Her faults were not considerable, nevertheless she was quite unable, she said, ever to express them. If the confessor told her that he was content with her accusation, she would answer that she was not satisfied with it and that, since she was not telling the truth, he could not give her absolution. If he pressed her to tell the whole truth, she felt utterly incapable of doing so.’ Nobody knew what to say to this unfortunate woman, who came in time to be regarded as not quite right in the head. Finally, she addressed herself to Condren, whose comments on her case are of the greatest interest.
‘“It is true,” he said, “that you have not adequately expressed your sins; but the fact is that, in this life, it is impossible to represent them in all their hideousness; we shall never know them as they really are until we see them in the pure light of God. God gives you an impression of the deformity of sin, by which he makes you feel it to be incomparably greater than it appears to your understanding or can be expressed by your words. Hence your anguish and distress ….
You must therefore conceive of your sins, as faith presents them to your mind in other words, as they are in themselves; but you must content yourself with describing them in such words as your mouth can form.’” All that Condren says about poor Mlle de la Roche’s no doubt very venial sins applies with equal force to distractions. Judged by everyday human standards, they seem matters of no account. And yet, as they are in themselves, as they are in relation to that ‘pure light of God,’ which they are able to eclipse and darken, as the sun is darkened by a dust storm or a cloud of locusts, these trifling imperfections have as much power for evil in the soul as anger, or an ugly greed, or some obsessive apprehension.
The psycho-physical machine, which produces distractions as a by-product of its functioning, works on materials derived from the external world. This, so far as civilized man is concerned, is mainly a human world, made in his own image -a projection and material embodiment of his reason, his passions and his imbecilities. To distractions within correspond the external distractions of civilized life-news, gossip, various kinds of sensuous, emotional and intellectual amusements, novelties and gadgets of every sort, casual social contacts, unnecessary business, all the diversified irrelevances whose pointless succession constitutes the vast majority of human lives. Because a large part of our personality is naturally imbecile, because we like this imbecility and have a habit of it, we have built ourselves a largely imbecile world to live in. Deep calls to deep; inner distractions evoke outer distractions, and in their turn the outer evoke the inner. Between congenitally distracted individuals and their distracting, imbecile environment there is set up a kind of self-perpetuating resonance.
“Fate which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be
By what distractions he would he possessed,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well nigh change his own identity That
it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to he
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to enquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas I none ever mines.”
Every sensitive human being has at one time or another realized the pointlessness and squalor of the common life of incessant and reiterated distractions, has longed for one-pointedness of being and purity of heart. But how pitifully few have ever chosen to act upon this realization, have tried to satisfy their longing I None has written more eloquently of the misery of the distracted life than Matthew Arnold. And yet, though he was fairly well versed in Christian literature, though, as a young man, he had been profoundly impressed by an early translation of the Bhagavad Gita, he sought no practical remedy to that misery, and denied, even as a matter of theory, the very possibility of such a remedy existing. The best he can offer is merely the symbol, the distorted human reflection of a remedy.
“Only -but this is rare- Wizen a beloved hand is laid in ours,
A bolt is shot hack in our breast;
And hears its winding murmur,
And then lie thinks lie knows
The hills where his life rose
And the sea where it goes.”
Note the sad lucidity of the phrase, ‘he thinks he knows.’ More romantic and optimistic, Browning would have asserted emphatically that the man did know the secret of life every time his ‘world-deafened ear is by the tones of a love voice caressed.’ Matthew Arnold was too realistically minded to fall into such a confusion, and too honest to pretend that he believed the flattering doctrine which equates those two incommensurables, the human and the divine. Those who enjoy the natural ecstasies of passion and affection do not know; they merely think they know. And for the unlucky ones who do not happen to have a beloved hand to clasp there is nothing but to
“…demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
All yes, and they benumb us at our call!”
But they benumb us only for a little while, and then the old misery returns more unbearable than ever. In the theological language of John Tauler (or whoever it was that wrote The Following of Christ), ‘each sin begetteth a special spiritual suffering. A suffering of this kind is like unto that of hell, for the more you suffer, the worse you become; this happeneth to sinners ; the more they suffer through their sins, the more wicked they become, and they fall continually more into them, in order to get free of suffering.’
Like so many poets and moralists before him, Arnold had stated a problem to which there is no practical solution, except through some system of spiritual exercises. In the overwhelming majority of individuals, distraction is the natural condition; one-pointedness must be acquired. One-pointedness can, of course, be turned to evil purposes no less than good. But the risk of actualizing a potential evil must always be run by those who seek the good. In this case, the good cannot be achieved without one-pointedness. That Arnold should have failed to draw the unavoidable conclusion from the premises of his own thoughts and feelings seems puzzling only when we consider him apart from his environment.
The mental climate in which he lived was utterly unpropitious to the flowering of genuine mysticism. The nineteenth century could tolerate only false, ersatz mysticism-the nature-mysticism of Wordsworth; the sublimated sexual mysticism of Whitman; the nationality mysticisms of all the patriotic poets and philosophers of every race and culture, from Fitch at the beginning of the period to Kipling and Barres at the end. Once more, Arnold’s ‘sad lucidity’ did not permit him to embrace any of these manifestly unsatisfactory substitutes for the genuine article. He chose instead the mild and respectable road of literary modernism.
It was a blind alley, of course; but better a blind alley than the headlong descent, by way of the mysticisms of nationality and humanity, to war, revolution and universal tyranny. The acquisition of one-pointedness and the cultivation of genuine mysticism were tasks no easier in the fourteenth century or the seventeenth, than under Queen Victoria; they merely seemed more reasonable, more worthy of consideration by men of culture and intelligence. No concern for his intellectual respectability deterred the author of The Clout from telling his pupils the best ways of approaching God and repressing or circumventing the distractions which interpose themselves between the soul and ultimate reality. He wrote; and those who read his book -even those who read it without the smallest intention of following his instructions- regarded him as an eminently sensible person, treating of a highly important subject.
In the Cloud a number of different methods for dealing with distractions are described. There is the method which consists in fixing the unstable mind by means of what the Indians call a mantra-a word or short phrase constantly repeated, so that it fills, so to speak, the whole conscious and subconscious foreground of the personality, leaving the something that exists in the background (the higher will of scholastic psychology) free to beat with its blind stirrings of love against the cloud of unknowing. Another method may be described as the method of repression and inattention; distractions are ‘trodden down under the cloud of forgetting’ -not with a vehement effort of the will (for such efforts tend to defeat their own object and to strengthen, rather than weaken, the forces of distraction), but by a gentle turning away towards the object of contemplation.
The distraction is ignored; one ‘looks over its shoulder’ at what lies beyond and, deprived of the attention which gave it life, the distraction perishes of inanition. Sometimes, however, it happens that distractions make their assault in such force that they cannot be defeated or avoided by any of the foregoing methods. In this case, says our
