jesus of Nazareth stands alone, uncomprehended by the few who love him, despised or feared by the few who love him not, unheeded by the many who see in him nothing by which he can be distinguished from common humanity; solitary in person, and solitary in spirit, having little in common with his generation; solitary, with his great Religion folded in the secret place of his own heart. The mighty Truths which the world hail as revelations and build up into confessions, are his private thoughts. The creative forces which have wrought such moral results, and even something like a transformation in the sentiments of the most elevated portion of mankind, are the silent affections of his heart. The regenerating principles which have effected so much towards the growth of a new order of humanity, are the deep convictions of his individual conscience; and profoundly hidden in the experiences of his soul, are the spiritual laws that have since purified the piety and re-constructed the worship of millions of men. In that one peculiar being, as in a seed, [Christendom lies latent.] … The seed fulfils the conditions of all growth. It falls into the ground and dies.

“Ere long the fruit it was to bear, begins to appear. Little clusters of people like grapes on a vine are found in cities both near and remote from the place where he lived. They cling to each other. They grow together as if united by a common life, and attract the notice of all men by the singularity of their worship and behavior…. To them existence is not what it was; the world is not what it was; new thoughts occupy their minds; fresh affections, making old things seem distasteful, are yearning after congenial intercourse; an awakened moral sense abhors the practices in which they had before innocently engaged, and makes another order of the world necessary to their peace and satisfaction; strange hopes have taken hold on their souls; strange aspirations and purposes, which have altered their whole attitude towards their generation. They are one in the sympathy of a common Faith, Hope, and Charity. And what has begotten in these people, this new and singular spirit? They have seen, heard, conversed with, the men to whom this Jesus had communicated himself through some subtle influence which they could neither explain to themselves nor to others. They had no insight into his motives or intentions. Up to the very last hour of his life, they indulged a hope, which all his life long he had been laboring to dispel. His immortal ideas they failed to grasp, while they clung to his less significant words with a tenacity that nothing could loose. Yet, through all their stupidity and prejudice, his spirit had found its way to theirs. His being had bathed them like an atmosphere; had refreshed them like another climate. His character had shed itself like an aroma from his person, and penetrated invisibly to their natures’ roots. The mild radiance of his presence, the beaming of his face, the glance of his eye, the accents of his voice interpreting to their hearts words which their understanding could not apprehend, the indescribable serenity of his mien, so holy and so gracious, all expressed and imparted the spiritual life that was in him, so that when he died, that life was in various forms reproduced in those that knew him, according to their degree of susceptibility. And these, again, borne like seeds on the breath of the Spirit, spread the divine contagion even to distant lands, and made the attributes of the inward Christ visible in multitudes of communions, some of which knew him not, even by name.

“You will understand now what I mean by saying that Christianity was LIVED into the world. It was not built up by any skill in organizing establishments. It was not planted by sheer force of authoritative teaching. Men were not drilled into it, nor indoctrinated into it; they were BORN into it. It came to them as inspiration comes, and the effect of its coming was a new CONSCIOUSNESS, a new motive force, an original stamp of mind, and style of character. In a word, there was another life in the race….

“Christianity, let me repeat, was LIVED into the world. As a life, it reproduced and extended itself.   Its tendency, at least, nowhere completely fulfilled, it is true, but everywhere pushing against the obstacles in its path, was to re-animate and re-construct human relations….

“We have heard much lately about the Christian ‘CONSCIOUSNESS,’ as distinct from particular forms of belief or modes of thought; a general state of mind and affection that belongs to all genuine Christians alike, the partaking of which makes one a Christian, the lack of which makes one to be not a Christian; a prevailing and determining spirit, which, having the hidings of its power far down among the roots of human nature, distributes a secret but vital and quickening influence all through the substance of the moral and spiritual being, and diffuses abroad an aroma too delicate to be caught and imprisoned in symbolical books and sacred confessions, yet powerful enough to impress every spiritual sense and stimulate every spiritual desire. I believe there is such a spiritual Consciousness, common to all Christians, and distinguishing them from all who are not Christians more clearly than divines have ever succeeded in doing, while, at the same time, it prevents Christians, however artificially divided among themselves, from falling out finally with one another; a spiritual Consciousness which is nothing more or less than the mind of Jesus organizing itself in humanity….

“These are thoughts, vast, deep, shadowy. They are not dogmas; they are not opinions. They are spoiled and clipped by logical definition. They are spiritual truths, addressing themselves to the higher reason, which each may define for himself who can, or may innocently leave in the indistinctness which the soul best loves. They are inferences from what the Christian regards not as a notion but as a fact, a fact of inward assurance, a great conviction, that abides as a cornerstone, immovable in the deep soil of his heart. They are his translation into thought of a feeling that is deeper than all thought and runs before it.”

* * * *

One must read this material selectively. Along with sublime thoughts are a few prejudices and errors – many American Transcendentalists and Unitarians rejected, along with the harsh doctrines of Calvinism (from whence these movements evolved), many fine and noble elements of traditional Christianity.  For example, Frothingham writes,

“Put the intervening centuries by. Let your imaginations brush away, like so much dust on a window-pane, the vast Church that stands between you and him. Disappear, pope, cardinal, and priest; cathedral, chapel, shrine, altar, vestments, symbol, cross and goblet, keys and dove; vanish, creeds of every complexion, sects of every name.”

That is, in his appeal to  readers that they consult directly their Reason, Conscience, and intuitions for direct evidences of God, he goes further to question the validity of certain external forms of religion.  But remember that if we demand perfection of our saints, we shall have no saints. Despite certain prejudices, many of which are understandable if one considers the historical context, there is much that is saintly in these writings.

This caveat notwithstanding, there are times reading this literature that I am struck with a conviction that, in it, the prisca theologia, the ancient and venerable religion, reached its highest level of literary expression, before the radical materialism of the 20th century eclipsed the spiritual senses.  It remains there, providential, evidence of the action of the Holy Spirit in history, for us to consult and build upon.

This Old World religion, brought by the Puritans to New England and developed in the rich soil of village life in colonial America, I recognize as the same spiritual tradition in essence and fundamentals that was transmitted to me by Catholic sisters and priests at the parochial schools I attended as a child.

I should certainly try to follow up this post with more detail about the 19th century American Christian Transcendentalists and Unitarians.  One note of general interest to add here is that there is a direct literary and ideological connection between these writers and the Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century.  Besides Frothingham, some names of particular interest are William Ellery Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Francis Henry Hedge, and Abiel A. Livermore; but there are dozens more.

Additional Readings

Frothingham, Octavius B. Transcendentalism in New England. New York: Putnam, 1876.

Gardiner, Harold C. (Ed.). American Classics Reconsidered: A Christian Appraisal. New York: Scribner, 1958.

Howe, Daniel Walker. The Cambridge Platonists of Old and New England. Church History, 57, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 470-485. Reprinted as Ch. 7, ‘The Platonic Quest in New England’ in: Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self, 189-211. Oxford University Press, 2009 (orig. 1997).

Livermore, Abiel A. Discourses. Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Co., 1854.

Wells, Ronald V. Three Christian Transcendentalists: James Marsh, Caleb Sprague Henry, Frederic Henry Hedge. Columbia University Press, 1943.

Archetypal or Allegorical Interpretation of the Annunciation

Today is the commemoration of the Annunciation, which celebrates the Angel Gabriel appearing to the Blessed Virgin Mary and announcing that she will bear a son who is to be named Jesus (‘Savior’). How might we interpret this event of the New Testament at an archetypal or allegorical level? Perhaps as follows:

To deliver us from the suffering and bondage of our own errors (selfishness, attachment to pleasure, fear, doubt, envy, etc.), God (or the God of our soul), by grace (unearned gift), communicates to the compassionate, nurturing, pure, and innocent principle of our soul (the Virgin Mary), that she will bring forth a Savior (manifest the Christ principle). Therefore despite our suffering and an awareness of our own tendency to error, and of our inability, because this tendency to error runs so deep that we by ourselves cannot correct it, we have hope in a still higher or deeper principle within, the Self-Realization or Christ principle.

Specifically, she is promised that she will bear a son who is both God and man. When the Christ principle is born within us, we are in correct relation to the universe, namely, that of bringing form, purpose, beauty, harmony, integrity and morality to the material universe, living simultaneously as a material and a spiritual being, connecting or yoking heaven and earth. This yoking is the meaning of the word ‘yoga’ (and of the word ‘religion’, the syllable ‘lig’ meaning connection, as in ‘ligament’).

Since salvation comes as a free gift from God, what is our role in the process?  It is to adopt an attitude of pious humility and trust.  We should most definitely be active in the process, but act in response to the promptings of God and the Holy Spirit, and not rely overmuch on ‘our own wisdom’ or be carried away by our own schemes for reform.  That is, our soul should say with the Virgin Mary, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

Important symbols in paintings of the Annunciation are the lily (purity), and a book (Wisdom).

As always, it is to be emphasized that interpretation of Scripture at an allegorical level does not preclude a more literal or historical interpretation. For Christians allegory enhances, not replaces, traditional teachings. For non-Christians, it supplies a way to understand Christian Scripture as personally relevant.

A second point to repeatedly emphasize is that allegorical interpretation does not deliver a fixed doctrine or certain theory.  Rather, by its very nature allegorical interpretation is suited only to produce hypotheses, which one may then test and potentially confirm by personal experience, reading, or other lines of inquiry, or to suggest general principles which might lead to more accurate interpretative insights.

The Theory of Human Collective Memory and the Atonement of Jesus Christ

On this Good Friday, the points below try to tie together in a new way two different concepts:  the theory of the sacrificial atonement of Jesus Christ, and the theory of a human collective mind or collective memory.

1. Many psychologists (Jung and Freud included) have believed in the possibility of a collective mind or memory pool for the entire human race, such that, by some as-yet unspecified non-physical means, a mental experience of one person, once had, may become available for all other human beings to experience.  Some (limited) experimental evidence supports this theory.

2. The principle of a collective memory or collective mind is also found in many esoteric traditions (e.g., the Akashic Records of theosophy, the Adam Kadmon in the Kabbala, etc.)

3. Such a principle of a metaphysical collective mind would supply a possible mechanism for understanding in a new way the meaning of the theological principle of the ‘substitutive atonement of Jesus Christ’.

4. The theological doctrine of Jesus’ substitutive atonement holds that, by his life, passion, and death on the cross, Jesus Christ accomplished the actual or potential reconciliation (at-one-ment) of all human beings to God.

5. The atonement doctrine has several variants.  One especially problematic, but common, version is that Jesus literally, by his death, paid a ‘blood guilt’ or penal debt or which mankind incurred through disobedience to God. The difficulty with this is that it relies heavily on the terrible Calvinist doctrine of the innate depravity of human beings.  It also makes God out to be rather ungenerous, if not outright malicious, in requiring that a ‘blood guilt’ price be paid.

6. The collective mind theory supplies a potentially new perspective on the atonement of Christ:  by willingly accepting death, and completely subordinating his own personal will, Jesus of Nazareth achieved a level of humility, unselfishness, and union with God’s will entirely new for the human race. It set a new precedent of egolessness.

7. Jesus Christ having done this, then the thoughts, judgments, and insights by which he reached this peak of moral attainment, being those of a human being, would be deposited in the collective mind of humanity.  Thenceforth, all other human beings could potentially tap into this new mindset, and imitate it.

8. If so, this would potentially explain *why* God would want to incarnate as a human being, Jesus Christ.  In order to deposit those insights, judgments, etc. of Jesus Christ that enabled him to completely overcome his human ego into the collective mind of humanity, God would need to become a man himself.

9. Further, this model would help explain how individual Christians may follow in Christ’s steps.  Each person, by engaging in some new moral precedent or new sacrifice for the sake of humanity, would deposit new material in the collective mind, and thereby enable other human beings to do likewise.

10.  This mechanism would operate in addition to that of the historical and social example set by Jesus Christ, as transmitted by oral and written tradition, which is also a means by which the life, passion, and death of Jesus may be imitated and contributes to the atonement of humanity with God.

On Dogmatic Agnosticism

Many people who call themselves agnostics are arguably dogmatists.  Why do I say this?  Because today atheistic-materialism is a received opinion, a dogma.  And the dominant cultural assumption, as expressed in higher education and mass media, is that Christianity is obsolete, disproven, and all but finished as a paradigm.  Someone like the comedian, Bill Maher, can get on television and make snide jokes about Christians, and imply by innuendo that all Christians are basically stupid bigots, and everyone accepts these statements as completely ordinary, or even ‘cool’.  Nobody expects him to defend his accusations with intelligent arguments.

The problem is that this so-called conclusion is very far from the truth. Christianity has not been refuted or debunked.  Rather, the logical fallacy of ‘demolishing a straw man’ has been committed on a massive scale.  The poorest examples of Christianity (e.g., fundamentalists) are held up as the examples, and these are ridiculed.

The problem is that Christianity is not defined by it’s poorer examples.  In the same way, if we wanted to ridicule democracy as a principle, we could easily find examples where democracy is abused, ridicule those, and thereby conclude that all democracy is bad.  The same principle applies to any ideology or institution.  The simple truth, evident at least since the time of Socrates, is that *most people* are deeply confused.  Christianity is no exception to this rule.  In fact, one could argue that confused people *should* join a religion — since the express purpose of religion is to un-confuse people.  But no religion claims to do that without a long process.  Hence, it is perfectly consistent with the principles of Christianity that, at any given point in time, most Christians are poor Christians!

A true agnosticism would embrace the principle of intellectual humility.  An intellectually humble person doesn’t follow the scenario outlined above. Intellectually humble skeptics or agnostics would recognize their  ignorance as a liability, and therefore make a determined effort to investigate all plausible possibilities that might lead them to a definitive, or at least probable, opinion.

The first prerequisite of such an orientation, therefore, would be to struggle heroically to divest oneself of prejudice — for all people, being inclined to self-interest, habitually distort and select evidence in self-serving ways.  Next, a virtuous skeptic, in the Socratic tradition, would seek out not the worst examples of an opposing viewpoint, but the best.

Here then is my challenge to skeptics or agnostics who want to exert themselves manfully (or womanfully).  I propose that the work of the Roman philosopher, Cicero, titled On Moral Duties (De officiis) expresses, even though it is not an explicitly Christian work, essentially the same religious world view on morality as Christianity does.  What I’m suggesting is that the work is something extraordinary, sublime, beyond the merely rational, or, if you will, inspired.  Cicero’s eclectic synthesis of Platonic, Stoic, and Aristotelian ethics was integrated into Christianity via the later writers such as Ambrose of Milan, St. Augustine, and many others. The spirit of Christian morality is in it.  That is, Cicero’s philosophical writings contain much of what is best in the Christian moral tradition.  Yes, Christianity assimilated it from a non-Christian writer, but this was done, for the most part, in conscious recognition and admiration of Cicero.

Cicero’s work is also extremely interesting and entertaining to read.  It is a literary masterpiece, and ought to be read by everyone.   Nor can I imagine anyone reading without their feeling edified.

That is the proposal I would make to the sincere skeptic or agnostic.  Read this work, and having your mind placed on a higher plane, as reading the work should do, then in that light you will have a more solid and unprejudiced basis for evaluating the plausibility of the Christian tradition.  If the moral principles advocated by Cicero in the work, for example, are laudable and socially constructive, that would be something to factor into an evaluation of the merits and truth of Christianity, which has preserved this moral tradition, and taught it to countless millions of people.

This page has links to several translations of On Moral Duties that can be read online or downloaded.  The Peabody translation is excellent.

Philo on Exodus 4:1-5 — Moses’ Rod Becomes a Serpent

Moses’ Rod Becomes a Serpent (Exodus 4.1-5)

[1] And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The LORD hath not appeared unto thee.
[2] And the LORD said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod.
[3] And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.
[4] And the LORD said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand:
[5] That they may believe that the LORD God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee.

Philo of Alexandria, Allegorical Interpretation (Legum allegoriarum) 2.88-2.93

(88) Nor, indeed, does the pleasure which is in the form of a serpent, abstain from attacking that most sincere lover of God, Moses, for we read as follows; “If, therefore, they will not obey me, nor listen to my voice–for they will say, God has not been seen by you–what shall I say to them? And the Lord said unto Moses, What is that which is in thy hand? And he said, A rod. And God said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent, and Moses fled from it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch forth thy hand, and take hold of it by the tail. And having stretched forth his hand, he took hold of it by the tail, and it became a rod in his hand. And the Lord said unto him, That they may believe Thee”. [Ex 4:3]

(89) How can any one believe God? If he has learnt that all other things are changed, but that he alone is unchangeable. Therefore, God asks of the wise Moses what there is in the practical life of his soul; for the hand is the symbol of action. And he answers, Instruction, which he calls a rod. On which account Jacob the supplanter of the passions, says, “For in my staff did I pass over this Jordan”. [Gen 32:10] But Jordan being interpreted means descent. And of the lower, and earthly, and perishable nature, vice and passion are component parts; and the mind of the ascetic passes over them in the course of its education. For it is too low a notion to explain his saying literally; as if it meant that he crossed the river, holding his staff in his hand.

XXIII. (90) Well, therefore, does the Godloving Moses answer. For truly the actions of the virtuous man are supported by education as by a rod, tranquillizing the disturbances and agitations of the mind. This rod, when cast away, becomes a serpent. Very appropriately. For if the soul casts away instruction, it becomes fond of pleasure [philhedonos] instead of being fond of virtue [philaretos]. On which account Moses fled from it, for the man who is fond of virtue does flee from passion and from pleasure.

(91) But God did not praise his flight. For it is fitting, indeed, for your mind, before you are made perfect, to meditate flight and escape from the passions; but Moses, that perfect man, ought rather to persevere in his war against them, and to resist them, and to strive against them, otherwise they, relying on their freedom from danger and on their power, will ascend up to the citadel of the soul, and take it by storm, and will plunder it entirely, like a tyrant.

(92) On which account God commanded Moses “to take hold of it by the tail,” that is to say, let not the hostile and untameable spirit of pleasure terrify you, but with all your power take hold of it, and seize it firmly, and master it. For it will again become a rod instead of a serpent, that is to say, instead of pleasure it will become instruction in your hand;

(93) but it will be in your hand, that is in the action of a wise man, which, indeed, is true. But it is impossible to take hold of and to master pleasure, unless the hand be first stretched out, that is to say, unless the soul confesses that all actions and all progress is derived from God; and attributes nothing to himself. Accordingly he, when he saw this serpent, decided to flee from it? But he prepared another principle, that of temperance, which is the brazen serpent: that whosoever was bitten by pleasure, when he looked on temperance, might live a real life.

Source: Yonge, Charles Duke.  The Works of Philo. Complete and Unabridged, New Updated Edition. David M. Scholer, editor. Hendrickson Publishers, 1993. ISBN 0943575931.

May you be filled to the complete fullness of Christ — Pseudo-Macarius

Many people may have read the beautiful passage below in the Roman Catholic Office of Readings and wondered about its author.  It comes from the fourth-century work, Fifty Spiritual Homilies (specifically, Homily 18).  The author was traditionally thought to be Macarius of Egypt, but scholarly consensus is now against this attribution.  Lacking a firm identification, the author today is called simply Pseudo-Macarius.

Internal evidence in the Homilies points to a Syrian author.  It also appears there was contact or mutual familiarity between the author and the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa.  Hermann Dörries (Symeon von Mesopotamien; Leipzig, 1941) suggested that the author is Symeon of Mesopotamia.

The author potentially had some connection with the curious Messalian sect, though modern opinion is that there is nothing unorthodox in the Homilies.

Homily 18 in its entirety may be read in the next post.  The entire Fifty Homlies are available in a 1992 Paulist Press translation by George Maloney, and a free 1921 translation by James Mason.

From a homily by a spiritual writer of the fourth century

“May you be filled to the complete fullness of Christ”    

Those who have been found worthy to become children of God and also to be born again through the Holy Spirit, those who carry Christ within them, shining within them and renewing them – these people are guided by the Spirit in various ways and led forward by grace working invisibly in the inner peace of their hearts.

Sometimes they are, as it were, in mourning and lamentation for the whole human race. They utter prayers for all mankind and fall back in tears and lamentation. They are on fire with spiritual love for all humanity.

Sometimes they burn, through the Spirit, with such love and exultation that they would embrace all mankind if they could, without discrimination, good and bad alike.

Sometimes they are cast down by humility, down below the least of men, as they consider themselves to be in the lowest, the most abject of conditions.

Sometimes the Spirit keeps them in a state of inextinguishable and unspeakable gladness.

Sometimes they are like some champion who puts on a full suit of royal armour and plunges into battle, combats his enemies fiercely and at length vanquishes them. For in the same way the spiritual champion, wearing the heavenly armour of the Spirit, attacks his enemies and, winning the battle, treads them underfoot.

Sometimes their soul is in the deepest silence, stillness and peace, experiencing nothing but spiritual delight and ineffable power: the best of all possible states.

Sometimes their soul is in a state of understanding and boundless wisdom and attention to the inscrutable Spirit, taught by grace things that neither tongue nor lips can describe.

And sometimes their soul is in a state just like anyone else’s.

Thus grace is poured into them in different ways, and by different paths it leads the soul, renewing it according to God’s will. It guides it by various paths until it is made whole, sinless and stainless before the heavenly Father.

Therefore let us pray to God, pray with great love and hope, that he may give us the heavenly grace of the Spirit. Let us pray that the Spirit may guide us and lead us, following God’s will in every way, and may re-make us in stillness and in quiet. Thanks to his guidance and spiritual strengthening, may we be found worthy to attain the perfection and fullness of Christ. As St Paul says: that you may be filled to the complete fullness of Christ.

Paul Elmer More on the Communion of Saints

Paul Elmer More (1864—1937), one of the great twentieth-century American men of letters, is little read today, and that is unfortunate.  Part of the problem is timing:  More, a classicist, essayist, social critic – and mentor of C. S. Lewis – came along just when interest in traditional religion, patristics, and classics went out of fashion in American universities.  His works, however, contain a wealth of insight uniquely relevant to the cultural crises and religious dilemmas of our times.

This will be the first of several planned posts about More.  Here he is analyzing the items of faith of the Apostles Creed with his own unique blend of Anglo-Catholic traditionalism and modern scepticism, and comes to the Communion of Saints.

From Paul Elmer More, The Catholic Faith (Princeton, 1931), pp. 96-100.

Article 11: The Communion of Saints. — Here we are stopped by a doubt as to the actual meaning of the original words such as meets us nowhere else in the creed. It is contended by certain scholars, that the Greek phrase and its Latin equivalent (sanctorum communionem) had no reference to “saints” or to persons at all, but implied “a participation in the holy things” (sancta, neuter).  However that may be — and the contention is probably correct — it happened at an early date that the phrase came somehow to be referred to persons (sancti, masculine); and thus the clause stands in the English translation. So taken, the article must be understood simply to define and amplify the preceding confession of belief in the Church [note: i.e., Article 10 of the Creed, 'the Holy Catholic Church']. Yet it is an extension so rich in possible consequences as to merit separate consideration.

The certain nemesis of individualism, the price perhaps of being individuals, is loneliness, — the sullen power ever on watch if it may creep in at the gate of the soul, to darken with its shadows the hours of revelry, to tantalize the sweet expectations of love, to embitter the anguish of sorrow, — the mocker whose thin laughter can be heard without even when the bolts are drawn against its entrance. There is no escape from it though we go down to the pits of folly, no distraction that will drive it away, no pride of ambition that will satiate it, no human wisdom that will utterly extract its sting, and the threat of death is its eternal reality. The most terrible word of our western philosophy is the sentence with which Plotinus closes his account of the mystic ecstasy: “The flight of the alone to the Alone”; and it is but a chilly comfort that comes with the same idea from the theosophy of the East:

He, in that solitude before
The world was, looked the wide void o’er
And nothing saw, and said, Lo I
Alone! — and still we echo the lone cry.

Thereat He feared, and still we fear
In solitude when naught is near:
And, Lo, He said, myself alone!
What cause of dread when second is not known?
(Source: Century of Indian Epigrams, lxvi. From the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad, I, iv, 1 and 2.)

If there be any real mitigation of that loneliness, which otherwise seems only to be brought into deeper consciousness by the upward strivings of religion, we must look for it in the Church. Here, if anywhere, in the community of worship through prayer and praise, the spirits of men are united in “the fellowship of the Holy Ghost.” This is the thought that underlies the symbol of the Church as the body of Christ, running through the epistles of St. Paul like a beautiful refrain: “By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,” and “For we being many are one bread and one body.”

But the Church includes a wider fellowship than this. Besides the visible body of living believers it embraces the body of those who have passed into the invisible world, so that by this communion with the saints the very sundering partitions of time are broken down as well as the separations of place, and almost we can say that death has lost its sting and the grave its victory. It is a thought of unspeakable consolation, if only we could realize it in experience as we profess it in words.

Something of what is meant by this article of faith can be guessed from the arts, for in these too we have communion with the great dead as well as with the living. We read the poets whose soul has gone into their works, an Aeschylus or Virgil or Dante or Milton, we hear the melodies or see the pictures of the ancient masters, and forthwith we are rapt out of ourselves, out through the locked doors of the present, into the large atmosphere of those who once lived in the mystery of beauty and turned life itself into a tale of wonder.

Or we study the sages, the veritable seers to whom the gross forms of matter were commuted into a vision of Ideas or lost in “the intellectual love of God.” We know that there, in that society, is our true home, and we say, sit anima mea cum philosophis [note: May my soul be with the philosophers]. Such is the communion of art and philosophy, the high and glorious adventure of education; yet withal it is but a sign and foretaste of that which may be given by religion. For in philosophy and the arts we are made free indeed of the world in which the masters lived, and partakers of that which they added to the world by their creative genius; we live with their works, but, so far as they are merely artists and philosophers, not with them;  they are dead and their task is done. It is not so with the communion of saints. No doubt we have here too the benefit of their achievements as such; their holiness is a lesson and an ensample [note: synonym for example] to us, as it were a poem, a picture, and a book of wisdom on which we can draw for courage and enlightenment. But if the article of the creed is properly understood, it means more than this. It signifies that the saints are active spirits, members of the Church like ourselves, though withdrawn from sight and nearer to the source of light than we, to whom a man may come in prayer and friendship. That is a mystery of religion, none the less precious for the abuses of exaggeration it has suffered in certain practices of the actual Church.

Nor is it limited to the mighty champions of the faith, the canonized or uncanonized heroes of holiness. In another sense the lesser dead as well as the greater are included among the saints, those of our own circle who have gone before, and who speak to us, not in the dull mechanical fashion of the spiritualists so-called, but in a silence that can stir our being to its depths. There are those who will tell you how sometimes at the hearing of the mass or at the regular morning and evening service of prayer, and more especially when the congregation is united in saying the creed, they become strangely aware of the presence of one “loved long since and lost awhile,” and with that spirit seem to be carried close to the throne of mercy. And the memory of that communion is to them inexpressibly sweet. You may say that they are carried away by aesthetic emotions, momentarily rapt out of themselves by the illusions of fancy. It may be so; but I believe they are not utterly deceived. All this is conveyed by profession of faith in the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints.